I remember being capable of profound boredom in childhood, boredom of an intensity I’ve never felt since puberty or thereabouts.  There were a lot of waiting periods of an hour or more – waiting for parents to pick me up from places, enforced naptime when I wasn’t tired, etc. – in which I couldn’t do anything, and while I would sometimes daydream or make-believe during these, they were still painful in a way I find it hard to explain now.

I don’t think I was unhappy because I was anticipating something good.  This happened rarely when I had free rein of my house, though I can’t remember why.  I had a Game Boy I loved, so maybe I was kind of addicted to it?  Or maybe there was something deeper to the boredom.

I remember daycare being downright purgatorial – every day there seemed to last a year, endless empty waiting in a (metaphorically) colorless, lifeless realm.  (This feeling persisted across a number of daycare places, none of which were objectively bad as such things go, and even when my best friend was there with me – he was more social than me so I had less time with him than I wanted – or when they had a computer I could play games on.)  I’d bring a book and try to make it tolerable that way, but a lot of times I brought some book I’d never read and end up not liking it.

I don’t think it was separation from my parents, either – I don’t remember consciously feeling bad about that, and also I didn’t have this feeling much at school, unless I was forced to wait there with nothing at all to do.  I think I had it sometimes when my parents were around, too.

???

Does anyone else obsess over the idea that they have become mentally worse – less motivated, less energetic, more anhedonic – than their former selves?

I have a habit of assuming this decline is just a known fact, and then thinking a lot about what has changed and how I could reverse those changes.  But in the rare cases when I reflect on it, I realize I have no idea if I’ve declined at all.  I might be comparing the present baseline to highlights of the past, for instance.  Looking around on my computer storage, I can find occasional notes on my mood and motivation from various points in the past (up to 6-7 years ago), but these were all motivated by this same worry, which apparently goes back a ways.

It’s also possible that I really have declined in these ways, but that I’m choosing such a pivotal set of ages (roughly 17-22) for my reference points that I ought to expect decline.

I hardly ever get properly angry.  Probably way out in the lower end of the bell curve on that one.  And while I do sometimes hate specific people, it never feels quite like the powerful force that “hate” is made out to be.  It’s time-limited, something that appears after a specific incident and naturally fades without any conscious effort, like a minor wound.

But this is not to say that I am a sunny, uncritical soul.  I have plenty of negative opinions (most left unvoiced) about many people and many behaviors.  And there’s an associated emotion.  But it isn’t really anger at a person – I would call it disappointment at the world.

For some reason, my mind’s natural approach to these things is to see the bad behavior as though it is a flaw in a work of art.  People who hate The Big Bang Theory don’t hate Sheldon Cooper (who doesn’t exist outside the TV and cannot affect your life), they hate the people who wrote Sheldon Cooper.  It’s like that.  What always stands out to me about bad behavior is the banality of it, the reiteration of tired “tropes,” the way it produces situations which everyone – including the perpetrator – would roll their eyes at if they had a little distance.

Not all bad behavior is like this.  Some people relish the bad situations they create, without reservations.  And some things in human life really are difficult, fundamentally so – in which case the failures are (Greek-)tragic.  And yet so many failures are – when viewed from this “artistic” perspective – not tragic but comedic, sitcomedic, repetitive, uninspired and uninspiring, not even excitingly awful.

We’ve all seen this episode before, or we might as well have, they’re repeating material from Season 4, which was cliched even when it came out.  Even the perpetrators, the designated villains of this arc, are stuck in looping sitcom hell with the rest of us.  I wish they could be freed, too.

Besides “disappointing,” the word that most often comes to mind is “tedious.”

Disappointment at the world is, perhaps, an intuitive attempt to solve the deep problems involved in assigning blame.  People who damage others are often damaged themselves; every villain has an origin story (they’re making a third reboot next year, we can see the origin story in theaters again, aren’t you excited?).

Two families are having a feud: at some semi-regular interval, someone from one family will murder someone from the other, in revenge for the last such murder.  If we place the responsibility in the hands of the family most recent victimized, and the blame upon the most recent aggressor, then things will keep flipping back and forth.  This is stupid, and also unfair.  “Why should I have to be the bigger man now, when instead of being the bigger man, he just shot my brother?”  This person has a point.  And so the thing I resent is not the latest aggressor, but in some distributed way, the whole cycle.  Someone should stop this – no, not necessarily you, perhaps it would even take multiple people, but somehow, through little exertions of human will, the cycle should be broken.

I use it because it provides a familiar example of a “cycle,” but the feud may be misleading in other respects.  Too dramatic, too many opportunities for real and deep feeling, too difficult to solve.  Imagine the same cyclical structure, but smaller, pettier, on the scale of little choices that are easy to resist if one consciously tries, everywhere acting to make the world more vacuous, more predictably bad, more like the bad old joke which we are all trying to escape in the first place.  Anger or hatred would dignify the joke too much, would imply a suspension of disbelief that I reserve for better writers.  What feels appropriate is disappointment.

It was supposed to be better than this – bad in a better way, at least.

If there is some sort of nuclear apocalypse that still leaves remnants of civilization, and I’m still alive, I imagine I’d start looking to FFVI for consolation and inspiration, like a holy text.  It’s the only work of fiction I can think of that spans an event like that, spends a fair amount of time on both sides, and portrays the post-apocalyptic world in a hopeful light

(The Gone-Away World technically fits those criteria, but was more surreal and cartoonish, harder to connect to real life)

When I was writing the previous post and casting about for vivid, unpleasant childhood memories, the first one that popped into my head was having to have a one-on-one meeting with a middle school teacher I hated because I was in trouble with her for some reason.  (The English/history teacher from this post.)

I remember walking with her to her classroom, dreading the impending moment when we’d step through the door.  And I specifically remember that, while we were walking, she said something in kind of a goofy or mildly clever way (not anything mean, or about me), and then a few moments later, she said “that was a joke.  It’s okay to laugh.”  In a reproachful tone, not a reassuring one, like I was either impugning her sense of humor, or displaying a shameful social defectiveness, or both.  (It must have been obvious that I was very anxious and not in a state to laugh even if she had said something I found funny, which she hadn’t.)

That’s just such a perfect moment, you know?  It’s not like I’m mentioning this because I’m still bitter about it.  I’m just appreciative of her technique.  As awful teachers went, she had style.

Friendly reminder

puellaeternus:

“In a healthy relationship, your partner hears you out if you’re upset, and their goal is to avoid upsetting you in the future, not to debate whether you should have been upset in the first place.”

I mean … unless the “you” in this sentence is upset that the “partner” is exercising basic human autonomy, or that sort of thing.  Then it’s not a healthy relationship.

(via cccccppppp-deactivated20181228)

This has occurred to me independently several times, so I figure I might as well write it down.

Anytime there is a social rule, some people will try to find ways to exploit it – to do bad things in ways that are technically rule-compliant, or to wield the rules against the innocent by taking advantage of subtle flaws in the rule’s formulation.

The solution to this is not to make even better rules.  Yes, certain rules are especially bad and ought to be replaced by less exploitable ones.  But any rule you bind yourself to will be exploited.

What you always need, in addition to good rules, is a fail-safe button.  You need to give yourself the right to say “hey, this looks like manipulative bullshit” or “that person sure is an asshole” – specifically, the right to do this “extra-legally,” without caring about the rules.  You need a “no, that’s just wrong, even though some similar things are right” option.

Of course, this option can itself be abused, particularly if it is used freely and unthinkingly.  If the rules hold only until the moment you don’t like their consequences, then the rules don’t really hold at all.

But if someone does that, you can take the same option yourself: “yeah, I said you should have this option, but using it like that is wrong.”  Because the option does not have specific rules (by construction), no one can use rules lawyering to take it away from you.  If someone uses “calling bullshit” for bad ends, you can just call bullshit on them.

This is not without downsides.  It means nothing is certain.  If you declare your right to press the failsafe button, no one can simply rely on you to follow the rules; they have to judge your character to know whether to trust you in any given case.  But there isn’t any real alternative to this.  Rules don’t save you from having to assess other people’s character; even if you know they will follow the letter of the law, you have to decide whether they will follow the spirit of it.

If everyone grokked everyone else perfectly, rules would not be necessary.  Rules help you coexist with strangers, with people you don’t know will grok you.  But don’t be afraid to insist that coexisting with you is more than just a matter of following the rules; that the latter are just a means for furthering the former.  Don’t be afraid to remind people that they are interacting with you, not with the rules, and that your judgments are ultimately your own, for them to take or leave.

Prompted by the old memories in that last post: does anyone else remember the special camaraderie of the school bus?  (I mean, among people who rode school buses at all)

In my own childhood and adolescence, the bus tended to create an artificial social group, where by necessity people hung out with other people they’d never hang out with by choice alone.  Cool/popular kids would converse with uncool/unpopular kids, just because there were a limited number of kids on the route, and the number who wanted to socialize while riding was even more limited.  Because the same kids rode the bus every day, there would be a well-defined group that clowned and bantered on the way, but this would be a group that would never have assembled at school, representing a broader range of the student population in every respect.

Creating an artificial clique containing cool/popular and uncool/popular kids did not suddenly erase the usual dynamics, and sometimes there was outright bullying or the like.  But often there wasn’t.  For me, after I went on Risperdal and lost touch with social life at school, the bus still provided a fulfilling social group, although one that only existed on the ride itself.  At school, I couldn’t even keep up with my nerd friends, once they were pubescent and reinventing themselves on the regular.  But on the bus, I was a recognized member of a stable social group, and was recognized as a fellow group member by people who were way too cool for my nerd friends.  (Characteristically, I didn’t think much about this divide at the time, although I did realize there was something special about “the bus” and looked forward to riding it.)