notageek

Some people would say it like this: “You’re just not a (air quotes) ‘people person‘.”

Which is true, but it’s more accurate to say that I’m just not very personable. I don’t like ‘meeting people’, or ‘making connections’ or ‘networking’ or ‘catching up’ or ‘touching base’. In fact, I loathe the phrase ‘touch base’ with a vehemence heretofore reserved for ‘nauseous’ and ‘could care less’, but because of its connotations rather than annoying use issues which can be explained away by invoking English-the-living-language.

No, I hate the phrases because of what they require of me, and for that same reason I hate family reunions, I hate airplanes and train rides and other situations where I’m stuck with people I don’t know but should.

Because I don’t Like People. I don’t dislike the human race, but I certainly don’t automatically like members thereof. I take a good while and a good reason to bring people into my good graces from my indifference, and people outside my family seem to think that’s shocking, as if everyone in the world is just a friend waiting to be made and if I would just come out of my asocial little shell then the world would be just a little bit happier.

That’s bullshit. I can’t be friends with the entire world, and I don’t want to, and I’m not going to, because it’s beyond my capabilities anyway. Because the same way people throw up their hands and say “I could never do physics, it’s so hard” after having taken a term of kinematics, I feel about People Issues. Functioning as a “normal” person for me requires a lot of intellectualisation, and that is fucking exhausting. In a lot of cases, it’s worth it, and I value greatly the friendships I’ve managed to forge–but to trivialise those bonds by pretending their pertinent features are inherent characteristics of every human interaction I have is to insult my friends. It’s also to insult me, by saying that the energies I have are so worthless that they should be dumped into interactions I don’t value rather than nonsocial pursuits I do, and that I’m much better at.

I don’t even dislike meeting people–I just hate ‘meeting people’, with all the artificiality and tiny temporality the phrase implies to me. It smacks of faking smiles, of biting my tongue, of memorising pointless details about people I don’t like and don’t care about and may never meet again. I hate talkative airplane seatmates, because I don’t want 2-hour friends and because it takes more than two hours of having hips squashed to make a real friend.

So anyway, shut up, you cheery fuckwits. No, I will not fix your computer, and no, I will not let you try to fix me.

Can you do something properly for fifty days? Fifty-four, if you count finals, because that’s what ten weeks of five days of classes gets you. Fifty days of reading ecology out of the $150 textbook, fifty days of listening to the dead boring physiology professor, three days of tromping around in the wet counting Abies spp or various arthropods. Only ten days of being treated like a 5-year-old (or a first-year; really the same thing) by the graduate student who runs the lab.

If all goes well, I have 135 of those days left. I never counted days in high school, because I knew was going on to the university, and I even knew which university it would be. I used to want to go to med school, and I would whine about having my life plotted out for the next 12 years–that, too, was in high school. I quit whining after I’d spent some time without nothing plotted out, not even the place I was living or the job I was doing tomorrow. I’ve come to see certainty as a highly desirable luxury.

Not that I value stagnancy; just that I value stability. Change is good, but only in its season. Change for its own sake is dangerous and bewildering; it leaves me with no ground to stand on and nowhere to place a thought. I don’t hold the ability to do things on a moment’s notice particularly high. I like to plan things, consider things, turn them over–because of the potential for destruction of long-held hopes by things done on a moment’s notice. Because I have done tons of stupid, stupid shit on a moments’ notice and few things that I treasure. Because they don’t balance each other.

Not that I haven’t carefully considered and decided to go ahead with things that I now regret–but the consideration I gave allows me to figure out what difference exists between who I am now and when I made the decision. Or maybe that’s just bullshit to make me feel better. Or maybe that doesn’t matter at all.

Because, anyway, I’m not a Super Undergraduate Shoo-In for pharmacy school the way I was for university as a high-school student, and I might not get in, and that terrifies me, because it prevents me from making plans.

-Toque?
-Coffee Crisp?
-All-dressed chips?
-”mum”?
-”washroom”?

All check.

-Been dosed with Buckley’s?

That too. I *am* a pine tree, eh?

I’m a fucker. A non-updating fucker who has a field trip tomorrow.

My backpack contains:

1 red toque
1 red anorak
1 field manual for my ecology course
1 Pacific Coast Tree Finder dichotomous key thing
1 pair socks, in a plastic bag
1 cell phone, in a plastic bag
1 gigantic lunch, in a plastic bag
2 litres filtered water, in a bottle
1 pair of mittens
1 frisbee, with quadrants 1-4 marked
1 top-bound notebook of “rite-in-the-rain” paper
1 mechanical pencil with 0.5 mm graphite
1 hotel ballpoint pen

The excess of red (I have a red coat, too) is partly because I’m partial to red, but mostly because it’s hunting season, and apparently by the time a deer is visibly red, it’s already pretty close to kicking it. So we’re supposed to wear red, and avoid wearing antler hats–much to my chagrin.

Oh, and

1 grape jolly rancher