Tag: antisocial

  • it takes a village

    Today we left the house.

    *shudder*

    We were driving along and passed a street called Friendship Village Rd.

    kid: Do you want to go to Friendship Village?
    me: No.
    kid: But it sounds nice and friendly.
    me: I want to visit Mind Your Own Fucking Business Village.
    kid: THAT really wouldn’t be a “village” then.
    me: Mind your own business.
    kid: *silence*

  • Anyone have a taser I can borrow?

    Me: teens are invading my house
    Me: well at least one is
    Me: and that feels a lot like way too many
    Friend: ew
    Me: it also means I have to put on pants
    Friend: if you stop buying pants
    Friend: eventually
    Friend: you won’t have any to put on
    Me: and then I could refuse to allow the teens over, for their sake, and legal reasons
    Me: teen is IMing me telling me he is heading over soon
    Me: guess he did not forget
    Friend: wth, you let BOYS in???
    Me: well
    Me: they like video games
    Me: and make less noise
    Me: and they talk about clothes and boys less
    Me: they smell worse…
    Me: and eat more
    Me: it is a toss up
    Me: woohoo
    Me: I put on pants – and now, not only am I less embarrassing to my daughter for when her friend arrives.
    Me: I found $25 cash in the pocket!
    Friend: hmm
    Friend: maybe I should put pants on
    Me: these are like the best pants ever
    Friend: really
    Me: of course the teen instigator of this pant wearing
    Me: will eat more than $25 worth of food
    Friend: don’t feed him
    Friend: they just keep coming back if you feed them
    Me: don’t you think he might become dangerous if I don’t feed him?
    Friend: keep a taser handy


  • I am not a social caterpillar.

    I keep trying to write something about my weekend, but I am still too tired to manage. It kept trying to turn into some large thing about introversion, which wasn’t what I actually wanted to say about the weekend.

    I am antisocial. I am an introvert. These two things are not the same. I have always been an introvert and have no reason at all to expect this to change. There have been studies which show differing brain activities between introverts and extroverts. This lends credence to the fact I was simply born this way, and will continue to be this way, short of a serious head trauma.

    Main Entry: an·ti·so·cial
    Function: adjective
    Date: 1797
    1 : averse to the society of others : UNSOCIABLE
    2 : hostile or harmful to organized society; especially : being or marked by behavior deviating sharply from the social norm

    Main Entry: un·so·cia·ble
    Function: adjective
    Date: 1600
    1 : having or showing a disinclination for social activity : SOLITARY, RESERVED

    Main Entry: dis·in·cli·na·tion
    Function: noun
    Date: 1647
    : a preference for avoiding something : slight aversion

    Today I will just look at antisocial in the first definition provided by Merriam-Webster. I am not always unsociable. This is a learned behavior, and is affected by my moods. There have been times in my life when I was not antisocial, there are times when I am less and more social. Being social always drains my energy reserves and I always need time to recuperate. However sometimes I am much more open to that, and sometimes I am even less enamored of social interaction than I am right now. I know many introverts who are much more social than I am, either by choice or simple function of their chosen career or significant other.

    There are many factors that play into my general antisocial nature, but probably the biggest one is that I just don’t tend to like people. Liking somebody is a big deal to me. This is not the same as hating everybody. I am not sitting here feeling intense hatred for everybody I do not actively like. I do not have enough energy to be bothered with that. Most people fall into the vast sea of indifference. If forced to look directly at them I might briefly feel something else toward them, but it is of little consequence.

    Admittedly this likely has ties in to my introversion. I have a friend who is an extrovert. Her assessment of people, if we speak specifically about them, is very similar to mine. She dislikes the same sort of behaviors and is very easily annoyed or disgusted by things. However her overall view of people, while not actually more optimistic than mine, is warmer than mine. I am convinced that this is because being around all those people, who are essentially in her sea of indifference, still gives her an energy boost.

    I know another extrovert who is so much an extrovert I actually believe it is pathological. It is basically impossible for him to not like somebody, no matter how much of a real and true complete asshole they are, because he simply gets such a big ass high from being around people. Literally the more the merrier for him. So much so, that he drives away people that are supposedly closer to him because he invites anybody he can think of to anything, even people that ones close to him have real reasons for disliking. He can sit through a party and do nothing but have a fight with somebody, and he is having fun. It is almost impossible for him to grasp that maybe the person he is fighting with is not enjoying it just as much. He feels like all human interaction is good. This is not a conceptual thing, it is real and physical for him.

    Since being around people drains me, I prefer to do it, either for work, or with people I really like, and I don’t seek out a lot of interaction with the masses. I know introverts who like a lot more people than I do, it is not solely a symptom of introversion, not at all. I also happen to have a very long and detailed memory. I don’t make an effort to hold a grudge, I just can’t help it. I still feel exactly how I felt when whatever happened, happened. I can hear the sounds. I can smell the smells. I probably know exactly what I was wearing. Plus the older I get the less tolerance I have.

    Now I find myself tempted into launching into something about friends, but I am way too tired for that as well. I also happen to be antisocial according the the second definition provided by Merriam-Webster, but that is also a post for another day. Today I am just going to stick with this.

  • so it’s sort of social… demented and sad, but social

    I really hate MySpace. Even before I factor in the ways in which it is used, and many of the people using it, I just hate how incredibly ugly and broken it is. It is one thing to give the masses a way to quickly customize a page and another thing to give them options which create audio and visual assault on any person who is unfortunate enough to click a link. I find it foul and hideous and I am saddened by just how popular it is. I even signed up for an account to try to check it out from the inside and see if it was possible to create something more functional with their tools, because, if I could it might be a good level of promotion for the short films I produce. From the inside I found it a total mess as well.

    Even if I ignore the ugly, I am very turned off by the way in which it is used. It doesn’t just give me a bad feeling about the site, the popularity gives me a bad feeling about society – as if I needed extra fodder.

    Because of that, I found this article about Mixi, a Japanese online networking site, and MySpace trying to break into the Japanese market to be very interesting.

    I wonder if I would like Mixi better, if I could score an invite and… you know… read Japanese. Would social networking sites hold more interest for me for actual social networking, if they reflected a different cultural tone? It would be amusing if it turned out that I wasn’t actually anti-social, so much as just living in the wrong society.