Ask the Box

25 jun 06

"In an earlier response, you describe yourself as both friendly and antisocial. Care to elaborate?"

here we enter into dangerous, dangerous waters. if i answer this, then this project will have gone from "question-answer" to "dialog", and its a very slippery slope from there to the total collapse of all ego boundaries and the madness of singular consciousness.

maybe just this once, but it won't be a very long answer, and i'll probably not answer any others. "others" as in, questions that are responses to previous answers.

how can someone be friendly and antisocial at the same time? easily. imagine this creature: he can't take too much human contact, gets nervous around people, has limited social skills, and would therefore most often prefer to remain in hiding, but when forced out, if "human x" approaches with a "hello!" amd a smile, it will be returned.

just because you don't like to be around people, doesn't mean you're not nice to them.

i'm getting tired of all of these personal questions. the whole point of this exercise was that i wanted to write about non-personal things, because those have been shown to make me less insane and hateful. plus, they're just more interesting to write, and, as i like to fantasize, to read. so how about some more of the theoretical, political, philosophical, scientific, theological, sociological, cultural, and technical, and less "wut do u do 4 fun"?

someone once told me that my essays were mostly uninteresting, and that the only juicy blogs worth reading were those that expounded on some component of my inner turmoil. maybe this is true, and the only writing that is worth reading is writing that pertains to "feeling", as opposed to "knowing" (or pretending to know). it's hard to write about feeling without writing about yourself -- perhaps impossible. consider maddox -- he doesn't use his blog as a therapeutic device, confessing his neuroses to the public. but, he emphatically and profanely discusses things he doesn't like and why he doesn't like them, and in effect tells the world that he's angry, hateful, and elitist. if maddox were to discuss grain elevator innovations in the 1950s, it would be more difficult to draw conclusions about his character.

of course one can be antisocial and friendly at once; they're not antonyms. "antisocial" doesn't mean "unkind", "rude" or "mean", nor does "friendly" mean "eager for human contact".