Sometimes the head leads, sometimes the feet...
I've got a jumble in my head today. A jumble about buttons and hearts and stupidity. A tangle of have to's and training regrets and tears. And then I had to go to a faculty meeting.
Dear, sweet, Terry Pratchet-like faculty...with your leading comments and stuffy vagaries and toddler like chitchat off the planned discourse...how I love and loathe you at the same time. I know I should enjoy the interaction of these meetings, but quite frankly, it sets my teeth on edge. But it's the amount of distraction, not any one thing any one person is doing. It's that there are five, quite interesting conversations going on around me and I don't know which one I should be paying attention to, so I try to grab them all. I get irritated when I have to work so hard to follow and it's just bull shit about, I don't know, the landscaping on campus.
Really, the whole Aspergers as a possibility is starting to fit. Yesterday, I took some accounting recruiters to lunch, and knew that the English skills of my faculty counterpart would leave me carrying the brunt of the conversation. So...I planned some topical questions to keep the small talk from getting painful. Yes. I do have to plan small talk. Small talk exhausts me, but I find if I plan two or three or four safe topics that I can get through a lunch without staring painfully at my glass and panicking that I can't think of someting to say. Small talk is completely irrelevant and stupid and phony...and I have never understood it. I think people think I'm a jerk, but I just...have nothing to say.
I don't know if realizing these things is freeing or damning. I'm scared to talk to anyone about it. Maybe there's nothing wrong with me and I'm just an asshole, after all. I'm typing these things in the hope that I'll get the courage to keep talking about them.
Dear, sweet, Terry Pratchet-like faculty...with your leading comments and stuffy vagaries and toddler like chitchat off the planned discourse...how I love and loathe you at the same time. I know I should enjoy the interaction of these meetings, but quite frankly, it sets my teeth on edge. But it's the amount of distraction, not any one thing any one person is doing. It's that there are five, quite interesting conversations going on around me and I don't know which one I should be paying attention to, so I try to grab them all. I get irritated when I have to work so hard to follow and it's just bull shit about, I don't know, the landscaping on campus.
Really, the whole Aspergers as a possibility is starting to fit. Yesterday, I took some accounting recruiters to lunch, and knew that the English skills of my faculty counterpart would leave me carrying the brunt of the conversation. So...I planned some topical questions to keep the small talk from getting painful. Yes. I do have to plan small talk. Small talk exhausts me, but I find if I plan two or three or four safe topics that I can get through a lunch without staring painfully at my glass and panicking that I can't think of someting to say. Small talk is completely irrelevant and stupid and phony...and I have never understood it. I think people think I'm a jerk, but I just...have nothing to say.
I don't know if realizing these things is freeing or damning. I'm scared to talk to anyone about it. Maybe there's nothing wrong with me and I'm just an asshole, after all. I'm typing these things in the hope that I'll get the courage to keep talking about them.