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Sunday, March 18th, 2007
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2:23 am - St. Patrick's Day
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So I did it, I went out to two crowded bars that terrify me and hung around there for an hour and half. I needed to take a klonapin beforehand to get myself in, and spent two hours fixing bluetooth, lacing shoes that I wasn't even going to wear, and writing long delayed emails, but I went. First went to the Spotted Pig, which just opened up on 14th St. between 2nd and 3rd. I went in and realized I had no idea how to approach a girl or start a conversation in a crowded bar or how to do anything except order a drink. I also realized I was exceedingly overdressed in my sports coat. Maybe too old too, when I did talk to girls they all seemed to be from NYU. I went briefly to a woman and told her I liked something green she was wearing. She grabbed her best friend and said she gave it. We talked briefly about I don't know what, and then she pointed to her wedding ring. I ordered a Stella and covertly poured half of it out. Put my manpurse in the back. I don't actually like beer, so I can sip little bits of it for hours. For a while, I decided to just stay and observe how people approach each other. I stood near an wrought iron support beam and watched, and I said to myself I'll stay for ten minutes and watch. That was just frustration. I had no idea what the glances back and forth meant or whether the glances meant come closer or pull away. This place, filled to the gills, is Asperger's hell. On the left corner TV, CSI Miami was playing. There was an establishing shot of a fashionable bar, occupied only by black clad women, sitting at the bar in such a precise order that they might have been waiting to step out into a Busby Berkeley number. TV is where 99% of my knowledge of bars, and I know it's a lie, but I keep being surprised every time I go in and it doesn't match up to my expectations.
Moved closer to the front of the bar, and a big drunk Irish guy friendly started talking to me, I have no idea about what. I was grateful to have someone talk to and stood beside him as he flirted with women in green and in transit. I suggested to him that we could work together, that if I was standing next to him, I would clearly be the less appealing option, not knowing what I was going. This got translated into him thinking I was gay. We had a long back and forth where he said there was nothing to be ashamed about being gay, and that half of his friends were gay, and that all the great Irish geniuses were gay. I countered with Joyce, and he conceded my point. We spent a while with him trying to get me to shake his hand to acknowledge I was gay and me trying to understand what he was saying. Then some guy came up out of nowhere to start a fight with my new Irish friend and I stood in between. Or tried to- there were so many other people doing it effectively that I apparently just gave the impression that I was trying to protect myself from hitting me. No one got hit or ejected, the fight just dissolved into the chaos. I said goodbye and said I would say hi if I see him again at Cellar (I refuse to call it Crocodile Bar, even though it's getting on its anniversary of its semi-successful conversion.) I went to get my coat and my man purse. A bunch of people were dancing when I got to the back, and they encouraged me to join in. I'm not a good dancer, I have no sense of rhythm and am always trying to follow the other person, but I joined in anyway- they formed a circle around me as I attempted to shake my thing while simultaneously put on a coat. They clapped- maybe ironically at the spastic guy, maybe not. I choose to believe it wasn't. The circle stayed as familiar songs played, and I went in the circle, along with several others. Pictures were taken and oh my god am I pale. I danced close with a girl, never sure how close I should approach when she placed her back to me. It was the highlight of my night- I finally felt like people wanted to be around me, and I could do any silly dance move and it would be laughed at, but not unkindly. After a while it broke up, and I approached a girl I danced at earlier and talked a bit. She's an NYU student, and we just chatted a while and somehow the bar became quiet. I told her I liked Cellar better, and she told me she's studying New York structure or something. I bullshitted briefly with what I knew of Robert Moses from the first third of Caro's biography and two walking tours. I then asked for her phone number so we could hang out sometime in a quieter bar. She said yes, but she that she had a boyfriend. I actually really don't know what I'm looking for now, but I'm happy with just a friend to hang out with. Generally, these dissolve into nothing, but we spent a while with her trying to write the phone number on the treo, and eventually I went low tech and gave her a pen and paper that were in my manpurse. She told me to text her immediately, so I would know her name. When I briefly employed a life coach, she told me that whenever I did something that stepped outside my comfort level, I should immediately give myself a reward for it. I'm stuck for rewards, so I think I'm going to have to go with Thursday's Colbert report and some sleep. I have no idea who this of interest to- forgive me if you've subscribed because you're Leonard's friend are bored silly or embarrassed.
I wish I had made friends successfully in college who could have guided me through the bar scene- I have no idea what the hell I'm doing.
Tomorrow, I have to make it to the volunteer thing- I have a bad habit of chickening out on those at the last second. And I'm seeing Alarm will sound in the afternoon, and the last time I saw them at Carnegie Hall it was one of the peak concert going experiences of my life. There is always the potential- and this happens after I exert myself socially, that I'll just want to retreat and and not leave the apartment, but I don't want to do that, and I am praying I don't wake up feeling that way. The amount of klonapin I've been taking may end up catching up to me and making me a zombie tomorrow, but I still will drag myself to the soup kitchen.
And hopefully, I'll continue to blog about it.
current mood:  content
current music: Arcade Fire
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| Saturday, March 17th, 2007
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7:46 pm - Upcoming Social Stuff
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If I can assemble the social nerves, I'm going to go out and mingle among the chaos of the St. Patrick bar scene. Even went on bought a mild green polo shirt to wear out. Normally, I hate bars and incredibly huge crowds, but earlier today I was feeling like giving it a shot- it's a time when everything is a little up in chaos and a little uncomfortable.I won't be drinking, because I just started Lamictal two weeks ago. All the anti-depressants have just been sapping my will and I went cold turkey off them last December in a desperate attempt to leave my apartment, but I've been cycling in and out of horrible depression and up periods since then. The Lamictal is supposed to help with the cycling, although last night at a concert I fell into a horrible, unshakeable feeling that I was never going to make any more friends again and would be lonely for the rest of my horribly long life. That didn't go away until about 11:00 AM this morning. Just yesterday I doubled the dosage from 25 mg once a day to twice a day, and that's apparently still not going to be enough to really help me yet. I have to go to slow because one out of 250 who take Lamictal develop a horrifying and deadly rash, Tomorrow I go out to socialize in a way I had when I first moved to the city, but haven't in a long while- volunteering. I'll be working with Makor at the soup kitchen at St. Francis Xavier. Then, I've got tickets to Alarm Will Sound at Carnegie Hall.
current mood:  pensive
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| Friday, March 16th, 2007
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2:14 am - My moment of zen
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As long as we're being cozy and pseudonomous in this here Livejournal, let me tell what just happened. First of all, I smoke pot occasionally. I started in my mid-twenties, ironically finally persuaded to try by my high school friends from my crazy reality therapy anti-drug cult/boarding school (the subject of a future entry.) I find it sometimes shakes me out of my depression, or gives a new perspective on the world, or makes me excited and want to write down grand lists for new careers or better design of pencil cups. I'll feel creative, invigorated, responding actively to my world. It'll eventually evaporate, but I put things in motion, or at least have a blast. That's about a third of the time. The other two thirds I'll be vaguely anxious and very hungry, but mostly the same slug I am when I'm a depressive fugue state. I never smoked regularly, but I thought my occasional toking up could be contributing to my depression, so I went abstinent for two months, with no result in either directions. The air didn't seem any fresher, flowers didn't smell sweeter, and I had the same clump of sediment and desperation where my ambition is supposed to be. So, particularly after having a great time babbling stoned with an old friend in Chicago, I decided to go back to it as a very occasional ritual. ( I used to smoke every Thursday with my high school friend C., but he unsurprisingly stopped coming by once he had a kid). I came home from work after an exhausting but kind of exhilarating day, where I'd managed to best two or three worst case scenario technical problems. I wanted to relax tonight and bought some “Blueberry” from a coworker. I have no sense of smell and no sense of how the stink lingers on my clothes or on my room, but my apartment was freshly cleaned, so rather than just try and blow out the window, I changed clothes and took the pipe to the fire escape. I took my fist hit and leaned back to inhale, and suddenly was aware how unsteady the back of the fire escape was, that it was shaking as I supported myself against it. I had just enough time to ponder how humiliating it would be to die from a fall with the pipe still in my mouth and the “blueberry” splayed all across my corpse before I lurched forward and caught myself on the building. Unfortunately my glasses moved faster and flung themselves off my face and into the backyard below. Wait, not the backyard. In a squint I could see they'd fallen into the basement of the backyard.The building super lives on the first floor and is always in. We fight because he hears phantom noises of me re-arranging even when I'm not in the tristate area, and because he refused to replace the tiles in my bathroom even when they were almost half gone, and when he finally did, he just poured caulk to replace the missing tiles, and it looks like the building puked it up. So I wasn't anxious to see him, particularly when I might be detectably high. At the same time, those were primary glasses, I'm blind without something, and I'd safely put away the backup pair someplace that I was sure at the time I'd never forget. So I changed clothes again, gargled mouth wash, splashed myself with musk, and rang his bell. He responded, as he did to all requests, with a long sigh and then a silence. Eventually I stood there long enough that he took me out back and had his son point a flashlight around the hole in the ground until one of the three of us saw a glint of the glasses. He then took me to the basement, lecturing me all the while about the evils of feng-shui adjustments at the witching hour, and brought me a ladder. I climbed in and thank god they were intact, He sighed some more, and I thanked him extensively on the way back, pondering all the while how I should make for this and the absence of any christmas tip (at the time, he was still refusing to fix the bathroom, and while it was more the management company's decision than his, he was still being a dick about it.) I think I'll go with a Harry and David fruit bundle- who doesn't like fruit?
current mood: relieved
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| Friday, February 23rd, 2007
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7:10 pm - Contrary to the 39 Steps, I am not glad that this is off my mind
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In other excuses for not writing, I've been so out of practice at any kind of expression that at the moment I feel like I'm typing with fingerless mittens on. One example: In a post I was dashing off just now, I was trying to make a small aside about how fashionable New Yorkers choose to protect themselves from the cold weather. I realized I had forgotten the word for the knitted colored long thing that people wrap around their necks and tuck under their jackets . It took me a good three minutes to realize that I meant "scarves." And those three minutes were harder than any programming exercise or any business organization I've had to do. And it isn't like forgetting what the "ineluctable modality of the visible is" and why Stephen Dedalus keeps muttering about it. In prose it's awkward enough, but I have time and isolation on my side. In conversation, it forces everyone around me into an awkward game of charades, while they're trying to pretend that's what's happening is perfectly normal. It's terrifying the hell out of me, and I recognize it, the constant feeling that a word is on the tip of your tongue but blocked by either some other word or some neural obstacle that you have to reroute your thoughts around. In the past it only affected the names of people I saw infrequently who looked precisely like other people, and now it starts popping up with common words and phrases, and it's getting worse.
My memory of events and of words is something I prize myself on. My high school friends used to be able to turn to me to recite the exact sequence of events of our confrontation groups, relationships falling apart, and the time the house mother put an burnt husk of hallah in the middle of the main hall and yelled at us for an hour about responsibility, while all we could think of was how much it looked like an elephant turd. (Posts giving context to the crazy reality therapy school in a haunted castle will be forthcoming at some point, in the mean time just roll with it.) I knew the precise seating order of everyone for the time A*** Mc****** asked for one last chance back into the school after his father told him that if he couldn't get himself re-accepted by the community, he wanted to out his son in what Adam understood for about thirty seconds was an exchange program called "Youth in Asia." And I was a pain because I remembered everything people said when they swallowed the kool-aid and joined witch hunts against the students who weren't "intense enough" to make it and I had no problem bringing that up ten years later, when we all had decent jobs, families, occasional drinking, and understood a lower key reality.
And further back, I was the kid who remembered every political cartoon in my cherished complete Herblock collection, the guy who could recite every detail of Bill the Cat's love affair with Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who had memorized almost every star rating Leonard Maltin gave to films that I had never seen or never would see, and who found himself being able to recite the first 10 pages of the Three Investigators Novel #5 without any prompting or preparation. I never thought was odd or a unique gift- I was too focused inwards as a pre-adolescent to understand myself in relation to others.
Other memory, the memory of where I placed my glasses or keys were harder to grab onto, and the best thing I ever wrote in creative writing was a short poem about the 12 stages of a man losing his keys, and then attempting to live his entire life from his dorm room. I'll dig it up if I can get my old files translated. That's been a constant and falls under a different category of my inability to stick with an organization system once the original thrill wears off. I've forgotten keys and wallets since I've been old enough to carry them, but I've never had trouble remembering what the word for wallet is.
I know there's no way not to make this into a self pitying "Flowers for Algernon" post, but it's worrying me. I feel like I should see Oliver Sacks or some more available neurologist, or at least mention it to my psychiatrist. Any feedback from my 1 and a half readers would be insanely helpful.
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7:03 pm - Posts I'm working on
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There's a long backlong of posts that have been on the back of my mind for a while, and I'm going to try and compose them all over this weekend, even though the events they describe are hardly fresh. Here's a partial list:
- I am no longer Mr. Memory
- The Zombie Trivia Night and why we envy the zombies
- My free speech/ anti-war crusade in the 9th grade and how far it got.
- Should I call the girl from the bar who gave my her number again?
- My officemate - active antagonist or just annoying poser?
current mood: pensive
current music: The click of a hard drive backup
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| Wednesday, February 7th, 2007
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10:55 pm - "Come on man, it's Journey"
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Went out to the Pandora f2f, which was interesting- so interesting that I feel awkward blogging about the details of it next to what I promised to keep as a chronicle of mortification (I'm already planning my post on my dismal history of medication and why I can never revisit now closed hot spot Libation.)
I have a log dormant blogspot blog where I think I'll put most the details on the Q & A. I certainly won't be alone. A full third of the audience raised their hand when the guy from Pandora asked who had a blog.
The title of the entry, incidentally, comes from a response the service got when they briefly let people write explanations why they gave up thumbs up or down to the music.
There wasn't really much of a social opportunity there to mingle- unless you count the 45 minutes where everyone was crammed in the lobby of the Cinema Village as the movie playing before the meeting. People gossiped about the music and technology industry and a girl who left 5 minutes into the actual event handed out fliers for her show on Friday. She described it as "alt-country," but declined to classify where she fit on the 400 different genomes.
On Saturday, there's a single's billiards and poker tournament and a New York Cares Team Leaders meeting, so my dance card will be relatively full.
But I'm most looking forward to the Attack of the Mind Eaters event at the Metroland bar. It may be completely humiliating or it may be great- I have no idea. Plus, I'll finally visit the bar that every blogger in New York allegedly has their birthday party at.
I'm up now, after a week or so of serious depression and general whogivesafuck lack of motivation. I fear I'm going through too many cycles with this- I've been going up and down like a yo-yo since October. I hope I haven't scheduled too many social events and will end up burning my self out on social anxiety held in for too long. That's what happened last Friday, where after a moderately successful (ie non-mortifying) night at a wine tasting and hanging at a bar afterwards, I locked myself in the apartment for the remainder of the weekend, and couldn't even rouse myself to watch my Netflix DVDs.
When I'm depressed and anti-social, I'm stunningly unproductive. I don't clean the apartment- I have to struggle to get myself to even go downstairs to drop off my trash, and I'm unwilling to face anything that might shake me out of my mood. I don't read anything longer than a blog post, and frequently won't read anything that's more involved than a few paragraphs. I'll end up rereading old internet discussions over and over, or looking up Wikipedia entries on pop culture entries that I already know everything about. I won't watch any complex shows or anything that might stir up any emotions (no episodes of the Wire or the Sopranos or the British Office- last weekend I watched all the episodes of a bad British Buffy rip off called Hex.) I'll get obsessed with watching every minute of my bittorent downloads, feeling I can't move until it's finished. This sort of epic dedication to punishing myself with boredom terrifies me, and is alien when I'm out of it. But I never seem to be able to rid myself of it. And the sheer amount of time that I've wasted with it over the last decade just depresses me further.
current mood: chipper
current music: Plunken 'Em By The People Under the Stairs
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| Tuesday, February 6th, 2007
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11:35 am - Real first entry
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The concept behind the blog is that I don't know the social world well- I don't have a great deal of experience in bars or dating or being out and about. I've got Asperger's Syndrome (google around if you're unfamiliar with it, I'm not laying out the full Oliver Sacks diagnosis here) and a huge amount of social anxiety that's at best only somewhat controlled. But as my old high school and college friends drift away I'm finding that I really have to put myself out there, and find a social scene of sorts. And I figured keeping a social diary of a man who tends to hide under his jacket might be of some interest, at least to me.
The problem is that I also (and I'm sorry- I'm not generally someone who buttonholes people at parties and rolls off their list of symptoms and conditions and dietary supplements) have a bit of a depression issue. And generally, when I get depressed, I don't write anything longer than my signature on the credit card receipt for delivered Chinese food that I've ordered because I haven't left the apartment in 3 days. I'm reading blogs but certainly not writing them. So there may be periodic long gaps in the narrative.
To be more precise, I actually tried this very idea 9 months or so ago on blogger, but quickly abandoned it. I like the community features on LiveJournal, and I've been meaning to start up again some kind of writing.
Upcoming: A party for Pandora (the eerie music recommendation service) on Wednesday.
current mood:  anxious
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| Friday, December 2nd, 2005
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1:37 pm - Nothing new....
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