Social Interaction is a Necessary Evil

Guys, I have a shocking confession. 

Are you all ready for it?

I...am kind of an awkward person.

Which comes as a shock to none of you, if you've been following this blog for a long amount of time.  I know I seem incredibly cool and laid-back on the Internet, but I assure you that if you met me in person you'd wonder if it was social anxiety pumping through my veins and not blood. I get flustered really easily in face-to-face conversations when I feel like there's nothing left to say, and I usually make a quick exit and chastise myself for Probably Making People Not Want To Talk To Me Ever Again.

essentially how I feel after a botched social interaction
but I tried really hard to impress you probably!!

This gets compounded if I'm talking to an attractive boy who I don't really know.

I identify as demisexual (which I'll talk about in another blogpost because it's super important) but that doesn't mean I'm immune to experiencing primary attraction (attraction to people based on instantly available information; smell, physical appearance, etc etc) on rare occasions, which is a super freaking pain in the 

neck. We'll go with neck. Keeping it PG today.

So once upon a time, there was this guy who I thought was very attractive at my school. I'd seen him around on campus and even traded the occasional "hey what's up" so it wasn't like we were complete strangers. I mostly noticed him because he had immaculate facial structure and I am (I kid you not) a sucker for immaculate facial structure. It sounds REALLY weird, but--

We interrupt this regularly scheduled blogpost to bring you

~A Quick Study in Immaculate Facial Structure~

JAWLINE.

World-famous zygoma and stuff

How do people this attractive even exist
I don't even know sometimes
does this unsettle anyone else? 

and here we see another great example of great genes and face and bone structure.

What was I talking about again?  

Right. Facial Structure. Being awkward around guys. 

*coughs*

I attended an event at school and this boy with facial structure from the Gods, probably, happened to be there. After the event, we chatted for a minute. I don't remember the exact specifics of the conversation, except that he went in for a hug and I was like aaah help no we don't know each other we can't hug it's too soon but you're really pretty. 

Well, that and I accidentally squeaked at him. 

It was significantly less embarrassing and involuntary than I'm making it sound. I have a habit of making things sound much worse than they actually are because that's just how I remember things in my mental world. What really happened was he politely said something, I politely tried to say something back, and my voice cracked. 

Like a prepubescent boy's. 

Loudly.

And it was after that that he awkwardly went in for the hug and I was like I don't actually know what's happening but I squeaked at this boy so I can never speak to him again.

I think I nodded at him after he hugged me and turned tail and ran as fast as I could to find someone else I knew really well who wouldn't let me flush myself down the toilet out of embarrassment (like I said, my reactions are not proportionate to the real severity of my actions) and I ran into Sahara, who, as you all remember, is my oldest friend and put up with a great deal from me in preschool when I was preschool-engaged.

I relayed the story to her, and to my friend Carlie, who also happened to be present.

They thought it was absolutely hilarious. 

I did not. 

They insisted that I should just talk to him some more, that he probably didn't even notice my vocal abnormalities; and that if he did he probably thought it was cute that I got all flustered.

In response, I tried to convince them that the real answer was to lock myself in an empty room until everyone left the event. 

They told me I was silly and dragged me into his general vicinity, and basically almost this exact scenario went down: 

That basically was all it took to cure me of...whatever malady it was that had caused me to squeak at him. There's nothing like getting the attraction embarrassed right out of you. It works wonders, and only the people who are truly your friends will do you this favor. They know how mad you'll be at them outright, as in Sahara Carlie NO SHUT UP HE WILL HEAR YOU THIS IS VERY BAD YOU GUYS ARE UNBELIEVABLE WHAT IS THIS HIGH SCHOOL but they also know you will forgive them once you realize you're so embarrassed that you have become entirely free. 

It's sort of like when you have emotional pain and you do something physically painful, like wear shoes that are too tight because the physical pain distracts you from feeling the emotional pain as acutely. I was no longer embarrassed about squeaking; instead now I was embarrassed about the fact that he probably knew I thought he was cute. 

It sounds harsh, and I don't mean it to. I love both Sahara and Carlie very dearly, and I know they have nothing but my best interests at heart. They really don't torture me on a regular basis, and they're both actually very understanding of my social anxiety. 

I never spoke to him again.

Well, that's not entirely true. I've bumped into him since. Interacted with him, even. Carried on a functional, squeak-free conversation. He still has an immaculate facial structure. It's very distracting, but not as distracting as it used to be. The Embarrassment Cure my friends used on me has worked its magic.

And I'm still immaculately awkward, so

until next time 

here's a picture of Tom Hiddleston in Crimson Peak because how else would I end this stupid blogpost? 

you know that's right. 

Tales From the Call Center

Now that I've got a more or less Real Adult Job doing social media managing for a company,  I feel like I can open up about the world I've been working in for the last six months with some impunity.

Excuse me while I give my supervisor a meaningful look and reassure him that I'm not going to write anything too compromising about his true nature as a shape-shifter-hunting captain of the Enterprise billionaire playboy philanthropist.

See, Jim? Your secret is totally safe with me.

I knew Jim and I would become friends the first day of training. He'd been very professionally giving us all a lecture with a slideshow about call center rules, and after that we'd been permitted a break. I was making conversation with one of the trainees (my future friend Manda) and Jim and his co-supervisor, Chase, descended on the newbies to finish training.

"All right," he asked, quoting Iron Man, "Do you want to be in the Fun-Vee or the Hum-Drum-Vee?"

"That depends," I deadpanned back without batting an eyelash, "Do we get attacked and killed by terrorists on the way?"

I think I took him aback a little, because he blinked a few times before saying "Are you a coward?"

"I don't think so."

"Good, then you're with me."

It took me about three weeks to not feel a full-blown panic attack coming on when I answered the phone with the standard greeting, and three more weeks to have the entire first medicine-related script memorized. When I applied for the job, I wasn't at all sure if I'd end up making friends. By December, I had several: Jim, Manda, Amy, and Max. Doubtless you'll hear more about each of them in the future. And I started feeling like, anxiety or not, these friends made the job worth it.

Of course; December was when we started working on a political poll that was twenty minutes long, and I'm fairly sure that the vitriol that seeped out of the respondents of that survey prematurely aged me a little bit. Everyone I spoke with in this state (with the exception of one or two people) seemed to seriously hate Democrats and it was all I could do at the end of surveys not to be like, "well, I sure hope you enjoyed completing this survey with me, a more or less liberal-leaning feminist who is terrified of the effects of global climate change and who also has definitely voted for Democrats on several occasions. Because I feel pretty great and stuff, knowing that you just hate all Democrats forever."

Which isn't just me being resentful. Someone actually DID say that to me.

I never said any of that, obviously. I was tempted.

The high point of that survey was the respondent who answered one of the questions about congress with "You know what I wish we could do? I wish we could bring back Andrew Jackson and have him challenge all of the senators to duels on the White House Lawn."

Believe it or not, that was one of the least crazy things I heard on that survey. Mostly I was (and am) more concerned by the fact that Andrew Jackson is a terrible candidate to put your bets on in one of my favorite parlor games, "Which Dead President Should We Bring Back To Power?" Andrew Jackson was a homicidal, genocidal crazy person who would probably kill at least 8/10 people who looked at him askance. Sure, there's a decent musical about him--the title of which should also put up some red flags: Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. Bloody once is bad enough; bloody twice? Forget it--in which he is reimagined as a rockstar (and in the production I saw, he looked like Zach Baggins, one of the hosts--I refuse to say star of--Ghost Adventurers which was massively distracting and vaguely upsetting). Rockstar, sure. President, again? Nope.


Working at the Call Center, I also learned that Idaho is a very hostile place. I've been on several surveys that did outgoing calls to Idaho and all of the meanest and most disgusting things that have been said to me on calls were ALL comments from Idahoan respondents. If they could have done so over the phone, I am confident I would have been stoned to death with those pleasant Idaho potatoes they're so famous for. Among the winners were:

"I'm sorry, I have diarrhea and I'm on the toilet RIGHT NOW so I can't take this call."

"If you suck my d*ck first." (in response to the standard "would you help us by answering some questions?")

Seriously.

The Call Center also taught me how to be polite in a way that nothing else had before. I never realized the usefulness of the phrase "I understand" until I was caught in a face-to-face conversation with an acquaintance a few weeks before I started my social media classes. This person had said something wildly insensitive and I was scrambling for something to say that wasn't shouty or rude or what I was thinking, which would have only made the situation worse.

The words "I understand" fell from my lips in a graceful, carefully neutral way, and I felt myself smile like the Madonna (the religious figure, not the artist; although for some people I'm pretty sure singer Madonna is an actual religion). "I understand" is maybe the most glorious phrase in the English language. It automatically transforms the speaker into a backhanded-benevolent Atticus Finch, who understands but doesn't say exactly WHAT it is that they understand. I'm fairly sure that people who write and dictate the laws of neutrality in survey administration didn't have that in mind when they set up this system, otherwise they might have taken it away from us. To them, it's just a true neutral response to whatever anecdote. But in my book it's a civil way to be polite to people of whom you actually understand very little. Civility like that is something you don't really learn in any other job, except, of course, if you're working the food service industry; where the pressure to be polite is unrelenting and the people are short-tempered and rude for no good reason.

I honestly think the world would be a lot kinder and more understanding if we were all required to do a stint in a job that puts that kind of pressure on people. I learned quite a lot about what I was capable of, emotionally--arguably, working phones isn't actually all that hard; it's physically easy if emotionally taxing for someone like me who has social anxiety, but I wouldn't trade the lessons that I learned for anything.

I'll be honest: coming to the end of my tenure at the call center is a bit of a relief; but it's harder than I thought it would be, too. It was a good job. It was, funnily enough, exactly what I needed at the time, and I'm incredibly, incredibly grateful I had the chance to work there. I could never have accurately predicted all the good times I would have.


So, just for the record--coming clean and all that,

every. single. time.

Well. Except when Idaho was involved. Seriously. Because of the way people from Idaho talked to me on this job, I'm never going to Idaho. Ever.

It's been very.

It Never Hurts to Be Grateful.

It's been a very tumultuous few days at Chez Forbush (I'm never using that phrase again, just so's you know. Way too much sibilance. It's making me a little bit uncomfortable). I've been doing things with Jobs that are very new and intimidating (I'm going to actually start doing Social Media for people!) and some of my dear friends have taken some pretty heavy blows this week. People going through pain is hard to watch from the outside, especially when they are people close to you and the events that they are feeling pain over (for one reason or another) hit really close to home for you, too.

All the sadness and stress floating around my face like fog has got me feeling very introspective, but also very lucky, too. Lucky, you say? Yes, say I. And, as you probably expect, I'm fixing to tell you why.

There are some people in this world who you just know you have been lucky; honored, even, to know. They fill up a room with their positivity. They've been around your whole life; or it just feels like they have, to the point where you can't imagine a time when they haven't been there. You can talk to them after years and feel like nothing has passed. They're the kind of people of whom the simplest gestures of kindness are remembered for as long as you have breath to tell others the story.

If you're lucky, you have one of these people in your life. I have several. They are friends, mother-figures, and family. And though they wouldn't tell you themselves, they are truly exceptional people. I like to try and pretend that somehow, some part of me is exceptional: if it's not my looks (which it definitely isn't) it's my intelligence and my 3.9 Summa Cum Laude with a cherry on top, if it's not that, it's my wit and vivacity, and if it's not that, well, then, it's my ability to read a freakish number of words per minute (which scares my dad). And if we're scraping the bottom of the barrel, it's the weird little pads on my fingers that I'm almost positive will turn sticky one day and I will don the mantle of Gecko Girl and fight crime in my native city.

Yeah. Like that'll ever happen.

But I'm not exceptional in the way that these people are exceptional, no matter how much I try to be.  If you know one of those people, your life is the better for it. And when they're gone from your life, you feel the void. You remember things, like the time they let you stay at their house as a teenager, or the fact that they always went out of their way to ask you how you were doing when you saw them. You remember the way they smiled, the fact that it radiated so much genuine kindness that it made other people's smiles seem cold and forced by comparison.

Sadness and loss makes me realize just how much people matter. I've always tried to practice this philosophy in my day-to-day life, but it's times like these that it gets thrown into sharp relief. Individuals matter. I look at my friends, and without exception every single one of them matters so much to me that it takes my breath away a little. Sure, I've been frustrated by (and DEFINITELY frustrating to) my friends at different times. I've felt lonely and abandoned (if we're being melodramatic) at times, just like every other human on the planet. But I look at this constellation of individuals that make up my little corner of the galaxy, and I mostly just feel incredibly, well, lucky. All the little things--the things that have caused vexation, feelings of pettiness and jealousy, all the little spats to the really big fights--they don't matter, not really. Ultimately, for me, they're forgettable, like the Hobbit Trilogy, or chicken n'waffles flavored potato chips. Because people matter. More than the fights, more than pettiness or jealousy, more than their mistakes.

You'd have to make me really suffer to want to give up the memories I've made with friends over my life. Growing up, co-ops and homeschooling and semi-hippie-sheltered childhoods. Adolescence, the abruptness of quick-changes (backstage and in-body) and the feeling of the hot stage lights on skin, the smell of varnish and high school halls, vulnerably trying so terribly hard to be grown-up, to be genuine. College, late nights in semi-illuminated dorms spinning wild stories off of one another, reading submission after submission of terrible prose, discussions of self-discovery, piano music and watching fireworks from the roof of the parking garage. Getting shattered, feeling numb; but not so numb that I couldn't appreciate how many pairs of hands appeared, trying to help me put what was left of me back together.

And the present time (After College? AC?), though of course I can't quite view the present with the same lens where everything is smooth and glossy and easily encapsulated by a single image. The present has too many jagged edges that my mind habitually tries to skip over. My present, though, is still made up of a lot of those selfsame friends.I'm one of the most flawed people I know, but I will say this: I am fiercely loyal to all of them. Because they're exceptional. They matter to me, so much. I want to hold them all tightly for as long as they'll let me. I'm not very good with loss, or change, and these whole few days have had a particularly elegiac feel to them. I just wanted to put it into words before this present becomes another of those well-eroded memories I keep in my pocket.

I want to remember the way this knowing feels: in spite of how brief a spark our existence is, how messed up we all are, how much we hurt each other; in spite of humanity's flaws and fatal failings, I want to remember for right now, just how much people matter.

And in spite of how crazy these last few days have been, that knowing feels like enough.