stress and the human machine
Today I feel like blogging about something that takes a slight detour from my typical subject matter.
I don’t feel like writing inane jokes about my legacy (although a virtual orchestra would be pretty sweet), I don’t feel like discussing some awesome computing problem that I’ve played with, I won’t go on about politics, or driving, or modifying minivans, or how awesome I am.
Today I’m going to talk about my shortcomings. I’m going to get things off my chest that just need to be said. I’m going to write this post not because I want to, but because I have to.
In a very logical sense, every machine has a breaking point. In software, we call this “scale”, eventually a website (like Tumblr, for instance) will come to a grinding halt because the underlying machines have either failed, or just can’t handle the sheer volume of what they’re being asked to do.
In a real machine, such as a car, it’s usually referred to as stress: you can only stress a part so far before it breaks. Many cars trys to prevent you from reaching their maximums, but in automotive sports: cars are routinely pushed to their breaking points. It’s not uncommon for them to practically ruin an engine, or run through a set of brakes, or blow a tire, in the course of one race. This is stuff that usually takes the average driver months to do, and racecar drivers can do it in an hour or two.
Not unsurprisingly, the human machine also has a concept of “stress”, although it’s very hard to define just how much stress the human body can take. Sure there’s physical stressors, and we can generally determine what person’s maximums are by observing them doing various physical activities.
But mental stress, well, that’s a different ballgame. It’s really challenging to determine what will “break” a person. Some people are trained to withstand torture: tactics that exist solely to reach a person’s maximum stress in a minimal amount of time. Other people break down when they get a bad grade on a homework assignment.
It’s so incredibly difficult to judge mental stress that a lot of us don’t even realize how much we’re stressing our bodies until we just break… and when we do break, we do it in all kinds of crazy and insane ways. Some people go on a murderous rampage. Other’s scream into a pillow. Some people die because of too much stress, other’s begin to cry, and other’s still have a complete mental breakdown and require intense care from trained professionals to recover.
When I break, I like to write. The thing is, writing is a really great tool for dealing with stress. Writing requires structure, and careful planning. Writing forces you to not only acknowledge your stress, but to give it appropriate structure. In a way, writing can become a powerful tool to organize your stress, analyze your stress, and eventually deal with it.
I would argue I haven’t broken yet, but I feel that my shortcomings pose several serious threats to my continued mental healthfulness, and my continued happiness.
The first shortcoming is one that, not coincidentally, has eaten away at me for the longest time: I’m quite shy.
You may not think that’s a difficult thing to admit, but believe me, those three words are quit difficult to type.
Also those of you that know me are probably saying What the fuck? Robbie’s not shy!
For me to explain my shyness, I must introduce a new character to my blog: Y’all.
Y’all is a pretty versatile guy/gal. (S)he refers to my friends that I know in real life.
The reason Y’all doesn’t think I’m a shy fellow is simply because: I know Y’all pretty well.
I know what Y’all likes, what he doesn’t like. I can generally form a conversation with Y’all in my head pretty easily. I know which of our interests intersect, and from that I can converse in pretty good detail with Y’all.
Y’all can hold a (pseudo)-intellectual conversation with me, and we generally share a few inside jokes.
The thing is, it takes a long time for an acquaintance to become “Y’all.”
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always had trouble with conversations. You see, I struggle to keep an immense grip on conversation in my head. I can’t process conversation all that fast unless I know damn well what I’m talking about.
So the more I know about someone, the easier it is for me to create an internal monologue with that person, and the easier it is for me to converse with that person.
If I don’t know someone, I pretty much find myself unable to create even the most idle of chatter. Small talk (not the programming language) pretty much escapes me.
I survived my public speaking classes in high school and college with a pretty simple technique: Pick a topic I know really well. Really. Fucking. Well.
I generally pick a topic that, if given the option, I could honestly discuss for hours.
I tend to go a bit over budget on time, but I never struggle for content, ever.
Also, since I pick a topic I already know very well, I can do the speech with little-to-no preparation.
Real life conversation tends to go in directions I know nothing about.
Ask me to justify my choice of Linux distro, and I’ll talk to you for hours.
Ask me to justify my choice in pants, and I’ll give you a kind of blank stare, and shuffle my feet a bit as I try to come up with an answer (or a way to change the subject.)
In the end, the way I process conversation is… well, what I’d consider “not normal.”
I’m not sure what normal really is, in the context of conversation, but I feel pretty confident that my mode of thought isn’t the standard definition.
ANALOGIES ARE LIKE BANANAS. PERFECT IN EVERY WAY UNTIL YOU LOOK AT THEM. What you are about to read is my best attempt at articulating the way my mind works, I do apologize if it gets convoluted, or if the analogy is less than stellar.
Imagine a forking path, if you will. When I talk to someone, my head instantly forks anywhere from tens to hundreds of paths, in a split second. Each fork is basically a verbal volley, you say something, and I come up with a response to it.
So in my mind, I’m trying to play out how this conversation could go. I might play it out 1 or 2 steps, or I might play it out 10 or 20 steps.
The reason I do this is because it’s really hard for me to talk on the spot. I need a fairly gratuitous amount of time to process your input, and give my output. The problem is, as I quickly learned, the average person considers this speech lag to be an “awkward pause.” - It turns out people don’t like awkward pauses. It makes the other person feel as though I’m disconnected, disengaged, or otherwise disinterested in the conversation.
To cope with that fact, my mind came up with this forking strategy. I think several steps ahead so I can have a response ready, and I don’t have to pause unnecessarily.
The thing is, while this forking strategy works incredibly well, it requires something that, from what I gather, “normal” conversation does not: a lot of background data on the person. I need to know how you think.
Think of any strategy game: the best strategy is knowing how your opponent is going to move, before they make the move. — In order to play a conversation out in my mind, I need to know how the other half of the conversation is going to go.
I can’t do this unless I already know the person, and I have to know them very well.
So, to those of you that know me, my conversation seems fluid, and natural. But I assure you it’s mentally draining. Socializing is not an easy feat for me, because it requires so much mental effort on my part to maintain a conversation. I’m not just thinking of my half of the conversation, I’m speaking for both of us, and I’m doing it 10s to 100s of times, for every sentence I say.
To summarize, it’s really hard for me to talk to new people because I just… I can’t be them. I can’t get in their shoes, I know nothing about them. Take the 10s to 100s of forks I make, and up that number to about 10s of thousands, or 100s of thousands. I’m sure the human brain could do it, but I haven’t gotten to that level yet, and perhaps I never will.
Since I can’t anticipate the conversation, I tend to just avoid conversation with new people altogether.
Really the only way I can meet a new person is when I have other friends around that can smooth out the lulls in the conversation. Then I’m talking to my friends, and the new person is an innocent bystander in this conversation. I get to learn about them, and they get to learn about me, but it’s not a one-to-one conversation. We’re learning about each others interests through the proxy of our mutual friends.
So - I’m not shy per say, I’m just really bad at holding conversations with people I know nothing about. In turn this has made me shy because I try to avoid meeting new people [by myself] so that I don’t have to deal with the mental stress that comes with socializing.
This in turn has led to me skipping out on parties [with unfamiliar guests.]
It’s also led to lots, and lots of internal conflict about girl troubles.
You see, the accepted practice is: you walk up to a hot girl, small talk with hot girl, get hot girls digits, and go from there.
I can’t do that. The only way I could ever idly chat with the infamous hot girl is if I became great friends with her first. This typically leads to the dreaded “friend zone” though, because it turns out most females, once they’ve befriended someone, do not want want to leave the comforts of that friendship.
In short, I wish the accepted practice was: friends introduce you to hotgirl. You have one or two nights of idle chat with the hot girl [with the accompaniment of your friends], then you befriend hot girl, and then you get to date hot girl.
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So, in a nutshell, that is my first shortcoming. My shyness which has come about due to my own social shortcomings.
This post actually ended up being a lot longer than I wanted it to be, so I think I’ll leave it at this for now.
I may amend this post, or I may just create a series of these posts.
There are other areas in my life which are getting to me, but this is by far the most personal shortcoming, and to be honest, it seems to be the most insurmountable shortcoming.
Feel free to comment, either by using Tumblr’s fairly limited commenting mechanism, or feel free to send me an e-mail. Whatever floats your boat.
There are several emails I check… the one most likely to get read, though, is still:
applefreak07 [at] gmail dot com. I check this daily, if not hourly.
The new one I’m trying to phase in is:
drbawb [at] fatalsyntax dot com. I check this one daily, because it’s hardly used at all yet.
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P.S: Just clicked Preview. Wow. You know how I said “This post actually ended up being a lot longer than I wanted it to be”, with italics and everything?
This is way longer than I had planned. With bold, and underline, so you know I’m being super cereal.
Sorry for the long read :I
