Unsolicited Advice

One thing a lot of people have trouble with, I find, is constructing explicit boundaries for themselves. It's not a thing you really think about, if you've spent your life in the company of reasonable people. Reasonable people have a sense of 'that would be insane, why would I do that to someone else?' that crazies and creepers lack. If you've always gotten by just fine with a Stewart-like definition of out-of-bounds behavior (" I know it when I see it "), then suddenly being confronted with someone who has no qualms about doing whatever they damn well please, crazy or not, is really baffling and dangerous. The best I can do with advice here is just tell you to sit down and think it over. If something someone else is doing or trying to get you to do is making your stomach twist, then it's probably a bad idea. If you can figure out what about the situation is giving you the willies, then you can more easily recognize it when it comes up again, and fla...

The hurly-burly continues over at Chez Capitaine Awkward . One particularly intelligent comment points out that many of the people who protest that they don't know how to be not-creepy are making the mistake of viewing "not-creepy" behavior as a list of concrete things that one must not do, rather than an exercise in pattern-matching and applying shortcuts like generalities. Some of them are doing it for the same reason my mother used to do it -- if they take you at your literal word, they can rationalize doing something ever-so-slightly different the next time, and then finish up by getting angry at you for "changing the rules" because you how the hell was he supposed to know not to do that if you didn't say? I'm sure there's a technical psychological term for this aggravating game somewhere, but it's known, at least to me, as 'please don't eat the daisies'. The reference is to an essay by the late Erma Bombeck Jean Kerr, in whic...

Captain Awkward -- who is one of my new favorite people, by the by -- has apparently been getting a lot of flack from her post about creepiness and how not to engage in it . I say flack specifically because it's not necessarily all directed at her personally, but when you're in the middle of a field of anti-aircraft guns all firing in random directions, you're likely to get some shrapnel in your hide whether anyone is aiming at you or not. One of the running arguments down in the comments (in her blog, in other blogs, on reddit, on the astral plane, etc.) is about whether it makes a difference whether someone is painfully socially awkward, has Asperger's or an autism spectrum disorder, or is just a boundary-free creepy fucker, whether these things are comorbid a lot, and what to do about it. I think it's really damn easy to tell the difference between them, myself. I suspect it's because I do tact about like a Panzer tank does ballet. The people who seem to ...

I've gotten a skosh paranoid, since unexpectedly losing a rat a little while ago. I refuse to worry that my pets are going to die one by one of a mysterious disease whose only symptom is "rat presents as completely normal" -- that way lieth only madness -- but I am keeping an eye out for distress. If you aren't used to rats, it's a little difficult to tell the difference between imminent death and sheer indolence. Rats spend most of their day in a sort of torpor, for much the same reason you used to when you got the summer off from school, except that they can't really watch The Price Is Right while they're lying around. They're prey animals, even if domesticated rats don't really have a conscious recollection of that, so the more they stay still and hidden during the day when other critters can see them, the longer they can get away with playing Call of Duty on the Xbox scuttling around looking for food all night, and not get caught out at it...

I'm at work doing research today, so just a quick link to share: The archive.org stash of Photoplay issues . Photoplay , back in the day, was an industry news and rumors mag for, about, and occasionally by the stars. Most of their content was written by staffers, random journos, and gossip-mongers, but from time to time they asked an actor for a piece -- Errol Flynn, f'r example, starved as a storyteller and essayist for a little while before he decided to starve as an actor, and was actually a pretty bang-up writer. (Although he was also the very definition of an unreliable narrator. He's forthright about his opinions, but on facts he likes to fudge. If the punchline to his story involves something falling down, you would do well to discreetly double-check the operation of gravity.) I sent the link over to Moggie a while ago, and her main comment was that it was exactly like reading a gossip rag today, complete with ads touting solutions to beauty problems you never kn...

Every so often, I go through and read the collective archives of someone's advice column. I do it for more or less the same reason Holmes used to read the agony columns in the London newspapers: You get to be privy to someone's hopes, dreams, and screaming terrors, while at the same time having the comfort of knowing that A. you never, ever have to deal with it in person, and B. someone else has taken the trouble of editing their question down to the important part, so you're spared the digressions about how he was a nurse at the local ER blah blah she was on her way to a postmodernist culinary poetry slam blah blah phone battery died blah pet goat blah blah Illuminati space lasers blah and they never would have ended up married if it weren't for Aunt Gladys' infected pilonidal cyst, isn't that so funny? There are some things that come up over and over and over again. Nobody asked me for any answers, but I did call this thing "Unsolicited Advice" for...

I'm down a rat. Spock. I don't know exactly why. He didn't either. He was fine when I brought them out to run around on their table, and an hour after that when I'd finished feeding me and gave them some pasta to chase around. Then I sat down to watch an episode of something across the room. When I came back, he wouldn't wake up. Kirk tried to help me. Whatever happened, Spock didn't even have time to notice. He just stretched out on their play blanket to sleep and stayed there. I wondered, when he was the first one to develop snurfles, if maybe he wouldn't last very long. Pet rats are pretty inbred, like cocker spaniels only worse, and they can fall prey to unfixable congenital anomalies. I hoped I was wrong. I guess I wasn't. Spock did not live a long life, but he lived a good one. He received many pets, and ate many foods. He lay out on their little rat balcony, chittering and licking my hand like a dog, while I scratched delicately down either si...