September 24, 2002
All Alone and No People Makes Chen Something Something.
I'm skipping Kung Fu tonight, which is bad. But my back has been hurting for like 10 days now and I think if I want to lick this whole back pain thing, then this is what I have to do: lie around on my hot water bottle and eat aspirins. This is the sacrifice I must make.
I seriously love going to kung fu though. This is hard.
Actually, you know what like 80% of that is? 80% of me loving going to kung fu is that there are People there! Other people, people that aren't me and aren't my cat! People are so great, because you can talk to them.
See 'cause I work from home now, which is a blessing, don't get me wrong. But I live alone, and so that means I spend a llllllot of time alone, sitting right here right in front of this very computer, doing something not unlike what I'm doing right now, which is typing. There are emails and IMs, and once a week there's a conference call and I get to hear voices, but for the most part it's just me and my thoughts and clickity clack, clickity clack. Symptoms have included:
- Increased talking to self (overheard in my bathroom today -- alone: "Hot water bottles are so hot right now.")
- Increased talking to cat (overheard in the kitchen today: "You won't eat this delicious chunk of tuna just because it's cold? What are you, a pussy?")
- Decreased ability to function in "small talk" situations with humans other than self
- Total unmitigated depression.
Those last two were the wake up calls, a couple months ago. It was getting so I didn't really feel like going out, which isn't normally that much of a problem for me, but since I wasn't leaving the apartment for any other reasons it got a little confined-y. I had to start forcing myself to night-socialize to make up for the societylessness of my daytime, which unfortunately tends to mean drinking and spending money, which are things I want to do only moderately. But I don't know, I think I've got a balance going on now, I think I got it under control. Now I can have a regular conversation again.
I'm serious about that inability to produce small talk thing.. that's some serious shit. Has that ever happened to you? I went to a 4th of July party and this fully cute boy handed me a slice of watermelon and said something conversationally valid and I fully giggled and walked away cause I had literally NO CONCEPT of what I could possibly say to a stranger. I couldn't even figure out what to say to people I knew. I'd be sitting there, they'd be talking, and I wouldn't know how to join in. It was pretty weird, for a while there. God, I had almost forgotten about that.
I saw this episode of "Understanding" a few weeks ago that was about laughter, and how insanely good for you it is, and how you need to socialize so that you'll laugh because you don't laugh as hard or as much when you're alone. And I realized there is a major lack of laughter in my life… and not cause I don't watch enough comedy, I mean I'm happily addicted to Larry Sanders re-re-re-re-runs. But this Understanding was about how much we laugh in conversation, at things that aren't really funny, and how it helps keep us mentally and physically healthy.
So now when I go out I carry a set of "small talk" index cards with me and then I laugh a big belly laugh in between my sentences, to make up for all this alone time. It's sort of like going to the gym, the gym where you exercise your humanity. My laugh is gonna be so fucking buff. I'm gonna be the Schwarzenegger of social interaction.
PS: The hot water bottles they make now aren't the red rubber kind that smell like red rubber, which i always found to be kind of a soothing smell, probably because i associated it with hot water bottles. No, now they're HOT PINK, and a latexy sort of plastic with no real scent. HOT PINK. I think that's a subtle hint from Rite Aid that all anyone uses hot water bottles for anymore is cramps. But man, I long to see the retired army general whose bursitis is acting up rock the hot pink water bottle.
