I think a lot of things about a lot of people that do not make it here. Much of what I do in psych profiling involves reconstructing narratives -- of events, of lives, of motivations. It is experience, and intuition, and guesswork, much of which I can never check. And quite often, I am guessing about things of which most people do not speak. They fall into that curious chasm between things that are only for intimates, and things that are fair game for public observation. Things which are visible, but almost always politely glossed over. The terminally socially-anxious bite their nails over these things, so important and so impossible to ask about. The relatively normal are often flustered to hear them spoken of aloud. Curiously, I find that compliments are more startling than criticism. People who have consciously steeled themselves against bitter comments can be the most taken aback by praise. I air a lot of these observations to friends, but do not post them here. Private gossip
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I believe I've mentioned that one of my persistent problems with profiling is that I don't know what anyone else looks like to a normal person, because I've never been one. I am occasionally reminded of this, usually with all the subtlety of a brick to the head. Moggie recently turned up this piece , by Amy Raphael for The Observer -- the Sunday Guardian , more or less -- as press for the third series of The Mighty Boosh , which was out late 2007-ish. She's not particularly wrong in her observations, or at least no more factually wrong than any other entertainment reporter -- how she could talk to Fielding for any length of time and think he was from south London, I have no idea, do other people not hear the th->f bit everywhere? -- but her interpretations of a lot of their interactions are completely alien to me. I assume hers are more normal than mine, primarily because Fielding mentions that people tend to take Barratt as more aloof and sometimes abrasive t
There's a photo I've been staring at, off and on, for about the past week, trying to work out if I could put my thoughts about it into words, and whether it would do anyone any good if I tried. After much writing and deleting and writing and deleting and writing and deleting with extreme prejudice, I think my point is: If ever there were an example of how we do the human race a grave disservice by using the very concept of intimacy solely as a euphemism for sex , it is these two. I have no idea where this picture was taken. It's a candid shot; the flat lighting suggests an unbounced flash, and the depth of field is not quite sufficient to get everything in focus at the same time. No pro would have done that intentionally -- and if it happened accidentally, the image would have been trashed with anything else that didn't quite work at the proofs stage. I don't know what prompted the gesture. They could be acting, I suppose, but they're comedians. When t
[Some more pleasant things for Moggie, who is drowning under the weight of some chemistry exams and a list of car repairs right now. THIS IS STILL YOUR FAULT MOGGIE. ALL OF IT.] One thing I find particularly interesting about being able to read body language -- consciously, most people can do it as a sort of blind instinct -- is watching people who are seriously weird interact successfully with people who aren't. Some of the gestures and expressions we make seem to be innate, but a lot more of them are determined by our cultural background. There's an infinity of potential variant dialects of non-verbal communication, and if you happen to have developed an especially strange one, adjusting for mutual intelligibility can be a challenge. It can make your life pretty difficult if your movements say one thing to you and mean a totally different thing to the people around you, as the autistic spectrum people know all too well. But every once in a while, someone with a really odd