Sock-Puppets
2003-06-15 � 4:42 p.m.

Isn't it interesting how self-invovled people can be?

I know this isn't one of those earth-shattering observations � it's something plain that appears everyday. But sometimes something will happen and the fact of it will smack you in the face...

...like a herring...

...and you can't help but be forcibly reminded of it.

When things really get interesting is when the self-involvment rebounds off of others' self-involvment and creates these eddies of absurd abstractions of reality. People are so turned inward that they don't even realize they are acting out a series of stylized, farcical poses.

Like muppets doing kabuki. Or something.

(I was going to say 'like sock-puppets doing Moliere' but that actually sounds pretty cool, and I hereby declare my intention to cause sock-puppets performing Moliere to happen � hell, I'm unemployed...why not?)

As so many things here, this observation was triggered by my observation of people at The Bonfire Lounge, where on Saturday nights I am "employed" to sit at the door and trouble people to prove they are old enough to drink the booze we serve.

Last night, like the last few Saturdays, was slow, slow, slow, and while I sat literally twiddling my thumbs, crazy Theresa calls out to me from the bar. If I was on my own time, I would avoid going over, but I'm technically working and therefore a representative of the establishment, so I go.

She inquires as to why I am still working even though it is fairly late and there isn't much traffic through the door. I explain that I have to stay and help clean up anyway, so I might as well just keep going. She tells me I'm quite dedicated and, as is usual when someone compliments me, I play it off with some sort of wry comment.

Here's where things get weird. There followed an exchange between us that fulfills the above description of farcical abstraction completely. She disagrees and compliments me again, I play it off again. Repeat three or four times, while she is obviously getting more frustrated and my internal dialogue is something like, 'Shut up, you stupid bitch. I don't want to be having this conversation. Can't you see that I am trying to shut you up? How dense can you be?'

She then tells me, in an apparent non sequitur, that I should read the Vanderbilt book on etiquette. This breaks my rhythm, and I get confused. For the next several moments I was completely muddled, and couldn't get my conversational feet underneath me, basically repeating, "Why?" over and over, trying to figure out what the hell she was talking about.

It wasn't until later that I figured out some things about her, and about me, and about people and their degree of self-involvement.

The problem was that we were never having a real "conversation." Theresa, being the selfish attention whore that she is, summoned me from the door not out of any genuine curiosity as to why I was doing what I was doing, but to have someone pay attention to her (she was uncharacteristically alone). Her compliment to me was a facile opening gambit in the superficial Bar Talk game, meant only to elicit a response.

Unfortunately, she chose me to speak to, and basically, I don't want attention, or find it uncomfortable to be alone (at least in the sense that we are speaking of here � we'll leave the larger issue of being alone for my next downward spiral into severe self-hate), and so while my responses were generally self-deprecating, they were also barbed. They were intended to make her uncomfortable with the course of conversation and to give me a moment of peace in which to escape. I wasn't even really listening to her.

And she wasn't really listening to me. She thought we were playing the game that she knew, and so having gotten a response from me at all she kept going. She found it to be hard going, though, because either she is not completely stupid or I am even more evil than I usually give myself credit for (we'll leave the ultimate conclusion on that as an exercise for the reader), because she found herself getting more and more frustrated and, eventually, insulted.

Which was, of course, my desire, though I didn't even realize it at the time.

I was being rude.

Which is why, suddenly, Theresa mentioned the Vanderbilt book on etiquette. She never was able to actually tell me why she brought it up, or maybe she thought it would be rude to mention (though I have not noticed her being especially tactful in her interactions with anyone else), but that's why. She finally figured out, consciously or subconsciously, that I was being rude to her.

Which I suppose means that, despite all my yammering about dances, abstractions and muppets, that we did eventually have some sort of meanigful exchange, even if it was sub-textual or even one-sided.

There's a lesson there, if one cares to learn it. I don't, particularly. Ha!

I do wonder at my tendency to dissect these kinds of interactions though. Do you think this indicates a good or bad behavior? Or perhaps only a misplaced or misused one?

I do know this: this entry, boring as it is, is way better than my other option, which was to talk about how one of the most enduring things I learned in college was the difference between the hyphen ( - ), and the dash ( � ), and how it sticks with me enough that I now automatically type out the ISO special character code to generate a dash in an HTML document, even though that means typing seven characters instead of just the two for a double hyphen (meant to designate a dash). Christ I am a fucking LOSER!

Holy crap! I just remembered a dream I had! It was nuts! I was travelling to a foreign nation, and I arrived via boat only to find none of the expected wlecoming comittee on the dock. I tried to play it cool and elicit information from the locals in the nearby market, but I ended up being given a drugged Turkish coffee. I didn't drink all of it and awoke in time to discovere three cookie-cutter foreign criminal types robbing me blind.

The crazy part is that, contrary to how I think I would behave in "real life" I went into attack mode. There was a bunch of action, including me kicking the crap out of one dude and even diving off the edge of the ship to swim after the others who were escaping in a launch. I ended up getting all my stuff back and meeting the people I was supposed to meet, only to discover that I hadn't packed any of the things I was going to need anyway, and the stuff I did have was basically useless. So all my efforts were futile � I should have let the criminals have my stuff instead of risking my life to recover it. Except that in the dream this didn't bother me at all, and in fact I felt like the experience I had had with the criminals was the perfect preparation for facing my upcoming ordeal (unspecified) without any of the equipment I thought I was going to need.

My brain is an interesting place.

-t

Currently Aurally Inducing: The Cure, The Kiss
Selection of the Lyrical Vocabulary: "Kiss me, kiss me, kiss me � your tongue's like poison, so swollen it fills up my mouth."

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