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It might come as a shock to anybody that has been reading this blog for a long time but I've never been interested in attending a high school reunion. When most of the things that make life worth living occur inside of your own head, you don't really look forward to making small talk with people that want to talk about jobs and families. Old Member of the Class of 1989: So, Tess, what have you been up to all these long years? Eee! Tess Ate Chai Tea: Well, I guess I've fantasized about the way every day of my life could possibly go and how every interaction that might have been possible during that day could end in complete disaster if I didn't plan out my conversations precisely only to later discover that a few grunts and awkward shifts of my glance to avoid eye contact were sufficient for my purposes before heading back home to sigh in pleasure as I turned inward once more, blocking out the overwhelming sights and sounds of a society built without taking my needs into consideration. Old Member of the Class of 1989: Oh. So. Um. Any children?"

Eee! Tess Ate Chai Tea, Master Comic Book Reader (via tessatechaitea)

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Extroverted neighbors who make music (to the protests of my introverted ears)

As mentioned before, living in an old house with shared walls and floors is a soundproofing nightmare.  You can't hear every sound, but you can hear a lot of mundane...effects.  This is true of anyone in the front two units of the apartment.  The confounding effect comes in when those people are chasing the urban male under 30* dream of either being a DJ or being in a band.  And if those people are social.  Because every discussion you might have with them is going to be unwinnable.  Why?  Because you don't say hi outside the house.  Because you don't speak to them for more than a minute, or at all, because you don't think living on the same street means you have So Much In Common.  And for you not to like their noise-making hobby/pursuit/passion/art-and-craft is just really the final straw.  Somehow the entire dynamic can get put on its head if the prevailing assumption on the part of the more extroverted is that you, in wanting No Guitar Practice when you're pursuing your own quieter work or hobbies makes you a stick in the mud, and a jerk.  And because they're social and you're not?  They might actually insult your social skills when you complain about the noise.  Way to go, downstairs jerk-neighbors.  You're doing nothing to advance the cause of accommodating loud people.  If you can't be bothered to soundproof, get headphones, stop STOMPING to keep time, or any combination of these things, I hope you move.  Go away.

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Introverts with extroverted eyes: Soaking in the scenery

While it's true that the introverts I know vastly prefer home-based activities with plenty of room for thinking or daydreaming, one area of divergence even in my own house is the importance of visual input.  Significant Other/Outlaw Husband would gladly hole up at home for days on end, punctuated only by runs for caffeine or food, and even then we both sit here wishing teleportation were a thing already (when is the future???).  But what he doesn't need and what I do need is visual input.  I don't want to interact.  I want to see stuff other than things I see every day for my job (the computer, the furniture, the cats), but I do not want to feel accosted by strangers.  This is why walks and lone drives are excellent.  S.O./O.H., however is reluctant to partake in this because he is far less visual, doesn't notice houses or things I take for granted, and refers to walking around all up in his head as being "blind".  So even though we are both firmly on the self-sufficient and introverted end of things, there's already that divergence.  I don't need much visual input, fortunately; just enough to kind of sprinkle through my brain, which holds onto things for decades, and then the brain-thresher may or may not chuck some outside visual imagery into dreams.  And really, ultimately, that's one of my main motivations:  To sleep, and definitely to dream.  But that's another post. 

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Introverts, rejoice! The Internets are your domain (no pun intended)

You know how people lament the loss of human interaction and connection ever since so much of the population of the first* world got on the Internet?  How people don't go out as much as they do and they don't talk to strangers on the street?  I suspect that others who tend to turn inward hear the griping and think, like I do, "So?" 

I recently saw a  headline for an article that says that Facebook boosts connections but not happiness.  How do you quantify happiness?  Obviously it's upsetting to realize that your childhood friend turned into a raving lunatic or that your family, who insisted on adding you, also insist on vaguebooking and fishing for compliments in their status updates and MANY shared pictures with quotes on them.  But if you turn inward naturally, the Internet is a danged *gift*.  It eases the communication with others.  It spares you phone calls and even, if you're me, class reunions.  I wasn't ever planning on going to mine and I certainly am not now, thanks to Facebook, and I affectionately refer to Facebook as a class reunion in slow motion, without the cheerleaders getting drunk and dancing on the table.  Which apparently they really DO, at least if you're from a small Midwestern town.  I'd hoped that was an apocryphal tale, but alas.  I saw the pictures on the Facebook page set up to organize and document the reunion.  Aaaaaand I digress.

There are a lot of stories I could tell about the beauties and horrors of the Internets, but will try to rein that in.  I don't see the tragedy in avoiding traditional communication, unlike my mother, who wishes I didn't think texting or using Facebook is better than talking on the phone, and who doesn't mind the occasional conversation with strangers...which I mostly do.  It has taken me months to even make awkward small talk with our nearby Starbucks baristas.  Like a true nerd, I may overshare a bit (cognitive disinhibition), and I may not know how to end a conversation, so I try to stick to more robotic social convention-talk.  It works till it doesn't.  One-sided well wishes from baristas are a great example of where I am like some artificial intelligence that hasn't learned What To Say. 

Barista:  "Enjoy your iced tea." 

Me:  "You too!!!" 

The realization of what I've said is almost instant, just like when I make a pun first and it dawns on me right after that what I've uttered.  On the whole, I'd argue that putting introverts into too many social situations really only serves to placate and maybe entertain more extroverted types.  I have found, however, that if you accept people who work in shops as spatial and temporal manifestations, they become less intimidating.  I realize that sounds cold or detached or even borderline psychotic, but I know I'm not in a game.  If they're there every day at 9 AM, then I anticipate that, just like I would an NPC in a computer game.  I've caught flak for saying this before, but I am not diminishing their humanity.  I am making an analogy.  I don't care if people at Starbucks say the same thing about me getting my iced tea wearing my particular outfits.  "There's that red riding hood iced tea fiend.  She ordered a different size and said she was 'living on the edge' today."

While a certain amount of social order and cohesion is certainly necessary, when I hear people crying in their coffee about this vast epidemic of loneliness the Internet has foisted upon us, I am not sympathetic.  I've used the net, as they used to call it, hugely to my advantage.  Thanks to search engines, videos, product reviews, and more, I have learned a ton of stuff I wouldn't otherwise known and retained a sliver thereof, I have connected to old friends or people I knew before without actually knowing them, and all that while not having to go through the ridiculous rigmarole of going out, dealing with noisy or drunk people, or paying for expensive events or parking.  Inwardly-motivated people are uniquely equipped to make similar use of this direct line to the realm of ideas, no matter how much wheedling they get from people whose social needs are harder to meet.  Please go enjoy your wine tasting or your dancing or your mass bike ride.  I'll be here, watching videos on how to make thing A or cook thing B or the rise and fall of civilization C.  Carpe Internet. 

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Confounding effect: Introvert is the new star sign

As pleased as I am that there's been such an uptick in the conversation about introverts and how not everybody agrees on how to spend their social energy, it's still distressing that one noun is getting bandied about as a tidy explanation for everything.  In a previous post, I complained about insincere extroverts, but this is not to suggest for a moment that there are no insincere introverts...you just might never know when an introvert is insincere because the thought may never get articulated.  Maria Bamford has several good bits about this, and they flicker off and on YouTube and other places in the ether.  Her description of being "evil" is a good example of how introvert and insincere might collide.  It all happens in her head:  She doesn't call her mom back.  She asks an old man on the street for directions and stops listening before he's finished telling her how to find her destination.  She takes more than the allotted number of straws (or napkins) from Subway.  She doesn't blurt out grandiose offers and then renege on them, but for the purposes of the bit, she can say, "You just had your time wasted...by the Beast!" 

If you don't know Maria Bamford's excellent thought processes, she makes a couple of references to introversion, as well as depression and bipolarity here.  The part with being an introvert starts about 19:00 in.  Bipolarity? Depression?  These are all complicating and texturalizing factors when coupled with introversion or extroversion.   Do bipolar extroverts act out more than bipolar introverts?  During a manic episode, do the extroverts have a bigger tendency to do all those textbook things like run out into traffic or try to fly, while the introverts have been not-sleeping for a week because they're obsessively reading or writing?  I doubt it's that simple, but now I wonder if anyone is going to try to quantify that. 

So the next time you offer introversion as an explanation for why you don't want to go to  a bar or meet strangers or network, ponder another word to narrow it down.  In my case, I might say, "I'm a cantankerous introvert."  This is surely not true of all introverts.  Many introverts may be nice, but retiring and easily drained; hardly grumpy sticks-in-the-mud.  So try it, people who identify introvert. What would your texture- and depth-adding word be?

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Confounding effect: Noisy neighbors

Living in an old house divided into units guarantees that there will be different personalities with different interests under one roof.  This is particularly clear when the people downstairs have music-related interests.  I should clarify a bit:  I mean loud music-related interests.  I love music.  My significant other loves music.  But we lack  the equipment that really puts us in the league of the acoustically presumptuous downstairs neighbor.  And it is to them I dedicate this post: Not only the current noisemakers, but to those past and future, because I doubt these are the last people to be an acoustic thorn in our side.

On one hand, some sounds are unavoidable.  I'll call these sounds of living:  Walking over the wood floor, some voice-drift up to our apartment, even entertaining bedroom-guests (or wherever, whatever).  Nobody expects them to drift around in a little silent bubble, although that would be nice.  Other sounds, like practicing music without headphones in an old house with thin walls and thin floors, are totally avoidable.  I might have second-guessed my indignant reaction to our current noisy neighbors and their acoustic sharing, had it not been for my experience having a DJ for a downstairs neighbor.  This was about five years ago. I was unaware there was a DJ downstairs until he turned on his music at a stunning volume at about 3 o'clock one morning, startling me and sending me jumping, maybe flying out of bed in a disoriented panic.  And then I was just angry. So I stomped on the floor.  I stomped so hard my shins hurt.  I no longer remember if he even heard me, but he kept flooding his space and our space with bass-heavy sounds until I complained.  He tried to plead his case by telling me he needed to practice his "art and [his] craft".  In an old house.  With people living above.  He didn't care that there was nowhere we could go in our apartment to escape his art and craft.  Trying to sleep in the bedroom?  Bass.  Trying to watch TV in the living room?  Bass.  Trying to work in the office (a former sleeping porch)? Bass.  Hey!  The bathroom is a bit less noisy.  He didn't last long in the house, maybe  a year.  I hope wherever he went next, he had a studio.  And that if he had neighbors, he didn't provoke them acoustically while trying to take the artistic high road.  Guess what, buddy?  This apartment does lots of "creative" stuff.  The difference is that we do quiet creative stuff; we neither generate loudness in writing or drawing, nor can we concentrate when loudness is coming from downstairs. 

Now, the quaint days with one loud neighbor in a four-unit house seem so long ago, for verily, we have a bigger situation now:  Let's call it Multiple Unit Acoustic Onslaught.  But that's for another post.

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Confounding effect: Insincerity, thy aspect is extroverted

A long time ago, I started finding myself having conversations which I now realize are typical introvert/extrovert exchanges.  They would go something like this:

Extroverted friend or family member:  Hey, are you coming to my wedding/graduation/party [in a part of the country where you'd have to buy a plane ticket to get there]?

Me:  No, at an event like that I'd be one of a hundred people and I'd only see you for about five minutes, which is not my idea of quality time with you.  I prefer talking to you like this, directly.

...fast forward a decade or so and it's exactly this kind of person who, if I'd been paying attention, I would have known would ultimately come across as superficial and insincere.  Is that a fair assessment?  Or are introverts too sensitive, expecting too much one-on-one time? 

Another variant on this is the insincere offer, where someone who is more extroverted talks out loud about going somewhere or doing something and the introvert takes the idea as a commitment for the future.   Here is how that sounds.

Extroverted friend/family member/acquaintance:   We should totally go to (place) one day!  It's great!

Me or other introvert:  Okay! (Mentally gauging time and expense to leave comfort zone but it sounds neat, so okay!)

....nothing happens.

LATER...

Extroverted friend/family member/acquaintance:  I was at (place mentioned a while ago to you) last weekend and it was a-maz-ing.

Me or other introvert feels annoyed, hurt, confused, or any combination of same. 

Just like little kids pick up all their parents' swearing-words, introverts and sensitive types probably remember every suggestion you make because it means more to them than it does to you, extroverts.  Just bear that in mind.

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We love the randomly-preserved past.

Maybe more than most people, I love old stuff in the form of photographs, movies, and some museum pieces from daily life.  Maybe not machinery; I fancy myself very low on the by-now well-established Steampunk Continuum.  If that's not already, extant, I'm sure someone will rectify that presently.  But one thing I find an exasperating impediment to my enjoyment (but not romanticizing) of the past when I go to one of those frozen in time houses or barns is the pesky Plexiglass encasing the things that could be pilfered, or the things that need extra protection from the environment, because visually it's off-putting. 

Having said that, I found pictures yesterday that make me take my figurative hat off to some photographer who used the reflective surfaces as part of the composition of the images he or she took of his or her visit.  I can't find all the pictures from yesterday's searching, but this is one.  Here's another.  As workarounds go, I think that's pretty good.  Still, I have to wonder when looking at what's on view at the museums, filtered through what people post online from their trips to said museums:  Would the people who lived in these places understand our fascination with their outhouses, and more importantly, would they approve of the condition in which their dishes, saw blades, and straw-filled mattresses survive to tell us stories?   As recently as a few years ago, when I was taking a picture of an antique corn huller at a relative's house, my uncle told me he would've painted that huller if he'd known I was going to photograph it.  But it's from like 1900.  I don't want it to look new! 

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Confounding effect: Dealing with the extroverted

I think I have my own little list of introvert-grievances or "how to get on the bad side of an introvert (and probably never realize it)" things.  The comments section on the "How to interact with introverts" link reminded me; someone mentioned that introverts do not enjoy their friends' friends.  I think there is definitely a big assumption on the part of extroverts, and it may be an example of transference.  "If you're my friend, and this unknown person is also my friend, then you and my friend will get along great."  Sometimes this works, but sometimes it is a SPECTACULAR failure.   I sometimes think, "Oh, maybe Friend A and Friend B might get along for reasons 1 and 2," but I don't have the energy to make that happen.  I think it's been years since I made that happen.  Basically, I just don't want to presume.  So that isn't the biggest gripe I have, but it's one I hadn't thought of before. 

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acoustic Schadenfreude

Our downstairs neighbors are inconsiderate of the fact that our house is poorly insulated/soundproofed and think it's okay to practice their music on their guitars and bass, so it was with great joy that we realized the other day that the popping noise and the lights flickering for a moment MAY have been their amp blowing out. 

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coining

Once I described some thoroughly sad state of affairs as a "symphony of low expectations".  I only wish I could remember what it was.  it may have been a wedding.

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Placeholder!

Because such a name guarantees content is on the horizon...right?