When is a vacation not a vacation?

[nimitzbrood]

July 19, 2009 7:51 PM 7/19/09

When you spend the weekend supporting all the computers an technology that everybody brought with them on the trip. I’m not supporting everything but so far I’ve had to deal with wireless connectivity issues, misc hardware, and an errant wireless Wii sensor bar.

Comments

[entropy_house]

*hugs* I couldn't take crowds, either. (Heck it has to be a good day for me to be able to handle the grocery.)

Any chance you can maybe exclaim over the beauty of nature and go for a long walk with your camera for a little de-stress time without getting the 'oh, you're anti-social' remarks?

[nimitzbrood]

I probably can but that kind of defeats the purpose of quietly trying to concentrate on doing basic math among other things.

Though it could possibly work for working on the other task I wanted to do out here which was practice my drawing.

[entropy_house]

Under the circumstances, you're not going to be able to do all the things you had hoped, anyway. And without de-stress time, you're going to be far less efficient at everything- social stress just eats up your energy.

[acelightning]

Socially "normal" people really don't grok that people like you actually need to be left alone; they think you're consciously choosing to ignore them or shut them out, and that's an action they define as "rude" and "anti-social". They don't want to be rude to you in return, so they attempt to include you, coercively if necessary, in the group activities they need as strongly as you need solitude. It's very difficult to get past the human tendency to consider one's own behavior as The Only Right And Proper Way To Behave, and try to see it from another perspective. Maybe a metaphor might help... just because fish love to swim around in water, and will die if they're not surrounded by it, doesn't mean the same thing applies to birds...

[nimitzbrood]

I think the worst ones are the ones that think "Well if we just force him to be social he'll be much better off than he is now."

*sigh*

In the past I would have been a wandering barbarian or a scribe with his nose in a giant library. Sometimes it feels like this society has no place for people like me now...

[acelightning]

There are still plenty of social niches for people who are solitary by nature - almost everything to do with computers, for example. Or be a writer, researcher, or inventor, although those don't exactly promise steady employment.

Some contact with other human beings is unavoidable, especially if they're your relatives. And they do generally mean well. As I said, they find your need to be alone as incomprehensible as you find their need to flock together, and they feel a need to "cure" your "anti-social" reclusiveness, to make you just like themselves. All I can suggest is that you try to get people used to you being a loner - "oh, don't bother pestering Nimmy, that's just the way he is."

[bmhmom]

I admit, it has been an awful vacation for him and it's all my fault. I shouldn't have subjected him to all of this.

[nimitzbrood]

I think once again we are both victim of a comedy of errors. Or a tragedy of horrors I'm not sure which.