Not long ago, I discussed with some friends the seemingly odd phenomenon of
web pages that teach you how to make small talk. I at first refused aloud to believe in their existence. "But imagine someone
so spergin' that they can barely look straight at other human beings," one friend offered. "They'd get some mileage out of them."
Truth,
but I still had a hard time wrapping my mind around the notion that one
might learn how to converse with one's fellow man via deliberate,
written-out instructions instead of the supposedly universal impulse to
connect. There's a disturbingly calculating feel to it, like
conversation is always a means to an extrasocial end for these people.
As negligible as it might seem to some, the gulf between asking others
about their lives because you're genuinely interested and asking others
about their lives because some HTML file said so seems comically huge
to me.
Yet it was not so long ago that my own social skills were
teh sux0r. It's not like I grew up shifting my eyes, stammering at the
ground and making unintentionally creepy overtures, but it did take an
unusually long time for me to recognize the appeal of that whole "other
people in the world" concept. I remember regarding most social
situations, outside of gatherings with my closest friends, as fruitless
time sinks to be avoided, or at least to be checked out of early so as
to get back to whatever comic or computer game I was making at the
time. The notion that I might speak to somebody I didn't already know
was so alien that I didn't even realize the extent to which I
unconsciously evaded it.
By thinking back to this time in
childhood — by which I mean "my entire childhood and most of my
adolescence" — I can empathize to a surprising extent with those
net.antisocials desperately for the flowchart with which they can
achieve effective social operation. Having over-internalized the
importance of honesty at an early age, I came to find that telling the
truth bit me in the @$$ as often as it helped — more often, in fact. I
stuck with implausible truths rather than substituting plausible lies,
with the ironic effect that I probably was
thought more of a
liar than the average, healthily lying kid around. Hence my tendency
not to ask people how they were doing or what was going on with their
various jobs and families: I didn't
want to know, and to front like I did would, to my young mind, constitute some form of lie. And that would be bad!
So
for the longest time, I spoke when spoken to, and when spoken to, my
unstated (maybe even unacknowledged) goal was to escape the
conversation as soon as possible, thereby minimizing the probability of
boredom and/or embarrassment. Why was I like this? Some really simple
guesses:
(a) growing up an only child, I didn't have to
interact with peers outside school if I didn't want to, and I usually
didn't want to,
(b) I quickly developed penchants for a variety
of solitary pursuits like drawing, reading and programming, which could
have been a natural consequence of
(a), and
(c) I wanted
to engage adults in conversation, but my attempts at statements of
substance usually drew only supercilious "Out of the mouths of babes!"
laughter, and I eventually stopped touching that burner. (Also, I
remain unsure how extricable the condition of "not being interested in
anyone else" is from the condition of "being eleven.")
Only with
the awesome power of hindsight can I see that this suite of
dysfunctions is responsible for 40-60 percent of the suckage —
conservative estimate — that has ever seeped into my life. I like to
think that I have defeated these tendencies, and 100+ hours spent in
conversation with famous strangers would seem to attest to that
victory. Given the strong correlation between my ability to talk to
other people on my life's
x axis and achievement/interestingness on its
y, it's no surprise that I published, on Twitter, this advanced formula:
(technical skills)(social skills) = (probability of success)
Seems true to me. Those I meet in possession of high technical skills and low social skills
could
make a lot happen in the world, but they lack access the channels that
can use them. Those I meet in possession of high social skills but low
technical skills
could arrange an opportunity to do whatever
they want in life with maybe three phone calls and an SMS message — but
they have little of value to offer. (I refrain from trotting out the
weary example of Paris Hilton.) Perhaps the two groups could work out a
Freak the Mighty-style arrangement whereby the techies ride around on the shoulders of the socialites.
I
know a lot more people who fall into the former group than the latter,
frustrated types given to pissed-offedness at the world's never having
adequately recognized their genius, their creativity, their wizardry
with Python,
etc. This might be a geek thing. Though my struggles to break into geek culture are
well-documented,
I've long since gotten comfortable with exile on its periphery,
offering me as it does a slightly more objective-ish (as distinct from
Objectivist) viewpoint on what happens within it. I can tell you that,
if there's a primary reason geeks aren't into sports, it's that they
already play one full-time: resenting the unreasonable workings of the
non-geek world.
As hesitant as I am to bust out "most people"
statements, most people probably fall in the "socially fluent/can't do
much" end of the spectrum. You find a high concentration of this far
end in sales departments of organizations the world over, or at least I
do, and when I do, I can't help but regard them as I would space
aliens. I'm almost in awe at people who can somehow carry on
conversations with whomever happens to be around, regardless of
interests, background or sensibilities. This awe is tempered by their
yen for cliché, their ceaseless flogging of sports metaphors and their
generalized dopiness, but neverthtless, these social creatures, even if
hindered by a near-absolute lack of meaningful aptitude, go pretty far
in life — way farther than the average uncommunicative whiz kid.
So
the grousing about "it's all who you know" resonates on and on and on
in geekier quarters, specifically among those whose geekiness-related
skills aren't so incandescent that the remainder of humanity beats a
path to their door to harness them. I myself have come to understand,
if not enthusiastically champion, the reasons it's like this. Placing
myself in the shoes of someone in a position to reward someone else for
doing something — a pure fantasy, I assure you — I can't deny that, 99
times out of 100, I go for the known quantity rather than the stranger
who might well do a "better" job. I'll take even a weak, third-hand
pre-existing social bond over super-competence any day. When Merlin
Mann
says "good decisions and good relationships" make success, I don't think he's lying. When A.C. Grayling
says "life is all about relationships," I don't think he's lying either.
Which brings me to clothes. Jesse Thorn, the mastermind behind
The Sound of Young America and the man for whom I've written a
Podthought each week for a year and a half or so, has begun a new project called
Put This On. It's half a men's style blog on the order of
A Suitable Wardrobe or
Sartorially Inclined and half a men's style video series. The
pilot episode is about denim.
Somebody started a
thread about that pilot
on Metafilter, which is not not a place where geeks don't not go. Some
of the comments express fairly harsh opinions about the fact that
anybody would create a whole series about something as insubstantial
and confusing as what to wear. One opinion, which I suspect of sarcasm,
runs as follows:
(Squeal) Oh! Fashion! It's Fabulous!!!11!! (end squeal)
Oh,
yes, men. You too can become a slave to fashion! Step right up, there's
no time to loose! Fashion, it's not just for women any more! now
everyone can become a slave to the god of superficial appearances!
Everyone who's anyone is doing it, so should you!
This one shows an amusing self-awareness:
I'm sitting here seething that there even exists a pair of jeans that costs more than $100.00
[emphasis mine, because how could I not emphasize that], yet I just
realized I have a second Firefox tab opened to a discussion breaking
down the costs one would incur if one were to build his own
film-quality Stormtrooper armor.
And I think this sums up the attitude I'm getting at near-perfectly:
I already own a perfectly serviceable belt.
This
being something of a sartorially dissolute age, I wouldn't argue that
the sour puss about clothes exists only, or even primarily, within geek
communities. (Its wreaks equally horrific consequences in what
Madelaine and I have termed the "
Casual Dad" movement.) But it's as clear a petri dish as any to observe it in action.
While
I sort of get the un-meritocratic feel of the social sphere, the
perceived difficulty of assembling an aesthetically pleasing wardrobe
and the excitement to be had in engagement with fictional narratives, I
find it very difficult to hear someone bitch about how it's all who you
know, assert that style is superficial nonsense to be circumvented with
a pair of Costco cargo pants or rave about this one season of
Battlestar Galactica
that "takes the characters to some really dark places." Specifically, I
find it difficult not to beat the living crap out of them, for reasons
I can't fully articulate.
The
lazy dresser's implicit disregard for the rest of humanity has
something to do with it. I've entertained fair-to-middlin' threadular
interests for years, but the rise of
Put This On and the
constellation of internet style stuff that surrounds it has
aggressively bumped those up to middlin'-to-strong. Naturally, I have
taken such extreme measures as building a personal Alan Flusser
library, organized for constant reference.
But style is not
achieved by Alan Flusser books alone. Only with tireless augmentation
and winnowing can one's wardrobe be refined. Alas, this entails a
radical change to my current clothes-buying ritual, that is, only
buying clothes when I've fallen into desperate need for them. In
dressing as in wildlife, once the herd thins, things get exponentially
uglier as pressure increases on the remaining specimens, and I've come
to sense, and fear, the approach of extinction more acutely than ever.
I
can chalk one up in the "not starting from zero" department based on
the fact that I occasionally get complimented on my capacity for
dressing myself. Though I have never thought of myself as a
particularly adept wearer of clothes, I guess I do have some points in
my favor:
- I own not just one, but many a "perfectly serviceable
belt," and wear them without exception (unless I'm at the gym or
something)
- I wear no t-shirts emblazoned with brand ads or
other gauche-y text, and no t-shirt of any kind ever constitutes my
outermost layer (unless I'm at the gym or something)
- Most of what I own actually fits
- Nothing I own has holes in it, patched or otherwise
Okay,
so those last two (and possibly those first two) sound pretty lame,
but you'd be shocked at the extent of the general ill fit and holiness
of most Southern Californian clothes. I'm the first to call
overblownness on the alleged "Nor-Cal"/"So-Cal" divide — the real
distinction is east-west, and even that's bleached out when viewed in a
global context — but there really does seem to be a style problem down
here. My theory is that some sartorial retardation-causing poison leaks
into the water supply, giving rise to symptomatic hoodies and
flip-flops. (Not that the condition is unique to this area. I grew up
around Seattle, land of the fleece and/or Gore-Tex
TM-clad faux outdoorsman.)
I
realize this makes me sound like a fulminating, red-faced pedant, the
miserable, useless kind of fellow incensed by the sight of white after
Labor Day. But I'm not bothered by the way other people dress; I'm
bothered by the influence the way other people dress might have on the
way
I dress. This falls in line with the overall attitudinal
transformation of my adult life: every day, I give one less damn about
everything out of my direct control, including the actions of others,
and several additional damns about actions of my own. My thoughts about
clothes represent this in microcosm: even if I currently dress five
percent more presentably than the half-state that surrounds me, my
wardrobe still
feels shambolic.
This sparks a belated
resolution for 2010, one designed to break the sparseness of my
clothes-acquisition habits and to steadily lift the average quality of
my outfit. Every weekend, I acquire one new non-shabby article of
clothing. It needs not be expensive — in fact, I limit myself to fifty
bucks per item — and it needs not be brand new, but it needs be
aesthetically interesting and as wearably functional as possible. I've
built up a comfortable
buffer
by acquiring a few items on the internet all at once — yes, you can
successfully buy non-utilitarian, non-Reddit-y clothes here — but I'll
keep myself paced from now on.
Whether you're talking about
launching and maintaining good conversations or selecting and wearing
good clothes, the operative issue is self-presentation. I consider that to
be a chief aspect of living life in the same way that one would craft a
work of art. I know that sounds
stupendously fancy, but hear me
out. Having accepted and even embraced, per the above, that I should
only care about that which I can personally control, I arrive at the
conclusion that the locus of my focus, as it were, should be the
gradual iteration and refinement of what I, like, do. Both the clothes
I buy and put on as well as the human interactions I execute (as
opposed to the humans I execute) reside smack in the middle of this
region of concern. While I certainly want to affect and create things
external to myself, that will only happen as a function of my actions.
If one wants to create art, it only happens as a consequence of
creating oneself — and pretty much everything, I would submit, is art.
That said, does anybody know a good tailor in Santa Barbara? I don't know any good tailors.
