The Eccentric has started a non-profit. It is not going well. He has hired me as one of two "operations managers", but won't let either of us handle any of the actual operations. Which is unfortunate, because it turns out that he is rubbish at small business administration. His main issue is that he has no relationship of any kind with the linear flow of time, and consequently no useful time management skills. He has no idea how long anything will realistically take, and, per the famous equation, no idea how much it's going to cost. This is bad under most circumstances, but ruinous when running on a shoestring budget.
He is going to flame out spectacularly. It will be very sad. He has resisted every piece of advice everyone has ever given him about how to avoid this, so there is nothing I can do. I have resolved to let him pay me an hourly wage to watch the desk of his beloved debacle until our current engagement ends or I find a better job, whichever comes first.
The two of us are friends for unconnected, mainly bachata-related reasons, so I'm not worried on that front; it is going to hit him very hard, though, and I'm well aware that I'm now part of the support system that will have to help him pick up the pieces. A lot of people who have known him for a very long time have come out to give him moral support, which is a good sign for the aftermath. One of them hugged me and told me I was "doing God's work" babysitting him and the project until it imploded. Ah, well.
More interesting, and considerably less depressing, is the other ops manager the Eccentric scared up when the job was originally slated to be full time, and I said I could not do 40+ hours a week by myself. I keep wanting to call him the "new kid", which is really unfair of me. He is an adult, albeit a young one -- old enough to buy liquor, not old enough to rent a car.
The Novyi is a newly-minted film school grad who turns out to have a number of quirks in common with the Eccentric, although mercifully he is far more laid-back in conversation, and seems to have a mailing address on Planet Earth. He also turns out to have an Asperger's Syndrome tag from before that diagnosis was revised out of existence. I've been giving him the tl;dr guide to Dealing With The Eccentric, which is mostly down to 'I love him to bits but he is not neurotypical, best be as blunt as possible when talking to him, and here is a handy quick-translation phrasebook'. A lot of the things I have brought up that other people find difficult to deal with are things the Novyi sees in himself, although in much milder form. This bodes well for the Novyi being part of the interface layer between the Eccentric and the outside world, assuming the Eccentric ever stop hoarding all the contact info for everybody and actually lets us do that.
One of the most surprising ones was when I mentioned that the Eccentric had a friend radius of about five inches, and the Novyi basically just nodded and went 'yah, it me'. That got me curious. I had a hunch while I was stuck on the train home that night and typed 'autism spectrum disorders personal space' into Google, and holy smokes, I did not know that was a thing.
Interpersonal distance is an important social signalling channel. It stands to reason that if one of your symptoms is a difficulty deciphering social signals, you'd be irregular in your handling of personal space. I had no idea that the skew was that consistent, though. There's one particularly striking study where the relative differences between comfortable distances for various conditions were almost identical between variable-matched autistic and non-autistic participants, but the absolute distances reported for the autistic participants were universally much closer. It's marked in the trials where the experimenter walked toward the participants, but even more so in the trials where the participants controlled the distance between themselves and the experimenter. The data for one autistic participant were discarded as an outlier when they literally got nose-to-nose with the experimenter without reporting any discomfort, which is a little bit yikes.
[Similar results have been reported for trials measuring comfortable clearances around inanimate objects like coat racks. The experimenters spin that into a hypothesis about miscalibration in the amygdala-controlled 'let's maybe don't run into things' warning system, but that honestly just sounds like they're slapping around for a plausible guess. The results are interesting enough without the ass-pulls. Also not doing anything to dismantle my argument that the Eccentric has a really solid case of Weird Brains.]
This may never come up with the Novyi again, outside of random chit-chat. It's only been a couple of weeks, and I've no idea how much friending he is interested in doing with a co-worker who is 15+ years his senior. On the other hand, I've already been asked point-blank whether we were at 'handshake' or 'hug'. If he does work substantially like the Eccentric here, he will give at most 2% of a shit about social convention, and the other 98% will be given over to figuring out where he wants to be standing vs. where I have given him permission to stand.
I am inclined to think it is probably okay, question mark? I find the idea of an environment where people hug me and are glad that I show up to be quite pleasant, which automatically makes me suspicious, on the grounds that nothing I want could possibly be a good idea. It seems to work out all right with the Eccentric. Hanging on him like a fashionable scarf has never stopped me from saying no when he's being unreasonable, and I can honestly say that my 'no' has never prompted him to withhold affection. It may be an odd dynamic, but seems to be functional. The Novyi has seen me do it, so he knows I do have platonic friends who get clearance.
I feel like I'm supposed to be skeptical of the Novyi's ability to know what he's about on the grounds of his youth. That seems unfair as well, especially inasmuch as he's got a good grasp on the 'ask first' part. He got a handshake the first time, which passed without note. The next time I saw him I reconsidered and decided hug was fine; I found out later, and then only in response to a comment I made about it, that he's pretty much always on the side of 'hug', to the point where it is a running joke among his friends.
The implied universality of that is reassuring. It seems to be a class feature rather than a targeted thing. I gather from what he's said that it's not that he wants to loll on specific people so much as he kind of wants to do it to everyone in the 'friend' category. The ones who are actually subject to it are just the ones who have given him permission. People who zero in on me make me nervous, especially if they ask over and over and are obviously disappointed when I decline. So far the Novyi is on solid ground.
I'm sure I'm overthinking this times a million, but the Eccentric took me by surprise, and to be honest, these are things of great significance to me. Affection was not really a thing my family got into, and I had to learn it from scratch as a teenager when I finally made some decent friends. I have a special sympathy for the idea of someone going through life knowing that standing on someone else's shoes is what feels like friendship, and also knowing that they can't ever do that, or their friends will feel crowded and run. It sounds like a special kind of hell. No wonder I got the Eccentric's attention so quickly when I decided to quit standing so far away.
He is going to flame out spectacularly. It will be very sad. He has resisted every piece of advice everyone has ever given him about how to avoid this, so there is nothing I can do. I have resolved to let him pay me an hourly wage to watch the desk of his beloved debacle until our current engagement ends or I find a better job, whichever comes first.
The two of us are friends for unconnected, mainly bachata-related reasons, so I'm not worried on that front; it is going to hit him very hard, though, and I'm well aware that I'm now part of the support system that will have to help him pick up the pieces. A lot of people who have known him for a very long time have come out to give him moral support, which is a good sign for the aftermath. One of them hugged me and told me I was "doing God's work" babysitting him and the project until it imploded. Ah, well.
More interesting, and considerably less depressing, is the other ops manager the Eccentric scared up when the job was originally slated to be full time, and I said I could not do 40+ hours a week by myself. I keep wanting to call him the "new kid", which is really unfair of me. He is an adult, albeit a young one -- old enough to buy liquor, not old enough to rent a car.
The Novyi is a newly-minted film school grad who turns out to have a number of quirks in common with the Eccentric, although mercifully he is far more laid-back in conversation, and seems to have a mailing address on Planet Earth. He also turns out to have an Asperger's Syndrome tag from before that diagnosis was revised out of existence. I've been giving him the tl;dr guide to Dealing With The Eccentric, which is mostly down to 'I love him to bits but he is not neurotypical, best be as blunt as possible when talking to him, and here is a handy quick-translation phrasebook'. A lot of the things I have brought up that other people find difficult to deal with are things the Novyi sees in himself, although in much milder form. This bodes well for the Novyi being part of the interface layer between the Eccentric and the outside world, assuming the Eccentric ever stop hoarding all the contact info for everybody and actually lets us do that.
One of the most surprising ones was when I mentioned that the Eccentric had a friend radius of about five inches, and the Novyi basically just nodded and went 'yah, it me'. That got me curious. I had a hunch while I was stuck on the train home that night and typed 'autism spectrum disorders personal space' into Google, and holy smokes, I did not know that was a thing.
Interpersonal distance is an important social signalling channel. It stands to reason that if one of your symptoms is a difficulty deciphering social signals, you'd be irregular in your handling of personal space. I had no idea that the skew was that consistent, though. There's one particularly striking study where the relative differences between comfortable distances for various conditions were almost identical between variable-matched autistic and non-autistic participants, but the absolute distances reported for the autistic participants were universally much closer. It's marked in the trials where the experimenter walked toward the participants, but even more so in the trials where the participants controlled the distance between themselves and the experimenter. The data for one autistic participant were discarded as an outlier when they literally got nose-to-nose with the experimenter without reporting any discomfort, which is a little bit yikes.
[Similar results have been reported for trials measuring comfortable clearances around inanimate objects like coat racks. The experimenters spin that into a hypothesis about miscalibration in the amygdala-controlled 'let's maybe don't run into things' warning system, but that honestly just sounds like they're slapping around for a plausible guess. The results are interesting enough without the ass-pulls. Also not doing anything to dismantle my argument that the Eccentric has a really solid case of Weird Brains.]
This may never come up with the Novyi again, outside of random chit-chat. It's only been a couple of weeks, and I've no idea how much friending he is interested in doing with a co-worker who is 15+ years his senior. On the other hand, I've already been asked point-blank whether we were at 'handshake' or 'hug'. If he does work substantially like the Eccentric here, he will give at most 2% of a shit about social convention, and the other 98% will be given over to figuring out where he wants to be standing vs. where I have given him permission to stand.
I am inclined to think it is probably okay, question mark? I find the idea of an environment where people hug me and are glad that I show up to be quite pleasant, which automatically makes me suspicious, on the grounds that nothing I want could possibly be a good idea. It seems to work out all right with the Eccentric. Hanging on him like a fashionable scarf has never stopped me from saying no when he's being unreasonable, and I can honestly say that my 'no' has never prompted him to withhold affection. It may be an odd dynamic, but seems to be functional. The Novyi has seen me do it, so he knows I do have platonic friends who get clearance.
I feel like I'm supposed to be skeptical of the Novyi's ability to know what he's about on the grounds of his youth. That seems unfair as well, especially inasmuch as he's got a good grasp on the 'ask first' part. He got a handshake the first time, which passed without note. The next time I saw him I reconsidered and decided hug was fine; I found out later, and then only in response to a comment I made about it, that he's pretty much always on the side of 'hug', to the point where it is a running joke among his friends.
The implied universality of that is reassuring. It seems to be a class feature rather than a targeted thing. I gather from what he's said that it's not that he wants to loll on specific people so much as he kind of wants to do it to everyone in the 'friend' category. The ones who are actually subject to it are just the ones who have given him permission. People who zero in on me make me nervous, especially if they ask over and over and are obviously disappointed when I decline. So far the Novyi is on solid ground.
I'm sure I'm overthinking this times a million, but the Eccentric took me by surprise, and to be honest, these are things of great significance to me. Affection was not really a thing my family got into, and I had to learn it from scratch as a teenager when I finally made some decent friends. I have a special sympathy for the idea of someone going through life knowing that standing on someone else's shoes is what feels like friendship, and also knowing that they can't ever do that, or their friends will feel crowded and run. It sounds like a special kind of hell. No wonder I got the Eccentric's attention so quickly when I decided to quit standing so far away.
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