The microphone looks like ass but otherwise, pretty cool.

Pretty sure that one of the reasons I rarely got along with my fellow students, both as a child and as an adult, is that I give off a coldly alien vibe.

I’m weird. That’s what I am saying. And not just in a cute, wacky, nerdy way. Oh no.

I’m weird in a way that can chill people to the bone and leave them very confused by me because I don’t give them the signals they don’t even know they need.

It’s all very…. unarticulated.

It’s especially bizarre with me because on the surface, I am friendly, affable, easygoing, and sweet. My surface vibe is very personable and charming.

But underneath, I am cold as stone, and that dissonance makes most people just shake their head at me and decide I am too weird to deal with.

So they don’t. They pull back from me entirely and that’s where they are going to stay because approaching me is too weird and alienating and it’s not like I get in their face and demand they pay attention to me.

How could I? Until recently I did not even know why they pulled back from me and never dealt with me again.

Now I know. And that means I can try to do something about it.

But I am not sure what. Maybe one of those “social skills for aspies” courses would do me some good. Might teach me the extremely basic social skills everybody else learned in kindergarten but I did not.

Because I never went to kindergarten. It was determined that I didn’t “need” it.

And I didn’t need it intellectually. I was already way way ahead of my age when it came to book smarts.

But I sure could have used those social skills.

I suppose the real solution for my chilly vibe would be to abandon my position behind my invisible wall and actually be fully emotionally present for people.

I’m working on it.

At least I can get on well with my fellow nerds. A lot of them are pretty chilly too and luckily our individual windchill factors tend to cancel each other when we’re together.

Basically, we’re not even looking for the signals we’re not putting out. Most of us have no idea they even exist. Ours is a fundamentally intellectual realm and that’s the level at which we can relate to one another.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have emotions. It just means that our big brains are in the driver’s seat more times that not and we are more likely to follow our fascination than our emotional intuition.

Me, I’m doubly weird. A chilly intellectual with powerful empathy.

Doctor Hannibal Lecter, in other words.

Nerdsville aside, I would like to learn to get along better with “mundane” people and maybe even learn some of the things that they “know” and I do not.

I put quotes around “know” because this is clearly a radically different kind of knowledge from those “book smarts” I mentioned earlier.

This is the type of thing people know deep in their bones, in their guts. Things they know on such a deep level that it’s very hard for them to imagine what it is like to not know them and still have to navigate this crazy world of ours.

This guy gets it.

I like to think that if I had another chance to be around “normal” people, I would be able to control my anxiety enough to kind of soak up the vibe and open my mind to a new kind of understanding of the world.

That might only be possible with Ativan at first. But it’s doable.

And who knows, maybe then I could finally come in from the cold.

Because I am not just cold to others. I’m cold in here too. My retreat into icy intellectualism when I was raped came at a very heavy cost.

And I want my money back.

More after the break

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The life of a spaz

I am so goddamned sick of spazzing out all the god damned time.

When I was getting my supper (baked potato and hot dogs!), I slipped while getting something out of the fridge, and reached out to grab the fridge door to steady myself.

Unfortunately, my hand landed on the little plastic compartment where we keep all out leftover packets of ketchup, plum sauce, soy sauce, and so on.

There’s got to be like 60-100 packets in there. It’s jam packed.

And, as I learned to my great dismay, it’s not actually attached to the fridge at all. I thought it was part of the fridge like the two crisper drawers, but nope.

So it came out of the fridge door and spilled its contents all over the floor.

And the best part is that I can’t clean that mess up myself. If I try to bend down that far, I will get super dizzy due to lack of oxygen to the brain because of how bad the circulation in the back of my legs is, or my legs will seize up and I will end up falling that way, or possibly both.

So I had no choice but to call Julian and warn him about what he will see when he comes home tonight.

It will be up to him to clean up my mess, and that sucks. I hate it. I want to be able to do things for myself.

Being dependent on others like I am now is quite alien to me. Nobody looked after me like that when I was a kid, at least that I remember.

Even before I was abandoned to do my own laundry and buy my own clothes, I got very little personal attention from anybody.

I got fed because Mom cooked meals for everybody. I had clean clothes because Mom did the laundry for everybody.

So I was looked after in a sort of institutional way.

And eventually even that ended. I had to buy my own clothes and do my own laundry and cook 2/3 of my own meals.

So you can see how I have been doing things for myself for a long time.

And I really miss that. I hate needing to get Julian to do things for me. It makes me feel guilty for imposing on him and being a burden on him.

Maybe I should try getting a wheelchair. Or crutches.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.