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.

     

"Die, damn you!"

Last week I was on a video call with Marie. She was talking about the latest news from the COVID-19 pandemic. In among other bits of information, she mentioned that the sharpest recent increases in the death rate were (apparently) all in counties that had voted for Donald Trump in the last couple of elections.

And she grinned a great big, wide, satisfied grin. Which -- for just a moment -- scared the shit out of me.

I pointed out to her that she was grinning. Her only remark was that she guessed she had better not mention this factoid to any of those family members who disagree with her politically, or at any rate not if she's on a video call with them. She wasn't horrified or alarmed. In fact she took the news quite calmly.

Why did she grin? One possibility is that she was glad at the thought of her opponents dropping dead. But there's actually another that I think more likely, based on the other things she was saying. The way she told the story -- I have taken no steps to confirm any of this -- the counties with the highest death rates were mostly those that had rejected the imposition of strict mask and vaccination mandates. And of course there's a high correlation between the counties that rejected strict mandates and the counties that voted for Mr. Trump. So I actually think Marie's glee was the glee of an intense, young grade-school student who just got the right answer when all the bigger kids got it wrong. I think her grin was supposed to say, "My friends and I did what the teacher told us to do, and we're all alive. But you didn't listen and insisted on doing your own thing, and now you're all dying. Now do you see that we were right all along?"

Hermione Granger morphs into Madame Defarge.

There is something terrifying about the Need To Be Right.

  

"Good night John-Boy, … Debbie, … Mattie …."

This week Debbie bought a new house.

She won't move for a while. The current owners don't want to have to leave till November. That's fine with Debbie because she's still waiting for her mom's house to sell so she'll have the money. (You remember that her mom died a couple months ago.)

But wait, doesn't Debbie already have a house? Doesn't she, in fact, own a house that she herself described as "the nicest place she has ever lived as an adult"? What gives?

Well, you know that her daughter Mattie lives in the next town over -- Mattie and her husband and two little boys. (That's the whole reason Debbie is living where she's living.) She regularly drives over to spend time with them, helping out in a grandmotherly way when Mattie and her husband are overburdened. You also know that Mattie and her husband don't make much money, and live very frugally. So Debbie and Mattie put their heads together and decided it would make the most sense to buy a big house where they could all live together. Debbie could help raise the boys, Mattie and her husband could stop paying rent, and when Debbie gets actually old (she's 67 this year, and clearly not yet "old" by this definition), Mattie and her husband could help her out and take care of her. 

Wait a minute -- suppose I want to come visit? How will that work? Debbie figures she'll put a sofa-bed in her bedroom along with her regular bed; then any guest "who is like family" can sleep there. For someone who is less close, she guesses they can figure something else out. I think I'm probably in the first category.

OK, OK, so if we suppose that the question of my visits has been handled, what then? It's interesting. In principle I think it is a great idea. When my father was a kid his grandmother lived with them, and he loved it. And I can personally vouch that parenthood is too big a job for two adults: having live-in help is a great idea.

But at the same time I can never imagine doing the same thing with either of my boys. And I am trying to understand why not.

• Partly, I value my own solitude too much. This will become a problem when I get old and frail and brittle, but I am assiduously not thinking about that right now. (That always works, right?)
• Partly there are two of them, … so in the event that they both start families, which one should I stay with?
• And partly I just assume that neither one of them wants to see that much of me. Didn't they get pretty well sick of me during all those years they were growing up? Sure, we get along fine now, but I assume that's just because we see each other only in small doses. 

Of course, I assume that about most people, really -- I mean, I assume that they can tolerate me best when there are strict boundaries and limited exposure. And, well, OK … I guess strictly speaking I know that Marie wants to marry me or live with me permanently, but I figure she just doesn't know her own desires well enough because she hasn't been married before: I keep telling her that after a few years the bloom will fade and she'll get sick of me. Also I know that Son 1 is living with Wife right now, but I'm pretty sure that's just because of straight-up emotional blackmail on her part. If anything, surely that experience will leave him sufficiently disgusted that there would be no prayer of his ever wanting to do it again.

It's strange that I can think this is such a good idea in the abstract, and yet it feels odd when Debbie does it and I find it unthinkable that I myself ever would. Maybe this makes me a flawed person … I mean, more flawed than we already knew I am. I just don't know.

      

Sociopath postscript

Well, our conversation (following on from here) was something of an anticlimax. I did not raise any of the relationship-shaking issues, but mostly let her talk. I did explain that if she were determined to see the whole topic like a war, then it really made more sense to treat this engagement as an immaterial skirmish rather than anything bigger. For her part, she said (while trying to smile) that at least she hadn't kept her upset a secret but had let me know right away … a sign that she had learned from when I mentioned that I have a problem with her habit of keeping issues bottled up inside her without any word of warning.

I also mentioned as a casual observation that she and I almost never discuss politics, but didn't bother to explain why not. There's time for all that later.

And then after a while we discussed trivial shit: things like what medical insurance plan should she select during her company's Open Enrollment period? I guess the rest can wait.

     

So now I'm a sociopath?

The last couple of days I've had the most interesting exchange with Marie. It started Friday, when she emailed me briefly to tell me how one of her relatives was weathering Hurricane Ida, and to mention (seemingly in passing) her dismay at the Supreme Court's recent decision to take no action in the case of Whole Woman's Health et al. v. Austin Reeve Jackson, Judge, et al. I didn't know anything about the decision so I googled it and read a couple of articles. Based on what those articles told me, I replied (later the same day) that it looked to me like this "decision not to decide" was at most very temporary, and that bigger cases (substantive ones, not to be decided on procedural details) appeared to be on the horizon. What I meant by this was that, if she wanted to engage in any kind of political activity around the issue, she would be well advised to keep her powder safe and dry for a time that it could make a difference. 

What I got back from her late that evening was an impassioned screed that started, "You fucking sociopath!" She went on to remind me that I'm not a woman [err, … yes, that's true, was there any doubt of this?], to express gratitude that none of my children had been daughters, to explain that everyone else "in the universe" is currently "register[ing] excruciating agony" over this topic, and to excoriate me for not "giv[ing] a FUCK for anything that makes other people's, REAL OTHER PEOPLE's, lives utterly, HORRIFIC[ALLY], WORSE." Then after adding a little more juicy substantiating detail, together with some odd predictions for the local politics in my own state, she concluded:

You don't care, do you?, so long as you imagine you cannot be affected.

Go fuck yourself.

Seriously.

Fuck yourself again and again.

Fuck yourself in every orifice.

And then again.

This email was followed by a one-sentence email later the same evening in which she apologized for swearing at me.

Wow. 

Kind of exciting, actually. I don't remember anyone ever accusing me of sociopathy before.

I waited a while before replying. Saturday, around noon, I asked her to double-check the articles I had read (and had previously linked for her), so she could tell me whether there was anything in my email that I had not lifted directly from them? Also, did she think those journalists were sociopaths too?

She replied in a longer email that mostly avoided capital letters, in which she explained why any decent human being would feel as helplessly, hopelessly distraught as she did right now, before closing with:

But [the word] sociopath was ill-chosen.  You struck me as exhibiting a lack of empathy marked enough to feel to me like a slap in the face, but you certainly don't exhibit tendencies either to personal irresponsibility or to violence. 

So sorry about that term as well.

Love, Marie

Does this mean I'm not a sociopath after all? Inquiring minds want to know.

Also I have to wonder, where does this leave us as a couple? Does it make a difference? Do we go on as before? Or do we have to do some kind of work around this? I know that in general I avoid discussing politics with Marie, because I know that she gets crazily over-invested in it. But in this case I wasn't even expressing an opinion on the issue that was different from hers. (To the extent that my political opinions are different from hers – on this issue or any other – I am even more careful to keep my silence.) But clearly avoiding disagreement isn't good enough. Even if I am "not-disagreeing," apparently I have to use exactly the right words to express that "non-disagreement" in. This could get old fast. 

And of course it's not even remotely news. (For example, compare this post here, which dates from almost exactly four years ago.) That's why I don't talk politics with Marie. But I thought my remarks were totally innocuous, so I was taken by surprise.

Let me clarify that I'm not hurt, or offended, or insulted. I didn't take her outburst seriously enough for any of that. After raising two children up from birth, and after living through Wife and D as romantic partners, I'm used to handling infantile temper tantrums. (Go ahead – tell me I'm being condescending. You're not wrong.)

But I was taken by surprise. And at this point I may have to explain to her that this is part of the reason I am not about to trust her emotionally. Of course that doesn't stop us from fucking. But will she really be happy in the long term with a relationship where we fuck whenever we can travel, but where I keep large parts of myself off-limits and out-of-bounds? Where we can't even discuss the daily news, for Pete's sake, because usually the daily news involves politics and I won't discuss politics with her? What kind of relationship is that?

We have a regular, weekly phone call about an hour from now. Let's see how it goes.

    

Mattie, or, Movie meme 8

I've figured out what name to use for Debbie's daughter, if I ever have to write about her again. (The most recent time was here, for example.) I'm going to call her Mattie, after Mattie Ross in the movie "True Grit." 

Partly there is a physical similarity between Debbie's real daughter and Mattie as played by Hailee Steinfeld. But most of the similarity is in attitude. I am thinking specifically of Mattie's absolute conviction, rock-bottomed and copper sheathed, of her own righteousness – and of the determination that it gives her.

Maybe this is only part of the story with Debbie's daughter, but it's the part I see.