In the Beginning
In the beginning I was born, like everyone else, and despite popular rumour I wasn’t hatched from an egg nor did I descend from the heavens on a cloud of sarcasm, wit, poor eating habits, and social awkwardness. Since then my life hasn’t been like everyone else. As an infant I dismantled toys, and bugs, and I hated being around other people. I did everything backward, stood before I crawled, read before I spoke. So by the time I finally got to elementary school I was used to being weird, and pursuing my interests alone, and the other kids were happy to oblige; this bring me to the first (of four) important facts about me, I’m an introvert, full blown INTJ. I just don’t like to be alone, I need it, if I don’t get my alone time I start to go a little bit squirrelly. I quickly became that one kid that always got teased, all the time. It sort of spiked up and got really bad at one point, but that’s for another day; outside of that one spike it sort of gradually grew in intensity and frequency up until grade six. After that things suddenly changed, over one summer I went from the object of everyone’s malice to the object of everyone’s … ignoring. Looking back I think I understand what happened, one word – puberty, everyone suddenly stopped teasing me because they all took to ‘teasing’ each other.
I didn’t understand this new found fancy in other people. I mean I went through all those changes on schedule, all except the last one I’ve never found anyone, anywhere attractive in a sexual manner. That brings me to the second fact, I’m asexual, if you don’t know what that means then I suggest you go check out AVEN. Fast forward to high school, same kids as elementary and junior high, now they were nicer in a general sense; their malice, which was replaced with avoidance, was in turn replaced with a sort of neutral indifference, which I rather enjoyed. We had the odd conversation, never ’small talk’, always restricted to topics of our common studies or for the exchange of required pleasantries and information. But it was around this time I came to a slump in my extensive reading habits, (i.e. I could find another novel worth reading) and with that I was thrust into reality long enough that I realised that people were actually getting joy out of being around one another, not just that but they wanted to spend their free time around these other people, not just the minutes and lunch-hours between classes.
It was then I decided to make a change in my life. This brings me to facts three and four; three: I am always reexamining myself, I don’t know how people can go through thier day to day lives without trying to better themselves, questioning and exploring their foundation; and four: I’m smart, I learn fast, I hate saying that, and I don’t mean to sound arrogant, but I a want something (at least from a knowledge stand point) I have a knack for find quantity and quality information and absorbing it at a extraordinary rate. Anyway… What change? I decided to become, not necessarily more social, but more involved in the microcosm of civilization that is person to person interaction (much like how to better understand the essence of a star, one must observe atoms). My basic method for this has been to pour over ever credible document I could find about human behaviour, I spent a special amount of time focusing on personality psychology and have developed a lasting interest in it; and to go to a bar on the other side of town and, simply speaking, sat and observed humans in their natural social environment (come to think of it i probably looked creepy, twice a week alone, mulling over a rob roy).
It’s going good, I think, I now talk to people regularly, I even go out for impromptu social outings occasional (though still infrequently). If you asked me a year ago to ‘read’ some one body language, you might as well have put a long lost Chinese tablet in front of me, both equally undecipherable, but now I’m starting to pick up on subtle nuance in what people say and how it relates to their comportment (I still find this very difficult). So why you may ask did I decide to start a blog about my admittedly non-exciting life? Its been a culmination of three things in my life, one: a want to catalogue in some sense my rare (I dare not say unique) life has come to be along with a recording in some sense of my more fleeting thoughts; two: I’m not sure why but this post some how pushes myself further toward actually doing this; and three: an impromptu evening out with an old high school classmate and his girl friend who called me at 11 o’clock and said “wanna go for drinks?”, aside from having fun, I finally got to interact in a truly dynamic environment and it still confused the hell out of me.
I hope at least one person got all the way through this inaugral post and intends to come back and read more. As for the format I hope to follow, I will mostly try to deal with issues of an asexual and an introvert in an the highly social and sexual environment (in this case university), but I will occasionally (hopefully rarely) break the pattern with something about my loves of science, film, and video games. I also hope to post something at least ever 6-10 days, hopefully on the shorter end and hopefully they’ll become easier to read and less of a grammatical/linguistic nightmare.
Ciao.
