Bad at parties

Jack and Jill threw a Halloween party tonight. They had skipped it last year because of COVID-19, and in fact they haven't thrown any parties since the outbreak of the pandemic, so far as I can recall. (Or at any rate, they've had people over from time to time -- rarely, to be sure! -- but this is the first one that was general enough that I was invited.)

I knew that I couldn't afford to get really hammered, because I'm planning to visit my mom tomorrow, and that means a drive of a couple of hours. Plus, after I get there, we're going out for the evening somewhere that will require a bunch more driving. So I have to be functional tomorrow.

But also I have come to realize that I am really bad at parties, or at any rate at the kind of parties that Jack and Jill throw. I'm not good at small talk, or at least I'm not good at small talk with people I scarcely know. I'm not part of these people's lives -- none of them, not even Jack and Jill themselves, really, even though they are my next-door neighbors. And I don't dance, not unless I'm so drunk that the next day is already destined to be a total loss.

The one thing I know how to do at their parties is eat and drink. And they always have food out, and plenty of alcohol. So in the past I have often spent my time drinking and drinking again, occasionally chatting with someone who decides to be nice to me, and maybe dancing if I finally get drunk enough not to care that I have no clue what I'm doing.

No, that's not fair. The people at these parties are genuinely nice to me. Even the ones that I know the least smile and wave, and their eyes show recognition; others remember my name even when I've forgotten theirs. They recognize me, and even seem happy enough to see me.

It's my problem. I don't know what to say. I don't know how to interact. These people are all friendly and willing to interact with me in whatever constitutes "a normal way." It's my problem that I have no idea what that means, or how to do it.

This evening's party was scheduled to run from 6:00 pm to midnight. I arrived somewhere around 7:00 pm, I think. I chatted aimlessly with a couple of people, and drank four or five glasses of sake. (Jack had just come home from a trip overseas, and had brought a lot of sake with him.) I was the only one there without a Halloween costume, but Jill cleverly told someone else that I was dressed as a sociopath -- you know, they always look so normal! I thought that was pretty clever. (And in fact I wondered if she had been talking to Marie, but I managed to stop myself from asking.) And then, when no-one was looking, I snuck quietly out their back door and back to my apartment. I was home by 8:15. In fact I was all ready for bed before I decided to write this. But I'm going to bed right after. 

It's times like this that remind me how isolated I really am. And it's a depressing thing to remember. Oh well. Tomorrow is Halloween, and I'll be driving to visit my mom. That will be nice.

Time for bed. Maybe I can forget all this for a few hours while I'm asleep.

    

The perils of punditry

There's a new writer that I've started following on the Internet — a man named John Michael Greer. I don't always agree with him, but he's interesting and intelligent. These days he blogs here and here (and has an earlier blog archived here). Also, he has a regular group of people who follow his posts, and who comment about them afterwards. The discussions that arise in the comments are wide-ranging, and add a lot of depth to the posts themselves. This is the kind of engagement that bloggers dream of and long for; and except for a few years in the very early history of this blog (when I was lucky enough to be part of a real — if much smaller — online community) it's something that I, for example, have never had. I try hard not to sound envious when I say this, but you probably know better.

But about a month ago, Greer published a post that made me see in an instant that there are real dangers to being an Internet pundit — to writing so much, so regularly, for so many people. The danger is this: part of what it takes to be a successful pundit is that you are usually right. You are either smarter or bolder than the other posters around you — or both, of course — and so the things you say are usually borne out by reality. This means as a corollary that when someone disagrees with you, usually it's for one of two reasons: either he is wrong, or he doesn't understand you correctly. 

What's bad about with this? you ask. Isn't this the position every Internet blogger wants to be in? Yes of course it is. But the danger is that, if you ever are wrong, you won't see it. And when someone calls you out, you'll assume — based on all that previous experience — that either he's the one that's wrong or else he just didn't understand you.

Greer's post — the one I'm thinking of — is here. The gist is that Greer took issue with another author, a man named Paul Kingsnorth, who had posted an article which (according to Greer) included a number of fundamental errors on a subject close to Greer's heart and expertise. What's more, Greer was sure that Kingsnorth actually knew better — that Kingsnorth's errors were made in bad faith, or that they were deliberate lies. So Greer wrote a post calling out Kingsnorth's false statements. So far this sounds like a hundred other Internet disagreements, and hardly one that would reveal any deeper truths.

Two facts emerged in the later discussion of the post which changed the story. First, it turned out that Kingsnorth himself is a regular reader of Greer's blog, so he joined in the comments to insist, "That's not what I said."  Second, it turned out that Kingsnorth's article in question had been hidden behind a paywall, so Greer never read the original article before writing his; what he'd read was a summary prepared by a third party (a man named Rod Dreher) who really wanted to make points of his own and just referenced Kingsnorth to support some of them. (Since that time, Kingsnorth took this article out from behind the paywall, so anyone can read it. But it is one of a series, and the other articles in the series are still behind the paywall.)

At that point, in light of the new information, the obvious thing for Greer to have done would have been to say, "Oops. Sorry about that. Guess I was wrong." And if he'd changed just a couple of sentences, he probably could have left the rest of the essay in place as-is: all he would have had to do would be to replace, "Paul Kingsnorth is wrong because" with "An unwary reader might walk away thinking that Paul Kingsnorth means XYZ; but this oversimplified opinion is wrong because." It would have been a purely cosmetic change, and would have left all the important points of Greer's post intact. After all, the important part isn't that this or that individual human being is wrong; the important part has to be about the facts of the matter at hand. A graceful apology, a little humor at his own expense, and a trivial rewrite of a couple of introductory sentences could have extricated Greer from this situation smoothly and cleanly.

And that is exactly what he did not do. Instead, Greer doubled down: either Kingsnorth didn't understand my article or else he's just wrong, because as I already explained …. Several times in the after-post discussion, Greer expressed some version of this; and each time, Kingsnorth replied, No, that's not what I said. Finally, Greer just stopped replying to him. He engaged with everyone else, but treated Kingsnorth as if the latter were no longer there.

It sounds like I'm criticizing Greer, and in one small, unimportant sense I suppose I am. But not really. I'm a new reader, but already I've read him enough to realize that most of the time — the vast majority of the time, in fact — if some commenter disagrees with Greer, the commenter is the one who's wrong. Greer really is very smart, and his approach to the world is individual enough that he sees things the rest of us don't see. That's why I enjoy reading him. The only problem is, if 99% of the disagreements you have with online commenters are caused by the commenter not understanding you or not understanding the phenomena you describe, it becomes really hard to shift gears for that 1% of cases where you are the one who's wrong … or even to recognize that one of those cases has snuck up on you. 

Maybe I should be grateful that I'm not famous, huh? Maybe it keeps me modest? Or maybe it means I have even less practice fielding disagreements. Anyway, there's a risk to being an Internet pundit.