Eccentric Flower:201003/Blue Paint

One of my very few saving graces is that I am always willing to listen when someone wants to displace one of my ideas. It doesn't always result in that idea being displaced, you understand. Sometimes I think about it a while and decide I'm still not wrong. Sometimes I stay wrong. Sometimes I don't want to stay wrong but I can't help it. But it always has an effect, this business of someone else kicking my ideas around like a soccer ball. It shakes things up. I believe I am a better person for that, even in the cases where I'm still wrong.

Ysabel and I had a long chat today. She feels I was being overly harsh, cruel even, to theferrett. And she has a definite point, and is not wrong; but nor am I. The problem is that it depends on your premises, and we were working from different ones.

(Cue Sydney Smith quote.*)

The problem is between "can't" and "won't." If the person actually cannot understand why a particular rule needs to be applied, if that person can't understand how and where to apply it consistently, then that is tantamount to a learning or conceptual disability - and it was not my intention to make fun of anything like that. If someone is autistic, for example - no venom there. That would be cruel and I wouldn't do that.

But while I allow a great deal of leeway for can't, I have an equally large amount of nasty available for won't. To say, "I won't participate in your rules because they make no sense," well, that's fine, but then opt out completely and stop talking about them - that was my point.

Ysabel has had more contact with theferrett than I have (my personal contact with the gent is zero), and she assumed I was, in essence, picking on someone's disability. My assumption, of course, was that theferrett was perfectly capable of playing by any arbitrary stupid set of rules, however arbitrary, however stupid, and so he was being dishonest, either with his audience or himself or both.

Now, the more interesting question: Why would I assume that, uncharitably to say the least, of someone I barely know and for whom I have no evidence one way or another?

Well, one answer has to do with my essentially having given up hope for humans on the web - that I no longer take as a base assumption that online people are behaving well, honestly, or decently until proven otherwise. But that's a bigger blanket problem, and I realize now I had a more specific one with theferrett's pitch.

As you know, the fallacy that probably trips me up more often than any others is the assumption that my abilities and experiences are the floor. This is difficult for me to shake because of my own outlook on myself. To wit, I assume anything I can do is pretty minimal because I know what a half-assed failure I am, so if I can do it, I assume anyone else can do it; and if I can solve it I assume anyone else can solve it.

But, Ys, before you say "I told you so," hang on. There's a depth here we didn't discuss this afternoon. It took me a while to see it.

In his rant, theferrett shows that he understands the problem. He has taken it apart. He knows what he keeps tripping over. He has proven that he sees perfectly well what part is giving him repeated trouble.

I realized that if he had just thrown up his hands and said, "I'm baffled!" I would have cut him a lot more slack.

Because, you see, in my universe to understand a problem is to know how to solve the problem.

Oh sure, there are often implementation issues. Sometimes you know how to solve the problem, but you can't because the solution rests upon your changing things beyond your control (mostly other people). Sometimes you know how to solve the problem but won't because you're too damned lazy or otherwise insufficiently motivated to do so.

But what it came down to for me was, I read that and thought, "Well, if you've already concluded that some arcane and nonsensical protocol means you need to paint your forehead blue when you are in a particular building, and you want to keep operating in that building, don't whine about it, don't try to make sense of it - you HAVE the answer. Break out the blue paint!"

Which is why the fingernails example bothered me, because it seemed like an example he had deliberately designed so no one could throw the paragraph above at him. It's a lot harder to never display your fingernails. And, as the comments on his post make explicit, he does not consider wearing gloves a valid solution, because then you're giving the finger (so to speak) to someone else's social convention.

But in the real world - again barring the idea of a genuine disability - it doesn't strike me that there are examples like that. To the end of my days I will never understand the polite social null, for example, but it doesn't have to make sense because I know the solution: Just do it. Get out the blue paint. It washes off later.

It is very difficult for me to imagine someone understanding a problem and still not being able to solve it. I know the answers to all my problems, for example; it's just that often solving them requires more energy than I have or a greater change to my personality than I'm comfortable with. (I distrust all change.)

I know the answers to all the world's problems, too, but I can't solve any of them because I'm one puny human in a world of corruption and brutality and no one would like some of my answers even if they listened. That's extremely frustrating to me, and will probably be the thing that delivers me most quickly to an early grave.

And there are some problems I don't actually understand. You could throw me a computer problem in a computing language I know nothing about, and I wouldn't even be able to begin to debug it; I don't understand the problem. On the other hand, if you throw me a Perl problem, no matter how obscure, I will solve it eventually; I understand enough of that universe that it is strictly a matter of energy and time.

VERY IMPORTANT: Notice that I am using "understand" two different ways here. You need to understand the rules of the universe in which the problem occurs. You do not need to understand the problem. Perl has gremlins. Sometimes something will just fail. You don't have to know why it fails; you just have to know how to debug until you find the failure, and how to work around it. Similarly, I don't have to understand why people other than me like empty social pleasantries; I just have to understand that, in that universe, those are the rules. Solution presents itself immediately: Get out the paint.

It seemed to me that theferrett demonstrated understanding of the rules of the universe in question - even if he didn't understand the reasons for those rules - and thus he had the solution in hand.

But, again, this is maybe too much colored by my personal experiences and ways! Maybe I'm going back to my usual fallacy again! Maybe he knows the rules of that universe but still legitimately cannot see the answer.

If so, I feel sad for him.

The bottom line is: I've never encountered a getting-along-with-other-humans-and-their-weird-customs situation (and in my life I have encountered many, many) that couldn't be solved by the application of one of two answers:

1) Suck it up and do it.

2) Opt out and take the consequences.

I don't say "good morning" to my co-workers. They think I'm a grouch, when I just don't like empty social pleasantries, but I have chosen to take the penalty because I mind their thinking me a grouch a lot less than I mind having to make small talk with them. (I do talk to them - I am actually interested in knowing about their lives - for example one just came back from his honeymoon and I talked to him about that for a while this morning. I just don't do the empty bits.) The people who take the time to know my methods realize this is just a quirk and get past it; the rest of them can go to hell. Conversely, I am always exceedingly polite to the people who could have me thrown out of the building if I'm not. I don't like doing it, I don't understand why I need to do it, but I don't have to understand. It costs me very little to comply with their weirdness in this direction.

Now, again, if you legitimately don't understand what it is you're supposed to suck up and do, or when exactly to do it, fine, you get a pass - but you also have a genuine conceptual disability there, and you are therefore disqualified from the discussion I was originally trying to have. Not the same thing.

When I read theferrett's post I said, "Here is a man who (by my lights) must know the solutions, but doesn't want to apply them and doesn't want to face the consequences of not applying them," - and I was, shall we say, substantially unimpressed.

If, however, he has a genuine conceptual block at play here - and there are people who do - then I apologize thoroughly.

Tangentially: I would like to clarify something personal, because I know what a dim impression of my character I convey from these little screeds. The basic problem here, as Ys rediscovered this afternoon, is not that I am the world's biggest misanthrope. As I told her, if I were actually a misanthrope it would be easier because then I could say, "Screw you all, get out of my way and damn the torpedoes," and not care or comment on anyone else's bad behavior, nor my own for that matter.

What I actually am is a thoroughly disillusioned idealist/optimist, who has been shattered primarily because my standards are so unreasonably ridiculous - my standards for myself most of all.

I have said it before and I will say it again until everyone gets it: The flip side of my knowing how low in the universe I sit is that I expect anyone I like even a little bit to be better than I am. In short, my being harsh on theferrett is actually a compliment, in an extremely rough way. It is my way of saying, "I think you should be better than that; this behavior is beneath you." (That's assuming he was indeed being disingenuous.)

I don't tolerate whining much because *I* whine. I know it. If I have a bad habit (and my god I have so many), then, by my logic, then you should be above it (assuming I give a rat's ass about you and haven't written you off along with the other 98% of humanity). Don't share my faults.

I try not to talk about this much anymore because one bit of blue paint *I* have learned to apply is that my friends don't like it when I talk to them about my expectations of them. (It baffles me because I consider my expectations of them a compliment, but, again, I don't have to make sense of the rule to have a solution.) I've also learned they don't like it when I badmouth myself. So I'm trying to cut back.

(An even better solution is to change my expectations, and I'm trying, but it's a very slow process.)

But:

- There was no sunlight for the last two weeks of February. None. Zero.

- I haven't slept any way but restlessly for close to a month. When I have slept at all.

- I did not get to eat a meal today. (Still haven't, in fact. I've had snacks and am holding out for dinner at this late stage.)

- I have spent the last week-plus at work either bored to tears and too tired to do anything of my own, or dealing with abject human stupidity. No in-between.

- I'm done with winter, but winter is not done with me.

- I'm 42 and my birthday is always a reminder of what a failure I am.

So, on the whole, if there were ever a time for my views on these subjects to escape/backslide, this would be it.

I apologize for all collateral damage.

* I was just going to leave that unexplained, but it's surprisingly hard to search for, so: Smith once observed two women shouting an argument at each other from upper windows of facing buildings. "They will never resolve the matter," he said, "they are arguing from separate premises."