As Coolidge is supposed to have said, "Don't you know that four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still?"
This gem comes via The Atlantic Online (thanks, tc), in an article on Caring for Your Introvert.
I call it the 'social hangover'. Maybe you know what I'm talking about. You're out for a day or an evening, and having a perfectly marvelous time, laughing and dishing out zingers, but as soon as you cross the doorjamb on the way out, the doubts wash in...
What if I said something stupid? What if I offended someone and now they dislike me intensely, and I'll never have another chance to make up for it?
This can go on for days.
I felt so relieved when Lynda Barry admitted to something similar:
"My going into the background was something that has happened quite naturally over the last five or so years. I noticed that it took longer and longer to recover from the public persona I put on to get through an interview or a lecture or some of the other things I was doing. It's not hard for me to be funny in front of people, but most of that is just horrified nerves taking the form of what makes people laugh, and afterwards I'd always feel dreadfully depressed, kind of self-induced bi-polar disorder. I used to live a very social life and never spend much solitary time looking at birds or reading or doing the things that sustained me as a kid. In junior high when I met the rich people, one way that I made myself welcome was that I was funny. I could get people to laugh, and I paid my way into that world with that sort of currency."
Too bad I only found this out after I embarrassed myself during a signing event for her most recent book: I was so tongue-tied and shy that she told me a joke to diffuse the situation, and I didn't get it. She had to draw it out for me.
True to form, I was so embarrassed (hung-over) that I felt sick to my stomach all the way home. Yeah, sure, it sounds funny now, but that was my one chance to convince Lynda that I would be a perfect best friend for her (I was convinced in high school that I would surely make the perfect girlfriend for my favorite pop stars as well, so you can see that I haven't changed much).
Despite the rigorous reporting of the Atlantic Online article, no cure for 'social hangovers' seems to be available (save dubious pharmaceuticals), and I'm developing a tolerance to the numbing effects of alcohol. Can you help?
Do you feel comfortable wherever you go?
I've lived in this sunny little town for nearly two years now, and still feel like I'm lurking on the edges. The neighborhood is packed with people who are either much older or much younger than myself, so whenever I am spending time in a public place--the farmer's market, the coffee-shop--and see people who appear to be close to my age, I want to go up to them and ask them what they do with themselves all the time. Why haven't I seen them before?
And so last weekend X and I were spending the evening at Scotty's, a very homey sort of place, a bit like a recreation room at your friend's parents' house. You can play darts or pinball or pool; you can drink beer and feed money into the reasonably good jukebox; but mind your Ps and Qs, or the bartender will walk by, empty your ashtray, and remind you to take your shoes off the chair, honey, because "this isn't that kind of place."
Scotty's is a magnet for people who look like they've probably seen The Matrix fifty times, people who like to talk really loudly about everything, from strange Chinese strategy games to outfitting an automobile so it won't sink when launched on to a body of water. Not necessarily the sort of person I'm dying to spend a great deal of time with, but it beats the khakis-and-blue-shirt crowd, hands down.
And every time I spend any time there, I find myself wondering who these people are. Do they live with their parents? This is suburbia, after all, and the bar is in a strip mall; it's not the sort of place you would just wander into. These people are not popping in after the Fugazi show gets out. Are these hipsters really professionals who like to dress entirely in black and play a nice game of darts at the end of a long day?
I know, I know, I learned a while back that an interesting looking person is not necessarily interesting to be around, but still: I enjoy watching them parade around and I enjoy eavesdropping on their conversations and I admire their interesting pants and little grandfather-caps and clever shoes.
I kept thinking to myself, "These people are pretty interesting. They're cool. Why don't I know any of these people?" as though I myself am some kind of techie, or a person who has really clever shoes, or a person who knows everything there is to know about Japanese samurai. I keep wondering why these cool people don't know about me, as though I am up to their kind of cool.
Who do I think I am, anyway?
So, what's the deal with this dilettante stuff anyway? It's surely meant to be a slur, isn't it? Our job on this planet is to be as serious and devoted and committed as we can possibly be, and that means you can't throw your concentration around like a crazy person. Isn't there some kind of drug to cure people who can't settle down?
I mean really, man, the Renaissance is so fifteenth-century. Don't they call that sort of behavior ADHD these days?
I can't help it. I'm not truly good at anything, and whether it's because (as my mother might say) I haven't applied myself, or because I just don't have the skills, I've come to terms with the Renaissance mindset. I want to have my fingers in a dozen different dishes at once. I need to appease my frayed attention span, so I dabble.
Writing, reading, library science, bookbinding, knitting, photography, drawing, trying to do this HTML business, planting things, making things, cooking things....I've been an art student, a photo technician, a picture framer, and now a grad student in Library Science (at San Jose State University, the tight pants campus). And along the way I've checked out a whole lot of seemingly unrelated library books, because my interests keep changing.
You can call me flaky if you want to, an amateur. It's all right. I prefer bohemian, though, or eclectic. But the best of all words is dilettante. I mean, you can't go wrong with a word based in the Italian dilettare--"to delight."
I know, it's probably just me, but sometimes, does Tom Waits make you ache?
Maybe you have to hear it. I suggest you do. Or maybe, you're more the type for Neko Case?
I was crying on the bus today, feeling sorry for myself. The mood stuck around all day until I heard this trivia question on the radio:
"What is the life expectancy of the sun?"
For those of you counting down at home, the answer is 80 billion years. My goodness. And then what will we do when the sun gives it up? I learned it in science class, and I bet you did too: no sun, no life. You know, I think about the sun as though it exists for my own personal warmth. How dare it go and die?
How ridiculous I am. We all are. War and health clubs and Prozac and wine snobs and what color your eye shadow ought to be today. It's all a really great distraction, but it's dumb. We don't matter.
Just think of it. Think of humans--all things, really, but we're just the weirdest products of random evolution--as the accidental products of a single catastrophic event and zillions of years of happy accidents. Makes my little troubles seem stupid, really. Not just "small, meaningless," like the vast-universe cliche, but pathetic. All of this is an accident.
Maybe if we all just owned up to the fact that we're just the mold on the cheese, we'd lose our sense of self-aggrandizing entitlement to joy, peace, or comfort. The cheese owes us nothing.
Maybe my reading choices have been a little too cranky of late.