hanging my tomorrows on the bones of yesterday

So, talking to Coworker A again today, and I really am feeling the Bengali Tea-Boy story. It bothers me, watching people do the stupid shit I'm still trying to get better at. It bothers me listening to someone be ill-informed on abrasive issues and then not admit that their logic or data are faulty. Some people are sort of dispassionately annoying because they do things we don't do aand don't understand. But some people live under our skins and pull our thoughts back around to them and irritate us to madness because we recognize ourselves in them.

But in less personal-issues news, Coworker A - you'll get tired of not knowing who you are eventually, right? Reliance on convention is not the cure for your confusion. Kinky people are just as likely to be movie stars and bank executives as they are social outcasts with mohawks and obvious visual cues for subcultural leanings. Maybe David Carradine was murdered, but lack of defensive bruises says he did let someone put a rope around his heads; whether or not his death was accidental, he was still a kinkster.

Bless LJs save draft function! I'm writing this from a computer at the public library, because the laptop is down, probably 'til this weekend. Most of you have my cell number, if you need me.

[saved lj post continues]
Now, since I couldn't read or sit up for longer than a half hour on Thursday, I had lots of time to think. Yes, I am only just getting to the typing it out part as I am easily distractable. Have a look at some of my thinky thoughts!

Some of you have this mistaken belief that you can take care of your social network without being taken care of. Let me draw up the charts and graphs that illustrate how very wrong you are! :D Pay no attention to my own history behind the curtain!

So first take this out of your own perspective and make it impersonal. Person A likes to help others but doesn't like to be helped, person B can do either and likes both reasonably well, and person C likes being helped more than helping. These three people are a tiny network of friends, a microcosm of interaction. If person C gets hit with a big life event and needs help, C will tell A and B, they will help, and everything is okay. If person B gets hit similarly, A will help. If person A gets hit, nobody will help unless A tells someone which may not happen. Now factor in the way that life works. If A is still staggering under the last hit when B needs help, C will have to step up despite not liking to do so.

That seems fair, right? We expect that friends go out of their way to help keep everyone taken care of, that C should have to do some sharing of the burden to make sure the situation works out better? If so, then A should suck it up, too, and tell the network of troubles and let them help. I don't care if you A people don't like my logic here. Your reticence is potentially just as damaging as C's unhelpfulness.

( Further explanation of poor tactical planning is available here. )
So think of it like a finacial organization, what we have is revolving community credit. It's not that any one of us is accepting charity as it is that we're taking control of some of the excess capital until the next person needs it. We nurture the community nest egg, and then pass it along.

(And to those who don't trust their Cs: if you don't believe in them, why are they your friends?)

Except for this guy, we all like to use our brains, right? So one thing I've been trying to improve the functioning of my brain with lately is this assumption reversal technique.

My hypothetical problem: popular culture still perceives geeks as being 'weak' for their common lack of social involvement, thinking that it denotes poor socialization skills. I know that most geeks I've met are strong people. Could it be that geeks lack popularity because they are strong?

As adults, we have one primary format for decision making, the cost-benefit analysis. It sounds complicated, but means that we decide whether the cost of a course of action in time, effort, and emotional hardship is worth what benefits it will bring us. The problem with predicting each analysis is that since people have different values, they will weight decisions differently. If the cost of doing something you want to do is too high, you will probably avoid it. If you want something enough to tip the scales toward the 'benefit' side of the ratio, or if the cost to you can be negated by another factor, you are likely to do it.

What social people consider to be the cost in terms of peer disapproval for following unpopular interests may be higher than another, geekier person's cost who is less interested in peer approval. The geek would not need to be more interested in the subject, merely less invested in other people. And that's a trend that I can confirm from my own observations.

There are many skill sets in which I am weak due to never bothering to develop those skills because I didn't care enough to do so. Maybe that is true of all geeks, of all people: we focus on and develop the skill sets for the things we are most invested in. We try to minimize the costs to us or find ways to disregard the costs by learning not to care.

This runs in parallel with Bryan's theory that everyone is a geek of some sort, and that some people simply geek for social skills and baseball. Tell me what you think. :)

If not understanding people is scary then those who are different from us are our enemies, because we don't fear our friends, right? Fascism, such reasoning goes, is the obvious answer: if everyone's alike then we don't have misunderstandings with each other, and we have nothing to fear. :\

We look down on memes but still participate by taking them, posting them, and pimping them around. Do we recognize the truth in them: that no matter what we score, we're still included in the test's results? Do we feel empowered knowing that while our friends have different outcomes, they are different in ways that it's possible to quantify and understand? Do memes make interpersonal differences less threatening?

If so, then email questionnaires, website personality quizzes, and other memes are one more way the internet is breaking down the kind of thinking that leads to fascism. Strength in numbers used to mean excluding anyone that couldn't fit the most popular mold, but we've got a new paradigm going here on the web.

Accepting our differences together is its own kind of solidarity.

The next time I go to Club 2505 presents Panoptikon, I'm teaching a class on how to pick up girls in a club setting. This is not a comprehensive list, so feel free to add to the list in comments, for the good of the class.

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Know your target audience
It's important to understand where on the dating spectrum the women in the club fall, so that you have a realistic idea of your chances and do not waste time being emotionally defeated when a girl has someone or is out to catch someone that isn't you.

Girl dating stages and their visual strategies:
Single and not looking
Looks good but not great, probably watching people dance or hanging around the bar, may not be appropriately dressed for that club, doesn't change expressions when contact is made: was probably dragged along with friends, will not be looking for romance. Buy her a sympathy drink to earn brownie points with her friends later if you're looking for an opening gambit with her pack.

Single and looking
Dressed elaborately, wearing too much jewelry, or hiding in dark, quiet corners being a wallflower- all warning signs for damaged or high-maintenance women. If you don't think you're interesting, one really poor tactic to bolster your confidence is to bling until you LOOK interesting. Only try your game if you feel secure and have a high degree of skill. Or if you just want to practice flirting with someone to make them feel better.
Large, single pieces of jewelry, accessorized to catch attention (without looking like a Christmas tree that has too many ornaments). Interesting outfit, hair and nails done, good looking shoes. Makes eye contact for longer than a second. This one is your winner. She's not trying too hard, but not hiding out either. Because she's in the middle of the spectrum she usually blends into the crowds, making your task that much more difficult. Still your best option.
Girl Herds - competitively ho'ed out, hive-minded, and usually loud. These travel in packs, and if you make contact they will pass you around to the one they think you fit best with. Let it happen. Sometimes it works out, but everything you do or say with one all will know of by tomorrow night.

New boyfriend stage and not looking
Lots of girls want to make sure their new boyfriend continues to have fun, and want a chance to both proove to him that she's as hot as anyone out there, and to observe him interacting with other females to make sure he hasn't got a short attention span for girlfriends.
Recognizeable signs: they're called 'fuck me' boots for a reason. Girls with boyfriends feel more secure showing off for him because they have a champion in case someone decides to be an ass. They will be even hotter than the girls who are single. Yes, life is unfair. Shirts printed with words right across the breasts, necklines so low you can hear the echo from her cleavage, and corsets or other boob-trays with a dangly necklace mean she's deliberately drawing attention there. Single girls usually do this at the desperate stage, so let's hope she's with a guy whose attention she wants to keep right where she directs it.
Makes eye contact mostly with ONE GUY, assorted others only occasionally- this girl may not be going out with him, but her attention is already taken up by someone not you. Be neighborly and point out her interest to him if he continues oblivious. Wouldn't you want someone to help you out if you weren't cluing in?

Steady boyfriend, not looking
Has on appropriate clothes but minimal accessorizing of jewelry, nail polish, makeup, and hairstyle. Will make eye contact but does not react to flirting. Probably just there to dance, drink, and socialize.

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Know your technique

Once you have an idea of how she'll react to being approached, actually approach her. This is what courage and confidence are for.

React to her attention. Smile brighter AFTER you make eye contact, so she can see that she's the reason for the extra wattage.

Chat her up. Indirect advancement toward your goal of finding dateable prospects is good for showing that you have respect for your audience and allowing you to time to show off your game skills. Asking, "Who are you here with?" rather than, "Do you have a boyfriend?" displays more interest in her social situation than it does in whether she's interested in jumping your bones. It's an open-ended question, and allows her to tell you about her friends, herself, and her significant other if she has one. Talking to people is a time investment well worth spending, as it allows a gentler let-down and may include her hooking you up with her single friend if you have game.

Mnemonics. How much do you remember after talking to her for five minutes? What's her name, her friend's name? What did she say she was doing with her life ten minutes ago? How much attention you pay to her will show, and will cut you out above the crowd in her estimation. Men who pay attention are rare, and therefor precious.

Enjoy yourself - it's not called "game" for nothing. People desire fun, and they desire people who bring that fun with them. Play with your words, use moderate touches of flair or theatricality, tell your stories and jokes, ask her to dance or dance when she's nearby. Bring your A-game and share it with her. Failing that, buy her a drink (only one, as a social nicety, string free) so that your game seems better than it is. If you fear seeming pretentious, practice your flirting skills with your female friends until they think you're charming. It takes practice, so don't be discouraged by early mistakes.

Let her have her turn. You're not the only one with game. Let her bring hers, and share some of the fun she brought. Be fascinated, amused - show what you feel. If you're being respectful and your interest or honesty somehow offend her, then she's probably not the type you're going to get along with in a relationship. Wish her well and move on.

Know when to retreat. If you get any impression from a girl's body language or expression that there's an apparent lack of interest, then tell her you're interested in talking to her more if you see her later. Then go dance or something. Be sincere about respecting people's right to be uninterested in you, or to be absorbed in their own lives. It's usually not about you, so don't take it personally. People are who they are, and it's going to be difficult enough to find someone to fit into your life without carrying around a lot of unfounded blame for other people not fitting. It makes you bitter and cripples your enjoyment of an evening.

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That's all I got right now. COMMENT, BITCHES! Help out.

I remember things better if I have a picture or my own words to lead me back into the thought process. Words work best.

I have a pretty bad memory for people and events, except as facts that can be organized into a structural framework. Those parts are handled by a different part of the brain that seems to work just fine. But the fine detail, the 'flavor' of an experience will eventually degrade and I'll need to be reminded of what happened. I'd like to be able to blame that on the bits of brain damage I've got, but unfortunately I've always had selective amnesia where people are concerned. Maybe it got worse, but I have no way of judging that.

Maybe it was easier being kid-me if I could choose who mattered and who didn't by refusing to remember anything I didn't like. It's a form of control after all: like propaganda used inside your own head, and to much the same purpose. In a world where you have no power, it's the very first thing you have a choice in. You can't control your family or their behavior, you can't even control your body very well, but you can control who you ignore and what matters to you. You babysitter that drinks beer and makes you watch daytime TV? You keep only as much of her as you are willing to allow.

So I taught my brain to be this way, and now I'm training it to be some other way, and I've been trying for years. I think it's worked as much as it can, but I won't give up on the mnemonic exercises. I hope I'm wrong, but in case I'm not, I want to share with you my fears in the hope that even if I forget, you won't.

I don't want to lose you. If you read this, you are important to me. But eventually the details of our meetings may be lost to me, and that frightens me. I have all the things I have right now, but what of when these things are gone? Some of you will move away, or grow away from me, and then I will only have as much of you as I remember.

And those memories will fade.

I started keeping notes in my day planner a few years ago, and making sure to write down anything I absolutely had to remember. But I lack the skill to wrap all of an experience in few enough words to write them and have enough time to live the life to which they belong. I wish I could trust to my brain to do all this by itself, to correlate and stack information in ways that keep all of you safely here. I don't. I'm resigned to that. It's upsetting, but not tragic. I can write some of it down. But if you want to maybe sometime go through with me and make sure that I remember something that was important to you, well, that would be nice.

"We don't love people's faults, but their faults make us able to love them. We love the people we can reach, those differently broken than ourselves, that seem beautiful to us."

Doug asked me to elaborate last week, but there's still some bits that aren't finished with my idea of the impulse toward love. People mostly ask questions that make sense to them, but y'all're some strange race to me so I get to ask questions about things other people already think are obvious and come up with cracked insights and look like a smarter person than I really am. :) I'm okay with that.

Today's question: ( Why do people want to fall in love with the people they fall for? )

People seem to get stuck on duality, even relatively intelligent people. It's easy to see why: 9/10ths of the options are in those two categories. But always choosing one of the two most popular options means that your brain has drowned in the mainstream, been undertowed and sucked into complacency. Sometimes you want to choose a different course to navigate, and if you've trained yourself to see only those options which present themselves most clearly, then you're missing out on a lot of opportunities to go a different way.

If the workplace were the Serengeti and you had to interact with the other animals in it, most people would be either predators or prey. If you want to be in control you're obviously a lion. If you want to have srength through solidarity, you're a wildebeest and may get eaten anyway. (If you just want to have great hair then you're a zeebra, and probably deserve to get eaten.) But what if you don't want to bother with power dynamics? You don't want to eat or be eaten, just to grow as a person until you're too strong to be pushed around? If you are taking a slow and difficult path of self-betterment that has nothing to do with fitting into the herd, or with being the scariest badass, then what kind of archetype is that?

You are an elephant. As a healthy adult, you will have no natural predators. Your massive, powerful feet are sensitive enough that you can tell a rock from a turtle, so you will never step on your neighbor the turtle. You do no harm to others and are the wisest creature in your landscape. How do you fit that much effort, vulnerability, and willingness to change into a social paradigm? How do you show that the boring, slow-moving elephant is a good alternative to the loud and cool-seeming lion? Or that not being a particular thing does not limit your choice to being its opposite?

Procrustes: Greece's first serial killer has quite a legacy. He may have been killed by Theseus more than two thousand years ago, but the tradition he left of deliberately making people fit an unfair standard is alive and well.


I'm trying to simplify the concept of how a statistical universe of people not complying with the Procrustean bed model of interaction will change your world, so that I can turn it into a ritual for this Samhain's CMA. There has to be a way to break down the idea into smaller pieces that a layman can converse about, but only some of those I've already got. The translation effect I can make simple enough to put it into a ritual, but terms like "statistical universe" require explanation, and I don't want to write a ritual where I'm talking for half an hour. I always hate those, and other people will, too.
Meh.


I'm thinking of doing a daytime-hours class on it instead if I don't get the reductionism worked out by August.

Okay, the true meaning of that dream has finally emerged, ( and it's a weirdie. )