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scribal_goddessI'm either very philosophical or very lazy tonight, take your pick. In either case, I've spent most of my evening thinking about humanity, which is kind of a perilous proposition. Starting from the point at which I have to recognize that no other human being can ever fully understand my mental processes, just like I can't understand theirs, I've begun to wonder why, exactly, we define "normal" so narrowly. It could be an artifact of statistics, but I just don't understand why more people aren't faced every day with the idea that they aren't perfectly "normal" every day.(Very few people can be "normal" in all things: actually, the statistical probability of being average - say, within the very middle 10% of everything, intellect, athletic ability, creativity, etc., is probably a lot lower than being in the upper or lower 2% in any given category.)
That said, I'm still going to the school councilor, and still on the fence about whether or not it's going to work. Yup, guys, I'm talking about it in an unlocked post. Those who were just browsing have probably run off by now when they figured this post was going to be about feelings. According to the school councilor, I have social anxiety - not something you guys would have noticed, not being around me in real life. Supposedly that's interacting in a pretty complex way with my personality to start tanking my GPA since I have two math-related classes outside of my main major distribution, where I don't know people. Which, I get why the councilor thinks this - I really don't want to interact with a lot of my new class aquaintances, I do worry a lot that they'll think badly of me because they haven't known me as long as they've known each other, and I definitely stress over disappointing my professors. (That's one drawback to a small faculty-to-student ratio - start asking questions in class and the professors start relying on you for answers during lecture. And then wondering why you keep bombing the weekly quizzes.) At the same time, though, the thought struck me:
What if she's just profiling me, assuming that I must be socially inept somehow because I'm smart and tests have confirmed it? She doesn't have any information I didn't give her, but I had to explain to her why I'd gone to the school's councilor for learning disabilities first, which was because I knew the learning disabilities councilor from when I was a kid and my parents got my intelligence and a bunch of other things tested because they couldn't figure out why I didn't act like the other kids. I suppose that my parents had a good idea of what they were going to get, after I learned to read at three and my "c word" the third day of kindergarten was carotene, but I'm sure they wanted to know for sure, especially since I didn't get along with most of my new classmates. The funny thing is, I don't remember wanting to avoid classmates or being afraid of them when I was eight - I just didn't like boy bands or basketball or Disney Channel or Britney Spears. I liked bugs and mummies and Nancy Drew and National Geographic. At least the boys thought I was cool because I'd pick up worms and put them back where they belonged, in the grass. :)
Now? I still like bugs and mummies and National Geographic Magazine (the tv channel has started to loose some of my respect,) but I'm constantly aware that no matter how much I also like "normal" things, like computer games and music and Inception, people around me don't know how to deal with a girl who can identify the EKG of a rat's brain based on the shape, whose knowlege of physics contains absolutely nothing between basic Newtonian Laws and String Theory, (I'm working on that one, starting with astrophysics and physical chemistry - as it is, it's like eating a sandwich with the filling removed. I want to taste the flavors of quarks!), who only dances at weddings, has never had more alcohol than is in cough drops and who starts giggling at walls after two cans of mountain dew anyway, and who would rather have a Watson than a boyfriend, based on the fact that dashing about town for science is more fun than dating and that kissing tastes and feels like cold, wet chicken skin. I don't know how to deal with people who think that mummies are gross (or that they're basically zombies wrapped in toilet paper,) who spend their lives net and tabloid stalking celebrities, who don't know how to meet potential romances without being drunk or at least at a bar or a dance, and who contradict themselves and reinforce the double standards of society without realizing it. I don't know how to deal with people who don't vote because "union trouble," or "gay marriage," or "the national budget," are things they've decided don't affect them. I don't know how to narrow my feild of vision and not turn conversations to multiverse theory or the comic deaths of greek playwrights, or turtles or at least a good book. I mean, I can concentrate on a certain subject or a certain person, but as often as not I don't get results when I invite people into my world, which isn't exactly a small one. I've had to learn to be selective about who gets invited in the first place, because not everyone is safe. At best, people who aren't safe for me to care too much about are disappointing - they hang around for a while, and then they run away. Sometimes they give reasons - I'm too intense is usually what these things boil down to. They don't seem to realize that I don't have a medium setting for how much I care about a person. I'm missing the middle filling between aquaintance and cherished friend, so they have to make the jump at once, like electrons, to a different shell. There seem to be two types of people: those who can stand being focused on and those who can't. But the ones who can stand to be focused on are even harder to deal with than the ones who can't - sometimes they want to be the only one, and the only thing, and a few of them don't understand that I'm not a moon to orbit around them, that I'm my own person and am capable of focusing just as hard on a caterpillar or a drawing or a story.
That's the other reason I don't think I'll ever get married or have a boyfriend. I doubt anyone romantically interested in me would be able to tolerate me focusing on other people's brains to the extent that I do. I haven't the first clue of how to flirt, but seperate observers have wrongly pegged me as being in a relationship with each of my best friends, based on how much I focus on them. At the same time, though - I don't want to be alone, but you don't get to keep people, not when you're still in school, not when you have nothing to promise them. I want to go back to the days where a pinky swear meant trust and loyalty for as much as a child could understand of forever, but the thought that those days are forever shattered for me is almost too much for me to bear. I simply can't trust new people that much anymore. I know it's part of growing up, and that having some carefully shelved fear of humanity in general is a reasonable reaction to having been human and seen human beings for almost twenty one years now, but damn it if it doesn't make me feel alone.
Maybe that's why people choose to care less, and to not focus as hard or spread their net of caring so widely or love quite as strongly as I do. If they focus on parties and school drama and drinking and boyfriends and romance novels and stars, they'll keep putting more stuff in their brain and filling it up, distracting themselves from being alone. Or maybe that's just me - for all I know, all the people around me aren't looking ahead into the empty future and wondering if they'll be worth it. They could be living in the moment, or searching for someone to share that future with in the hopes that the uncertainties of life will shrink.
I'm graduating. Not soon, but soon enough that I can feel it looking over my shoulder. All my life I've assumed that most people I've met, besides family and the ones that I've known since I was an infant, won't stay a fixture in my life, but I've never been waiting to face a future where I was fairly certain that no one would be there with me. By the end of high school, I was just ready to escape the madness, because everyone told me that things would be better in college. I went with optimism - I figured life would fall into place when I picked a major, believed my mother when she said that I would "find the right guy," in college, thought that people would like me better in a place where half the population are "geeks." Instead it turns out that I'm beyond these people's definition of normal too.
Well, I shouldn't imply that it's everyone - I've found quite a few people who can stand to be focused on (and I've actually been able to collect them all in one room at the same time because they actually get along,) and have gotten a bit better at dealing with people who would prefer that I not focus on them, without ignoring them completely. I just don't know what to do when it's all over. It would be easier if I didn't need people quite so much, but asexual or not I'm not a machine. But if I'm having this much trouble on a college campus, where the vast majority of the population should be the kind of people I might want to get to know, how am I going to deal with the world after school, where the main avenues for meeting new people seem to be drinking and religions? I'm not too impressed with either.
It's not as if I can advertize in the papers or e-harmony for a live-in best friend.
Intellectual type asexual seeking platonic company. Must be willing to tolerate puns, have a strong gag reflex for the inappropriate lunchtime discussion of types of mummies and other instances of too much information of a scientific or archaeological nature, and agree to disagree at times on politics. A taste for mysteries is preferred, though no actual mysteries are likely to be solved. Interviewee in turn promises to keep musical efforts to a minimum, remain reasonably quiet during sleeping hours, refrain from spoiling books the applicant actually wishes to read, and share cooking and cleaning duties equitably.
I seem to have lost my original train of thought. Oh well - it's likely that you've forgotten it by now too, if you've made it to this point.
I really am okay, I'm just nervous about everything from this moment in time onwards. I don't like not having a reasonable idea of what's ahead.
That said, I'm still going to the school councilor, and still on the fence about whether or not it's going to work. Yup, guys, I'm talking about it in an unlocked post. Those who were just browsing have probably run off by now when they figured this post was going to be about feelings. According to the school councilor, I have social anxiety - not something you guys would have noticed, not being around me in real life. Supposedly that's interacting in a pretty complex way with my personality to start tanking my GPA since I have two math-related classes outside of my main major distribution, where I don't know people. Which, I get why the councilor thinks this - I really don't want to interact with a lot of my new class aquaintances, I do worry a lot that they'll think badly of me because they haven't known me as long as they've known each other, and I definitely stress over disappointing my professors. (That's one drawback to a small faculty-to-student ratio - start asking questions in class and the professors start relying on you for answers during lecture. And then wondering why you keep bombing the weekly quizzes.) At the same time, though, the thought struck me:
What if she's just profiling me, assuming that I must be socially inept somehow because I'm smart and tests have confirmed it? She doesn't have any information I didn't give her, but I had to explain to her why I'd gone to the school's councilor for learning disabilities first, which was because I knew the learning disabilities councilor from when I was a kid and my parents got my intelligence and a bunch of other things tested because they couldn't figure out why I didn't act like the other kids. I suppose that my parents had a good idea of what they were going to get, after I learned to read at three and my "c word" the third day of kindergarten was carotene, but I'm sure they wanted to know for sure, especially since I didn't get along with most of my new classmates. The funny thing is, I don't remember wanting to avoid classmates or being afraid of them when I was eight - I just didn't like boy bands or basketball or Disney Channel or Britney Spears. I liked bugs and mummies and Nancy Drew and National Geographic. At least the boys thought I was cool because I'd pick up worms and put them back where they belonged, in the grass. :)
Now? I still like bugs and mummies and National Geographic Magazine (the tv channel has started to loose some of my respect,) but I'm constantly aware that no matter how much I also like "normal" things, like computer games and music and Inception, people around me don't know how to deal with a girl who can identify the EKG of a rat's brain based on the shape, whose knowlege of physics contains absolutely nothing between basic Newtonian Laws and String Theory, (I'm working on that one, starting with astrophysics and physical chemistry - as it is, it's like eating a sandwich with the filling removed. I want to taste the flavors of quarks!), who only dances at weddings, has never had more alcohol than is in cough drops and who starts giggling at walls after two cans of mountain dew anyway, and who would rather have a Watson than a boyfriend, based on the fact that dashing about town for science is more fun than dating and that kissing tastes and feels like cold, wet chicken skin. I don't know how to deal with people who think that mummies are gross (or that they're basically zombies wrapped in toilet paper,) who spend their lives net and tabloid stalking celebrities, who don't know how to meet potential romances without being drunk or at least at a bar or a dance, and who contradict themselves and reinforce the double standards of society without realizing it. I don't know how to deal with people who don't vote because "union trouble," or "gay marriage," or "the national budget," are things they've decided don't affect them. I don't know how to narrow my feild of vision and not turn conversations to multiverse theory or the comic deaths of greek playwrights, or turtles or at least a good book. I mean, I can concentrate on a certain subject or a certain person, but as often as not I don't get results when I invite people into my world, which isn't exactly a small one. I've had to learn to be selective about who gets invited in the first place, because not everyone is safe. At best, people who aren't safe for me to care too much about are disappointing - they hang around for a while, and then they run away. Sometimes they give reasons - I'm too intense is usually what these things boil down to. They don't seem to realize that I don't have a medium setting for how much I care about a person. I'm missing the middle filling between aquaintance and cherished friend, so they have to make the jump at once, like electrons, to a different shell. There seem to be two types of people: those who can stand being focused on and those who can't. But the ones who can stand to be focused on are even harder to deal with than the ones who can't - sometimes they want to be the only one, and the only thing, and a few of them don't understand that I'm not a moon to orbit around them, that I'm my own person and am capable of focusing just as hard on a caterpillar or a drawing or a story.
That's the other reason I don't think I'll ever get married or have a boyfriend. I doubt anyone romantically interested in me would be able to tolerate me focusing on other people's brains to the extent that I do. I haven't the first clue of how to flirt, but seperate observers have wrongly pegged me as being in a relationship with each of my best friends, based on how much I focus on them. At the same time, though - I don't want to be alone, but you don't get to keep people, not when you're still in school, not when you have nothing to promise them. I want to go back to the days where a pinky swear meant trust and loyalty for as much as a child could understand of forever, but the thought that those days are forever shattered for me is almost too much for me to bear. I simply can't trust new people that much anymore. I know it's part of growing up, and that having some carefully shelved fear of humanity in general is a reasonable reaction to having been human and seen human beings for almost twenty one years now, but damn it if it doesn't make me feel alone.
Maybe that's why people choose to care less, and to not focus as hard or spread their net of caring so widely or love quite as strongly as I do. If they focus on parties and school drama and drinking and boyfriends and romance novels and stars, they'll keep putting more stuff in their brain and filling it up, distracting themselves from being alone. Or maybe that's just me - for all I know, all the people around me aren't looking ahead into the empty future and wondering if they'll be worth it. They could be living in the moment, or searching for someone to share that future with in the hopes that the uncertainties of life will shrink.
I'm graduating. Not soon, but soon enough that I can feel it looking over my shoulder. All my life I've assumed that most people I've met, besides family and the ones that I've known since I was an infant, won't stay a fixture in my life, but I've never been waiting to face a future where I was fairly certain that no one would be there with me. By the end of high school, I was just ready to escape the madness, because everyone told me that things would be better in college. I went with optimism - I figured life would fall into place when I picked a major, believed my mother when she said that I would "find the right guy," in college, thought that people would like me better in a place where half the population are "geeks." Instead it turns out that I'm beyond these people's definition of normal too.
Well, I shouldn't imply that it's everyone - I've found quite a few people who can stand to be focused on (and I've actually been able to collect them all in one room at the same time because they actually get along,) and have gotten a bit better at dealing with people who would prefer that I not focus on them, without ignoring them completely. I just don't know what to do when it's all over. It would be easier if I didn't need people quite so much, but asexual or not I'm not a machine. But if I'm having this much trouble on a college campus, where the vast majority of the population should be the kind of people I might want to get to know, how am I going to deal with the world after school, where the main avenues for meeting new people seem to be drinking and religions? I'm not too impressed with either.
It's not as if I can advertize in the papers or e-harmony for a live-in best friend.
Intellectual type asexual seeking platonic company. Must be willing to tolerate puns, have a strong gag reflex for the inappropriate lunchtime discussion of types of mummies and other instances of too much information of a scientific or archaeological nature, and agree to disagree at times on politics. A taste for mysteries is preferred, though no actual mysteries are likely to be solved. Interviewee in turn promises to keep musical efforts to a minimum, remain reasonably quiet during sleeping hours, refrain from spoiling books the applicant actually wishes to read, and share cooking and cleaning duties equitably.
I seem to have lost my original train of thought. Oh well - it's likely that you've forgotten it by now too, if you've made it to this point.
I really am okay, I'm just nervous about everything from this moment in time onwards. I don't like not having a reasonable idea of what's ahead.
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no subject
Date: 2012-12-04 07:27 pm (UTC)We do have a school-wide honors program but I kind of fell out of it when I started my major - there were plenty of other science majors in the program, but I was the only Environmental Science major and definitely the only Sciences/Humanities double major. They're fun, but I've never really had opportunity to interact with them beyond freshman year, because double majoring will eat your life.
Like I said, I have met a lot of great people, but communicating with them can be kind of hard. :/
Hmm, I think I read an article on having more communication circuts in the brain - but of course, since a lot of neural connections occur when you learn something, it could be socialization too.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-05 02:06 am (UTC)Really, I'm a school counselor and I have a counselor drawer that contains tissue, energy bars for people who forget their lunch, feminine hygiene products, and crayons for meetings that include much younger siblings. I have 450ish middle school students under my care (my co-worker had the other 450).
We also seem to store information differently, so there are more access points for retrieval. The brain is kind of cool
no subject
Date: 2012-12-05 02:52 am (UTC)Haha, I know how it is - my mom works as a fifth grade teacher, and after parent teacher conferences every year she comes home, throws her hands up, and says "Now I know exactly why those kids are the way they are." I see why you need a survival kit in your desk. :)
I usually lose my pens in the chem labs. Then I get really nervous around them if I get them back because I occasionally nibble on them and I don't want anything from lab in my mouth, ever.
What else do you know about the brain? All I've got for right now is that people get more neural connections in different places when they learn multiple languages.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-05 04:29 am (UTC)Lets see, cool things about the brain:
If you have a traumatic brain injury that injures basically an entire brain hemisphere or are born with a birth-defect that leaves you with one functional brain hemisphere, the brain will transfer almost all necessary functions to the remaining hemisphere, even though the two hemispheres are set up to do entirely different things.
There is speculation that the more texture/folds/twisty bits you have on the surface of your brain, the smarter you are.
IQ is, in some ways, a social construct rather than a biological function, which is why you can't give an IQ test to an African-American child.
If you scan someone's brain you can tell things about brain-related abilities and disabilities and substance abuse based on the energy levels in different parts of the brain.
Some kinds of meditation increase brain activity and there are parts of sleep where the brain is very active which we think might involve processing short-term memory into long term.
It is possible to store information in longterm memory without it having passed through short term memory.
A really cool one- you can learn information, even if the part of the brain that would normally process the information has been injured in a way that disallows learning through it and without being aware of learning it. IIRC, they did one study where they showed a person with a brain injury that blinded them (or, really destroyed a particular set of visual processing centers) a picture. The person could not consciously see the picture and was not told what the picture was, but when asked what it was, they knew.
Gay men often have parts of their brains that work in ways that are more similar to women's brains than to straight men's.
The brain processes music in a lot of the same ways it processes math.
People tend to learn better while listening to complex music (specifically Mozart IIRC) than simple music.
Random factoids, I haz them. :P
no subject
Date: 2012-12-05 02:04 pm (UTC)About the IQ test - well, I kind of see how the testing part might not work as well on a kid that's got different societal expectations weighing in on things, but how does that work?
I knew about the bits with the activity - once in chem 1 the notes got delayed a whole day because everyone wanted to talk about EKG scans that had been in the slideshow. (It was kind of a "this is your brain, this is your brain on drugs," comparison slide, and we spent a good half hour trying to figure out whether or not the picture was really of a rat's brain. It was.)
Braaaaaaaains.