It's Interesting, How I Work
People don’t think I’m an introvert. But it is true.
Partially, that’s because people don’t get introverts. They think, “Oh, introverts don’t like people,” but in truth, we introverts like people like tennis players love playing tennis: it’s great fun for an hour. Maybe if you’re into it, you can go all afternoon. But the idea of playing tennis twelve hours a day, seven days a week is fucking exhausting, a seemingly superhuman feat of endurance, and at some point you have to go plop in front of the couch and rest up for the next match.
It’s not that we don’t like people; it’s just that being around you involves putting out effort. And so we have to utilize our socialization sparingly.
But that’s also partially because I seem comfortable at conventions and large parties. I have zero problems speaking impromptu before large crowds. In fact, I remember a friend of mine drunkenly accosting me at a convention, poking me in the arm jovially and saying, “You know, you are a liar.”
“How did I lie?” I asked, shocked.
“You said,” he told me, sloshing his drink at me, “That you were lonely at conventions, and that anyone should feel free to say hello to you. And here you are!” He pointed at the four people I was engaged with in happy conversations, the pretty woman who was hugging me because I’d told her snuggles made me feel better. “Every time I have seen you at this con, you have been surrounded by people!”
This was true.
It was also a sign of desperation.
I got really pissy at someone last week because they said, “Ferrett always makes himself look good in his essays.” That was probably the maddest at any comment I’ve gotten in the last month, and that’s a month of dealing with douchy Alpha Male Men’s Rights Advocates popping by to pick fights. Because I’m always shocked when people don’t get it.
This whole blog is basically spackling over some rather deep psychological flaws.
Because, yeah, I am lonely at conventions. I freeze when asked to talk to strangers. I freeze when asked to talk to friends, as unless you say “hello” to me I’m not only convinced that you don’t remember me, but I am convinced you probably do remember me and dislike me intensely. I am totally dysfunctional when it comes to speaking to new people.
Yet I have a blog.
And I yammer on on various topics, and invite people into my little huddled cave of conversation here – a place I control, and can leave whenever I see fit, a perfect place for a socially anxious introvert – and slowly, by discussing my personal life with flair and consistency, y’all feel like you come to know me.
So when I go to conventions, people know me far more than they would if I actually had to meet them in person. They wave me over to join them, because we’ve exchanged comments, and because they know from essays like this just how fucking neurotic I am, and even though I’ve only said hello to them once briefly at a con in 2011, we are now friends on some level that brings me comfort.
I am lonely at conventions. But because I have a large online presence, it compensates. I broadcast to the world, “Oh, hey, guys, if you see me please say hello because I’m stupidly paranoid,” and some people are kind enough to have heard my announcements and as such go out of their way to invite me out specifically, and then I can be happy and bouncy and tell my silly stories.
Yet that trick doesn’t work with people who don’t follow me. There’s a Big-Name Author who I’ve met at conventions at least ten times, who taught a class I attended, who has never been anything other than kind and courteous to me in real life – and yet I can’t talk to him because he doesn’t follow me on Twitter, and as such I’m just this schlub to him, and even though he’s occasionally even waved hello at me, talking to him without him initiating the conversation is like trying to push past a wall of my own terrors.
My friends have ribbed me for this. They are correct to. Because really, why should I be afraid to talk to this guy?
Because he hasn’t interacted with me in the format of my choosing.
And that, my friends, is why I get a little pissy when people go, “Oh, Ferrett always makes himself look awesome.” Even if I did do that – and I think the simplest Google search will pull up several instances of me being a total asshole – anyone who’s been reading me for a while knows that honestly, The Blog is my very introverted and skewed way of interacting with the world. It’s not a bad thing, the blog – in fact, it’s a total positive for me on the whole, because I’ve tried to get around my social anxieties for thirty-plus years and have determined that like many deeply-embedded issues, it’s easier to do an end-run around the central problem than try to demolish a mountain with a sledgehammer.
Yet still. The blog is basically an admission of failure. You could call this whole thing FERRETT’S OVERCOMPENSATION, and you wouldn’t be too wrong. Thankfully, I’ve got a nice voice, and a lot of people seem to think what I say is generally sensible and/or entertaining, so it works.
But behind the scenes? You don’t have to look too far to see the duct tape and baling wire holding my personality together. The blog’s brought a lot of benefits, but like a lot of showmen, if I was a quote-unquote “normal” person without problems, I wouldn’t need this stage at all.
The stage is a benefit. But it’d be awfully nice just to be able to walk up to someone I’d met once, and never met again, and do that salesman’s-confidence trick of going, “Hi, I’m Ferrett, we met once in Birmingham?” without having to psych myself up for an hour first.
As it is: I have this. And thank you, thank you, for stepping aboard.
Fuckin' Congress, How Do They Work?
So I saw this photo posted to Twitter the other day:
And it’s the exact kind of thing I should be suspicious of.
Not just because it’s a photo of an unsourced empty room that could ave been taken at any time – I have only this anonymous captioner’s word that this is, indeed, a Congressional hearing. (Also see: all those annoying photos of “200,000 people showed up to this rally last weekend, and no one cared!” where all the trees are autumn-brown and the photo is actually from 2010.) No, I’ll believe that this is a Congressional hearing on unemployment.
The question is, which hearing?
I’m prone to believing this because hey, I think Congress is fucking useless when it comes to unemployment, and I’m perfectly willing to believe that no Congressman really cares. That’s my bias. But before I mindlessly Retweeted this, I thought, “You know, Congress has a lot of goddamned hearings. Some percentage of them are pretty useless, just rehashing facts we know before.”
And I thought about my career, and how many stupid fucking “Let’s discuss this issue again” meetings I would have skipped if my boss hasn’t made me go.
The problem with Congress is that, as Joe Schmuck, I don’t actually know what works. I can bitch all I like that Obama should have gone for single-payer Health Care, but if you asked me, “So who should he have talked to to make that happen?” I wouldn’t have one name. I know some subcommittees are useless busy work and others get shit done, but I don’t know which ones are the good ones, or even what the difference between “useless” and “funding” means. I have zero idea how lobbyists work, or how to pressure Congressmen.
I am fucking clueless.
And so when I’m presented with this “evidence” that Congress doesn’t care, well, it fits with my established bias, but I don’t actually know whether this is actually true. This could have been a photo taken from a who-gives-a-shit rehash hearing where dour people show up to go, “Yeah, it’s bad.” Is this the meeting where unemployment would have been miraculously solved if all the members had shown up?
Doubtful. Maybe. But doubtful.
Now, I’m content in my biases. I’m pretty sure if unemployment were a major concern of Congress, we’d see a lot more action on it, like the programs of the Depression. And I’m not saying Congress doesn’t care entirely, it’s just that when you make a list, “unemployment” falls somewhere below gerrymandering and impeaching Obama.
But would this meeting have solved shit? No idea. Is my Congressman good at what he does? No idea. What metrics should I use to determine how things should get done, and to vote my Congressman out on any other level aside from “Democrat good, Republican bad”?
No idea. And that’s the problem.
I’m part of the problem. Even if, you know, it’s understandable that I don’t want to acquire so much knowledge about politics that I might as well become a politician.
No, I Am Clingy.
I’m the kind of guy who needs to hear “I love you” every five minutes. The kind of guy who, whenever you go out on a date, I’m going to be paranoid all evening long that this is over, once you’ve got a taste of him (or her), it’s over for me. The kind of guy who, when you don’t text for three days, assumes you’re either dead or have quietly broken up with me.
And I am here to tell you that you should not reassure me.
Okay, you should. In carefully doled-out segments. But handing me all the reassurance in the world isn’t going to fix the problem. Tell me you love me every five minutes? Well, I’ll need to hear it every three minutes. Then every one. Then every thirty seconds.
I am a bottomless pit of need, and goddammit, I need to self-soothe.
Look. I’m all for talking to your partners about love and what you need, but there’s a flip side of handling jealousy and strife that doesn’t get mentioned enough, and that is that sometimes in any relationship, you get to sit and be uncomfortable for a while.
That’s your job, to be a little dissatisfied on occasion. Sometimes your partner is going to do things that make you feel unloved, and upon dissection it turns out that s/he didn’t do anything wrong, that’s just you getting butt-hurt because inside, you have this dripping hole of unworthiness that doesn’t heal over.
(Cue people saying, “…but I never feel that way!” That’s awesome. You should then be able to cue into the fact that this wasn’t written for you. Move along.)
And if you, the eternally unworthy, are ever going to have a functional relationship, you cannot expect your partner to spackle over that trembling ball of uncertainty. If you do, you will drain them dry with constant requests, and they will come to think of you as more of a chore than fun-times, and eventually they’ll probably go. (And even if they don’t, I assure you, dating someone who sees you as an onerous duty isn’t half as good as someone who sees you as mainly happy fun-times with the occasional downside.)
Sometimes, your job is to go, “Hey, am I overreacting?” And sometimes – often – you are. And then it’s your job to go, “Since this is me overreacting, is there any way I can handle this without dragging her down?” And sometimes the answer is no, and you have to ask.
But every time you ask for reassurance, you’re introducing a mild downer state into the relationship. People will reassure you, and wonderful people will say they’ll reassure you all they want… but if you’re the kind of leaky bucket that I am, they don’t know the vampiric possibilities fraught within your soul. You’re often interrupting their “I was having a fun time” to remind them that you’re not, not entirely, which bums them out and obscures the fact that you were mostly having a fun time.
So don’t make them offer. Learn to be a little discomfited. There will be times you’ll have dark nights of the soul, and the proper answer is to just hunker down with that shit and be a little scared, but trust.
Because verifying that trust is all too often a self-fulfilling possibility. There’s only so many times you can ask, “Hey, do you love me?” before the answer comes back, “No.”
Civilization 5 Blatherings
WARNING: Gaming blathering. You can probably skip past.
Yesterday, I finally downloaded all the Civilization 5 add-ons, and was pleasantly surprised to find a different game entirely.
Now, as far as I’m concerned, Civ 5 has exactly two victory conditions: Science and Cultural. I’ve tried to conquer the world, but on any reasonable-sized map the grind of warfare is tedious; I got as far as knocking five out of seven civilizations out of the ring before going, “God, I don’t want to build one more Giant Death Robot.” And when you find yourself saying things like, “I don’t want to build another Giant Death Robot,” you know it’s pretty dull.
The Diplomatic Victory, I’m told, is doable, but it’s also pretty boring. I got tired of stockpiling five billion gold to bribe these nebbishy city-states, who seemed eager to forget about me at every opportunity, and frankly if I had the economy to acquire five billion gold them it was a lot more fun to just conquer them with Giant Death Robots.
So that leaves Science. Science is all about wide empires, massive numbers of cities pumping out research. That’s pretty fun, because what I love about Civilization is the Barbie-doll customization of buying ALL THE BUILDINGS for every city. Seriously. I’m not happy until every city is fucking blinged to the max. I don’t care if it only has three citizens, I want a Market and a Bank and a University and a Garden and fifteen Public Schools ….
But Cultural Victories in the old Civilization were pretty boring. Cultural Victories were designed as a way for a small civilizations to remain competitive. Each building provides a static bonus (+2 Culture per turn, say), and periodically you’d “level up” in culture. The trick is, each new city made it harder to “level up” in culture, and with no way to change that static bonus you’d find that your five-city Civilization would only be able to crank out 10 culture a turn but needed 200 culture to level up, making it twice as hard as One-City Joe who cranks out 2 culture a turn but could level up at 20.
(WARNING: Not real numbers. Math bores me.)
That sounds appealing if you got stuck in a clogged zone and couldn’t found good cities in time, but realistically it made the end game a slog. You couldn’t really improve your culture output after the Sydney Opera House, so all of the play after 1900 consisted of hunkering down, churning out tanks, and defensively waiting for the inevitable invasions when the AI realized you were about to win. Which might take seventy turns.
The new Civilization add-ons basically changes the whole fucking game. Now you have Tourism, which offensively targets other civilizations to make them fall in love with you! You have Religion, which you can found early and spread it, giving bonuses and goals! And you don’t just plunk down a Museum and have it crank out Culture, you have to create Great Works to put in the Museum and attract people to you!
…and this is so shoddily documented that I have zero idea how any of it works!
Yeah, yeah, it comes with a Civilopedia, but realistically I had to keep stopping the game to go and read FAQs, then I got bored because I didn’t want to spend half an hour analyzing the minutiae of putting John Sebastian Bach in my Amphitheater, so I dumbly charged ahead. I am in 1920 right now in my latest game, and I actually have zero idea if I’m winning. I think I am, because my founded Religion is in like 80% of the world’s religions and I keep cranking out prophets to annoy my neighbors, and I have ALL THE MUSEUMS, but I don’t know if that means I’m actually getting there.
But I have to say, at least the peaceful game is busier. I have to manage Trade Routes, which is annoying (JUST KEEP GOING TO HAWAII, GUYS, IT’S GOT ALL THE GOLD), but it does provide the AI with less incentive to kick small civilizations – yes, you can declare war on me, but you’ll lose the 70 gold we have going every turn. And the Religion makes other, potentially larger, civilizations like me. So my turtling strategy seems to be more effective.
I don’t know, though. Because I don’t know if I’m winning (one country out of five is converted to my way of thinking), I can’t say if all of these little fiddly bits are more fun, or just something else to do while I merrily piss away my chances at victory. And it makes the game a lot longer, certainly, as it added like 50% more time to my game while I’m also managing missionaries and World Councils and whatnot.
I’ll let you know if I like it, but the issue is that I am also staggeringly bad at these games and never quite get all the fiddly details right. I play on Prince, because that’s the last level where the AI is just dead-even with you – after that, they start handicapping you by giving the AI mathematical advantages and leads, and I’m handicapped enough by my own marked lack of strategy, thank you.
But hey! My museums are full of art pieces. I think that means I’m winning. Now I just have to figure out what to do with all these spare Prophets lying around.
Help Me Recover: Ask Me Anything!
Heya, guys –
I’m currently in the midst of recovering from an ongoing energy drain. Dealing with Rebecca was hard enough – but as an introvert, doing it at someone else’s house for two weeks was insanely hard. Coping in a strange bed, without air conditioning, in chairs just a little uncomfortable for me, without my dog, eating food just a little different than I woulda had – a thousand little cuts that made me burn effort at a crazy rate. We’ve been home for four days now, and only now am I starting to realize just how redlined I was.
Near the end, for about four days, I didn’t really text anyone. I huddled up, reluctant to even talk to electronic people. Which is insane for me.
So I’ve got some entries I’ve been meaning to write, but then I just… sort of sit there.
And stare.
And then I play some Civilization V.
So here. Stir my addled brainmeats. Ask me a question: personal, professional, whatever – hey, I’ve got a novel and plenty of new emotional experiences to unpack, so unload on me. Help me restart my interactions with people. Ask me something – well, not stupid. I don’t care how many chucks a woodchuck could wood, or whatever. Just ask me something where you care, albeit on whatever small level, about the answer I’ll give. And I’ll answer.
Just as soon as I can stop staring at things.
The Wrong Door
I awoke this morning to hear Gini falling down the steps. We had been warned not to fall down the steps. Kat’s brother had told us that the Meyers’ guest room was tricky, it was three steps above the hallway, and if you were sleepy you’d forget those steps existed.
He’d almost fallen down them a lot.
So when I heard Gini’s body hit the floor, I screamed, “Gini, are you okay?” and then, a second later, “Gini!” and I ran to the door, flung it open, knowing what I was going to find:
Gini, dead, at the bottom of the steps. Neck broken. Gone.
You don’t understand: I knew that. Knew it with all my heart. By the time I had my hand on the doorknob I was halfway to grief, steeling myself to hold the body of my wife, one more thing after everything that happened, trying to piece together the last words I would say to her…
….and that wasn’t that door.
I opened that door to find a different universe; Gini, gripping the table that she’d stumbled onto to save herself, fearful, too stunned to answer me.
She was all right.
She was all right.
I fear I woke up the entire house with my cry, and though it was only 7:30 and I was going to get up for work at 8:00 I stayed in bed with my wife – my alive wife – for an hour and change, trying to still my trembles, feeling like I had gotten very lucky in opening the right door. I know she was gone, gone like Rebecca. I know that when I touched that handle something shifted and here she was alive, and I was very grateful to be in the arms of this universe, where I had more time with her though I don’t know how much time I have with her, nobody does.
I know this is foolish.
I know that.
Yet I’ve spent the morning feeling certain that some point I have walked through the wrong door, some horrible door back in August, or maybe even May. Some door where there was an alive Rebecca on the other side of it, a kid who was going to live to seven, seventeen, seventy, a door where I made some awful choice and stepped into this universe where she passed on in a room not thirty yards from me now.
And I feel this mad urge to walk back through the past year of my life, examining every door I opened, scrutinizing it for signs of what went wrong where, hoping that I might find the clue to get her back.