I’ve never really been in sync with the world.
I’ve talked about this before. I live in a cage inside my mind, and that makes it hard to deal with life in realtime.
It’s one of the perils of being a thoughtful kind of person. You are fine in situations where you have time to think about each action.
But life – real life – is much faster than that. As fast as thought can be, the world is often much faster, and reason simply cannot keep up.
There is no time to carefully think through every decision. You need something faster that thought – you need emotion.
Or, in this case, instinct. By that, I don’t literally mean instinct in the strictly biological sense. I mean more like what we mean when we say someone “goes with their gut”.
Instinct. Intuition. Call it what you will.
But if you are a thinker type, you don’t trust instincts or intuition. After all, you can’t verify them via reason. Not in realtime.
And so you second-guess your instincts all the time, which greatly impairs their efficiency and effectiveness.
This leads to being very awkward and clumsy in situations where realtime reactions – the fast circuit of the brain – are needed, whether you are trying to catch a pass in gym class or make a pass on a date.
Hence the socially awkward nerd versus the confident and successful jock. The jock’s main advantage is not their physique, it’s their trust in their own instincts. Instincts that have been honed by a lot of practice on and off the field.
A lot of the problems we nerds have in life come from us trying to think our way through situations where we would be far better off going with our gut.
In my own so-called life, this is illustrated by my preference in strategy games.
I only do turn based strategy. The realtime strategy games freak me the hell out. I am fine when I am gathering resources and building bases and designing my defenses, but when the enemy shows up and I have to command my troops in realtime, suddenly I have to switch modes and I freak out.
I am a much better strategist than I am a commander.
Don’t get the wrong impression, though. It’s not all bad news for us thinking types. Our ability to think deeply and thoroughly about things unlocks universes of possibilities for us and for humanity.
We are wizards. We do things that the more action oriented types can only see as magic as they can see the results but cannot comprehend how they were produced.
We human beings have these big brains for a reason : reason! It’s us thinkers that rule in science and technology and all the products thereof. And we are also the ones who create great works of creativity that can only come from those who think and feel deeply about the world.
The jocks might win the big game, but they don’t win Nobel prizes.
I know which I would prefer.
More after the break.
Under the Weather
Oy, the weather.
It’s cold as yesterday’s fuck and the wind is blowing hard enough to make the building shake and it’s dark and it’s nasty and I just want to hide under the covers and hibernate.
And aside from the dark part, it’s been like this all day. No wonder my nerves are so frayed, and I feel scared and shaken and not at all well.
And we leave for FRED in less than an hour. Peachy.
I am not at all sure I will make it. I don’t feel very good right now and while I know that this feeling is mostly emotional, not physical, it is nevertheless quite real and I still have to deal with it anyway.
The real problem is that it’s fuckin’ cold in this here bedroom of mine. It’s a frigging icebox in here. The heat is just plain not heating. I had the thermostat up to 27 degrees all afternoon and I am pretty sure the heat didn’t kick in once.
It sure as fuck isn’t doing jack shit right now.
And it gets this way every time it’s really windy. Sucks all the heat right out of the room. I have the windows shit as tight as tight as I can make them and yet there’s still enough of a draft to make the blinds on the big window right behind my computer billow.
Mental note : buy some goddamned thermal tape online.Seal up the windows with it. Make this room of mine retain heat.
Of course, it would have to generate some heat before it could retain it. I am convinced that the only reason this room isn’t so cold I can see my breath is the heat that leaches in from the rest of the building, where the good and decent people live.
Freaks like me get to freeze to death like the little fucking matchstick girl, it seems.
I am trying to separate my emotional disturbance from my physical health and remind myself that White Spot is probably relatively warm compared to this iceberg of a room, but it’s so hard to do it.
And the ill but tempting voice that urges me to call the whole thing off so I can stay home, order in, and play video games is getting harder and harder to resist.
I am on the edge of freaking out here. I wish i still had my old space heater so I could get some heat up in this bitch.
But if I still have it, I don’t know where the hell it is. Iam going to have to try just burying the dial on the thermostat for my room and seeing if THAT makes the heat turn on.
If not, I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do. I sure as fuck don’t feel like getting in the car and going out into this dark and stormy night.
Maybe I will burrow underground and sleep till spring.
Yeah…. that sounds good.
Anybody got a shovel?
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.