How Can You Tell If You Have Social Anxiety?
A Big-Name Author says, in a post, “If I blew you off, I didn’t do so intentionally. There are only two people I would have deliberately brushed off or ignored at this con, and happily, I didn’t run into either one.”
Another Big-Name Author says, in a comment, “There are only two people in SF I deliberately avoid.”
If you have social anxiety, you immediately go, “OH MY GOD, I’M ONE OF THOSE TWO PEOPLE.” Even though you’ve had dinner with both of these people, and ran into both (albeit briefly) at that con, and didn’t feel blown off. But still, stupidly, irrationally, you’re absolutely positive that something you’ve done or said in the interim has soured these two on you, and now you’re on their no-fly list, and who else did you offend this weekend? What did you do? And you start running through each conversation you had with everyone, scouring them for potential offense, positive that you’ve ruined your name forever and ever and ever.
Shut up brain. Please. For the sake of my sanity. Shut up.
Being Honest Vs. Being Effective
So after discussing some of the harassment that apparently happened at WorldCon, a friend of mine on Facebook said this:
“These cons seem like horrible places.”
The problem is, they often aren’t. Talking with a lot of my female friends, most of them didn’t have any incidents of note at the con that removed their ability to enjoy themselves (at least not that came up in conversation, and my female buddies aren’t shy about bitching about creepers). I’d tentatively venture to say, knowing that I’m a guy and hence don’t get the kind of con-destroying harassment that females are prone to on a regular basis, that most people at the con actually just went and had a good time and weren’t made miserable by sexual bullying.
But some were. Those people deserve safer spaces. The only way to make these spaces safer is to publicize these incidents so we can rectify them… but we do so at the cost of making cons seem like a terrible place to be. In that sense it’s kind of like New York City – which, yes, has some crime, but the focus on fixing crime makes it sound like when you step into NYC you’re automatically given a voucher for a mugging.
So we make cons actually safer by discussing bad behavior in public, but make them sound far less safe than, say, the fun cons of the 1970s when Isaac Asimov was pinching everyone’s ass and editors were trying to fuck young girls in elevators. So you make it better for people who attend while potentially driving new attendees away. And I’m not sure how you fix that.
Likewise, during the Democratic National Convention, Saladin Ahmed was complaining on Twitter that from a practical perspective of international politics, Obama really isn’t all that different than Dubya. Which is true, if you’re not in America. I mean, once my family was blown to wet meat in a predator drone strike, I’m not sure I’d go, “Oh, thank the stars that explosion was authorized by a Democratic President!”
All true. But still, there is a distinct difference between what Obama wants to do and what Romney wants to do in a lot of other areas. Saladin’s absolutely right to complain, but on the other hand if Romney won, I don’t think he’d be that thrilled… and reminding people of Obama’s terribleness at a time when I think he really needs to win is counterproductive for victory, but productive for reminding us to hold our President’s feet to the fire when it comes to all of those human rights he claimed he was for back when he was running in 2008.
I don’t have a good answer here. Sometimes, being outspokenly honest has unintended backlash, even if the results are good. I like to point to a solution here, but in these cases, I want the cake and edibility as one: for people to publicize bad incidents at cons while making them seem attractive to attend, for Saladin to point out flaws in the Democratic party while still encouraging voters to get out there. But I cannot. And I’ll prioritize honesty, but acknowledge that sometimes it’s a bitch.
Updates And One Story That Summarizes All Of WorldCon For Me
So I’m writing a post on “Surviving Cons: A Guide For Socially Anxious Writers,” but it overflowed the time I’d allotted for blogging today. (As it turns out, being an introvert, my social energy levels are closely tied to my writing levels. When I’m out of people-juice, I’m out of writer-juice as well.) So that’ll come… later.
Unfortunately, thanks to a flood of spam, I’ve had to disable anonymous commenting on the LJ. Which irritates me. I mean, not only does LJ now segregate anonymous posts with suspicious links… not only are these entries from a long time ago, and not really heavily-Googled anywhere… but LJ is a dying fucking social media. Yet here I am, dealing with 500 emails over the weekend from some idiot spammer who can’t figure out that all of his messages are being screened. One suspects a rather dim spammer who bought some CAPTCHA-cracking tool from 2007, and is just now taking it for a spin in his attempt to become the king of MySpace spam. Fucker.
So sorry, no anonymity. You can have Facebook, or Twitter, if you need, but getting that many emails over the weekend just cinched it.
In the meanwhile, have one story that summarizes all of WorldCon for me:
So I was hanging out with a female writer of some note, who was a very cute drunk – you know, the kind who apologizes every ten minutes because she’s not normally like this, all giggly, swaying a little. And we ran into my friend Tasha, who is a reviewer of some note.
“I ran into a guy who was name-dropping you quite heavily in conversation,” Tasha told me.
“Really?” I said, shocked. “Someone’s trying to trade on his knowledge of me? He clearly didn’t know who he was talking to, since he’d have done far better to name-drop you.”
“No, no,” Tasha declined. “Not at this con. I’m just a reviewer – you’re an actual content creator.”
“I disagree. Your writings put art in context, and bring it to a larger crowd. I think you’re far better for art than I am, actually….”
Drunken female writer looked on, amused, just as we walked into the Barfleet party – which, as Barfleets are wont to do, was hot, overcrowded, and full of music. Within seconds, we’d lost Tasha. And the drunken writer said, in as forlorn a voice as anyone could muster, “Where’s Tasha?”
I didn’t know, but drunken writer was insistent. “I wanted to talk to Taaasha,” she repeated, sounding heartbroken. “Where’s Tasha?”
After several plaintive queries, I realized where she was, in that state of inebriation where you can hold on to only one thought so it becomes Very Important – in fact, since you have only the one thought, it rolls around in your head, gaining steam until it takes on massive weight, the most important thing in the world.
So I went to fetch Tasha, and after wandering through a sweaty dance floor and texting and searching through crowds, I got a text confirming that Tasha had moved on and was not coming back.
“Where’s Tasha?” said drunken writer, lamenting.
I knelt down. “Tasha’s gone off to dance,” I told her, with all the seriousness of a man telling his child that her puppy is in the hospital. “She’s not coming back.”
Drunken writer slumped, looking crestfallen. “…but I wanted to talk to her about the false dichotomy between art and criticism!”
That’s WorldCon, folks. Drunken revelry and Very Serious Discussions, inexorably intertwined.
How To Be A Grownup On The Outside
There’s a lot of talk about always wanting to be a child inside, but being a child on the outside kind of sucks. For all the comfort of being a kid, your parents still control your bedtime, order for you at restaurants, tell you when to go to school, and can ground you if you annoy them.
No, what you want is to be a child on the inside and a grown-up on the outside, so you can drive your car to the bouncy-palace and have ice cream whenever you damned well please. And to have that kind of freedom involves letting go of one critical, childlike way of thinking:
The idea that if you sit still long enough, someone will tell you what to do.
The world of grownups is full of wonder – but whereas childlike wonder is happy because its unknowns are full of soap bubbles and puppies, grownup wonder is filled with anxiety-causing unknowns like tax returns and home loans. How do you do this? When you get your car, it’s a welter of bureaucracy-causing things of registrations and insurances and forms, and how do you know how to fill them all? You want to be a writer, or a talk show host, or a cupcake maker, but how do you get from “love” to “full-time career’?
And if you’re a child on the outside, you often freeze. A teacher will make you do it, eventually, if it’s important enough. And when they do, if you tell them you’re confused, they will sit down and explain it all to you, step by step.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen much in the outside world. There are some things with built-in punishments – taxes, car insurance – and if you don’t do them, then someone will come along to take things away from you. But they won’t care much about teaching you, and they’ll be quite mean. You can usually pay those off enough to get by, if you’re lucky, but you won’t learn a thing. Those are the good bits, strangely.
The bad ones are the bits that you want to be. If your deepest desire is to be the man who designs billboards, nobody’s going to come along and say, “You know what you should do? Paint that wall over there.” And if you’re still a child on the outside, you’ll be forever waiting for someone to come along and light that inner spark. They won’t. But the bills will show up knocking, and you’ll take a job down at the McDonald’s to get by, and when you get home after a ten-hour shift stinking of fry grease, there will still be no one to whisper, “Hey. You should get out there and design a billboard, and send it to these people.”
So you do nothing. Nobody’s making you, after all.
Slowly but surely, your dream will starve to death. It’ll be a slow death, smothered under many real necessities of life and a career, and you’re doing quite well at McDonald’s because the bosses tell you exactly what bathroom to clean and when to do it and how it should look like when you’re done… and so, inch by inch, you become an awesome McDonald’s employee and less of a billboard painter every day. And you wonder why things never quite panned out, but things are all right, you’re a manager at McDonald’s and earning a nice salary, and the next thing you know you’re all grown up on the outside and the inside. And something quite vital has been lost.
Here’s the trick: the madder your dream, the less there is to know about how to do it. If it’s really unique, it hasn’t been done. Nobody knows. There was no “Building Apple IIs for Dummies” that Steve Jobs could look at, no “How To Sell Things Online” manual that the founders of eBay and Amazon could turn to, no “How to write a Sandman comic” for Neil Gaiman. They had to be their own teachers, to look at a complex and bewildering world and form their own lesson plans, solving one challenge at a time. And they felt lost and stupid, which is what grownups on the outside often feel, and they despaired – but rather than waiting for someone else to come along and explain it all to them, they asked friends and consulted books and made their own explanations.
They didn’t wait for someone to tell them to paint a mural. They went out and painted the mural.
They became extraordinary without a single person’s permission.
That’s what being a grownup on the outside is. Those actions feed your child on the inside, too, because your child on the inside doesn’t really want to be told what to do, either. Your child on the inside wants to follow grand dreams, do the impossible, fight great monsters.
To do that, your grownup on the outside has to stop waiting around. Get out there. Walk into dark forests, chop the trees down to make pathways, and use the wood for torches. Because no one else can.
More WorldCon Silliness: The Open Reading
Due to clerical error, I got not one, not two, but three WorldCon readings… One of them lasting ninety minutes. I don’t need that many readings, but some people wanted readings and didn’t get them.
So I’m throwing open my longest reading, the 7:30 one tonight, to all comers. Want to read a short story? Come on down and read it. (Please have it be actually short.) If more people show up than we have time, we’ll vote on who gets to go. Or draw straws. Or fight over the pit of fire to Kirk vs. Spock-style exciting techno music. Whatevs. But please. Tell your friends. Let them know about this strange and unique opportunity, and then afterwards we will all head to Geek Prom as a single unit.
Also, don’t forget to attend my actual reading at 5:30, since I will be nervous and, as usual, looking for an audience.
My Reading At WorldCon
I’ll be doing a reading tomorrow at 5:30 at WorldCon. I’ll be performing my short story “Shadow Transit,” which has been universally referred to as “pretty dang creepy, Steinmetz,” and is a fun thing to read since it features a small child stomping on Barbies.
However, if you download the official WorldCon app, it says that I am also doing a reading at 4:30 pm today. Which I don’t think I am. Embarrassing.
I plan to head over to the room on the off chance that someone was looking for me, to tell them that I’m not actually here right now. If you read my blog, and want to meet me, well, that’s probably not a bad place to say “hi,” and then I’ll frantically try to talk you into coming to my actual reading.
Anyway. Actual reading: 5:30 tomorrow, involving tiny acted tantrums. Be there?
Porn Stars and Poor Grammar
I made the mistake of going to one of my favorite porn stars’ Twitter feed. It was a mangled Sarlacc Pit of grammar where words were fed in as whole thoughts and spat out as fragmented dreck. The “Hey Guys hanging out on here Your The Best” was, literally, the most coherent thought on the page – the rest read like a dyslexic man frantically transcribing a snake-handler’s talking in tongues. I was deeply disappointed.
And I would have posted that thought on Twitter, except I knew what I’d get: “Ha ha, what’d you expect from a porn star?”
My answer: an intelligent woman.
Just because a girl fucks a lot, even for money, doesn’t make her stupid. In fact, a lot of the interviews I’ve read with porn starlets are excruciatingly honest about the what porn is- they’re aware that they’re a commodity, and are using that to make money at something they enjoy. They’re businesswomen, often more competent than given credit for, their considerable intellect hidden behind the cumshot. (Or, as is often more accurate, an intellect hidden behind a porn consumer base that doesn’t value verbal fireworks. Though I could easily see a classic literature-inspired porno series where a beautiful women reads Dickens, then gets dickened.)
Which is not to say there aren’t dumb women, or lost women, in the porn industry: a reading of “The Other Hollywood: An Uncensored Oral History Of Porn” will give you many a tale of the overdosed, beaten, and lost. But the same could be said of the entertainment industry in general, and most of the female voices describing their experiences in porn here are wise and insightful – not just about porn, but about life.
It’s safer to think of women in porn as stupid, easily guided. After all, these are beautiful women who have sex freely, shamelessly, and in some cases exultantly. It’d be kind of terrifying to a lot of men, and women, if there were beautiful, smart women who loved to fuck. So it’s better if we can shovel those women off into the corner as airheads, and the rest are abused women; nobody would do this willingly, of course. That’s what porn is – full of living examples of How To Live Your Life Wrong.
Except man, we love to watch.
Then I thought, you know, maybe even that’s not the case. Because if you compared this starlet’s feed to, say, Gordon Ramsay’s feed – a man who is highly intelligent on television, a master chef who can taste the difference between five kinds of tuna, and yet has yet to discover the proper use of the apostrophe. Someone’s ability to communicate via the written word and their intellect is linked, but by no means is it an absolute link. Perhaps she’s just not good with words… and as I know all too well from getting ingrained in arguments with well-spoken stupid people, the ability to speak clearly is not equated with the ability to think clearly.
The truth is, I can assume little from what I see. But I do know that if you think “porn star” automatically equals “dumb,” that probably says more about you than the starlet in question. And it annoys me that if I’d said, “This porn star is dumb,” a bunch of people would have thought that the status quo.