A Small Dose of Introspection

I was at a recent birthday party for a friend. At this party was an old acquaintance with whom I was, in my opinion, a closer friend for several years while in our middle- and high-school years until we had a falling out towards the end of our high school careers and from that period forth we didn't really speak much at all.

We had kept enough in touch enough to know certain things. I knew, for example, that he got married. And I knew when he and his wife had their first child. I guess you can say it could be characterized more like keeping tabs on his life. I don't know what he knew of my own life events.

I went to the party actually looking forward to seeing him again. I was hoping to see his wife...we had gone to school together...and another old friend with whom I had lost touch, but they weren't there. I wanted to see if there was any reconciliation. It's been literally nearly a decade since he had treaded so heavily on my "that pissed me off" buttons, and I believe that the best way to reconcile with people that drive you to want to kill them is to allow a large passage of time with a large distance between you.

We got along at the party. That was good. But...there's always a "but"...there was a period of reflection where I analyzed events.

We talked and exchanged a few stories. He didn't know I had weight surgery. I didn't know that he was diagnosed with Asperger's just as he was going into college.

That was the point I was thinking about this morning. Asperger's. He's always been forthright in many respects, committing faux-pas in social niceties and such. He was usually pretty good at giving and taking criticism, for the most part, as long as it's honest and relating to a task or performance instead of the person. But this doesn't make you an Aspie.

One of the hallmarks of Asperger's is social reclusiveness. This doesn't mean hiding in the woods in a shack or threatening to shoot people that come within twenty feet of your doorstep. It simply refers to a social isolation, whether physical or mental, that stems from the inability to relate to "normals". Normally, from my research, means that we tend not to draw attention to ourselves because we're introverted.

Mr. Man routinely draws attention to himself. He is one of those people that is LOUD. Loud when he speaks, boisterous in his actions, generally...well, there's a line between Asperger's and just being obnoxious. He always firmly fell into the downright obnoxious realm of behavior.

I suppose I see these traits best because there's an indirect relation who is also a loud, boisterous person with delusions of their own capabilities. I've watched that person's behavior and correlated it as best I can with other opinions and behavior profiles and came to the conclusion that this person is completely self-deluded and obnoxious (and quite proud of it, although I don't think the person in question knows just how deluded and obnoxious they are). Mr. Man isn't quite this far gone. Believe me, I've known him longer and there would be no hesitation on my part to slam that which I think needs slamming. He's not quite that bad.

There are other things that made me kind of lump him into the semi-deluded label. He works with people at a state college now after a career working in technology for a startup that went (apparently) belly-up. He talks about making really good money, having lots of good money...he started out from poverty, so maybe "good money" is relative but the way he spoke made it seem as if he's going home at night and rolling in piles of cash. Working for a state college system...I can't reconcile that. I acknowledge that it's possible he's making a lot. A computer science degree can be worth quite a bit in the business world. I'm being paid far below what the market supposedly holds for someone with my degree and experience level (which contributes to my own sense of frustration with my situation do a degree, but that's a separate and more layered topic). In my travels I've found that there are only a few key people that make a lot of money in any field associated with academia:

• Traditional administrator roles - superintendents, deans, heads of major departments (here I mean things like head of organizational roles, not necessarily the head of academic roles like the head of the humanities or science departments).
• Teachers of high rank - teachers with many years of additional education (as required by law in the US for public schools teachers), thus bumped up on payscale for experience + education level, professors of many years of experience (as in near retirement)
• Vendors and consultants - they make short bursts of income in the range of "poopload", especially for solutions that they get organizations invested in. Organizations will spend fifty grand to a million on a solution because of a good snowjob sales presentation and technology challenged decision makers, and once that check is written it becomes a matter of "make it work" instead of "we made a mistake, let's find another solution" once issues are discovered. Along with that "make it work" attitude comes more checks for support to the contractor as people scramble to fit the square peg into the round hole.

There may be others, especially depending on your definitions, but these are the major once that I end up envying a bit when the subject had come up.

I know that he had a talent for framing things in a more positive light than is necessarily reality. When I was applying to colleges I was accepted at two; one large college with a name that contains an "Institute", "Technology", and a city that rhymes with "Rochester" and a polar-opposite school that was small and personal but was associated as a satellite campus to a major university in southern PA. I chose the polar opposite school. He was accepted at the school with the word that rhymes with Rochester in the name as well and went there.

I think he went for a year before dropping out. More than that he transferred to the small, quiet, secluded school that I was attending.

That's a big change. I mean total culture shock. I more or less saw those differences to begin with and that was the major reason I didn't go to that larger but bigger name school; he had framed it in a positive light for several reasons and quite frankly I didn't care. Part of me always thought that at least part of the reason was because he couldn't hack it there, though. I don't know if it was the truth. I just sort of acknowledged and moved on. there's no reason to try to get him to admit something like that.

The point was that if it was true that he "couldn't hack it there" at the previous school he still was superior to everyone else at the smaller college in skills and ability and talent in his mind and didn't hesitate to make people around him understand where they were in the talent ladder compared to him.

Incidentally this further reinforced my opinion of him at the time since I was established on the campus with several Comp Sci people...and thus was privy to several conversations about the "new obnoxious punk that knew everything" roaming the halls, since I came from his hometown area and people wanted to know if he was always like that.

He spoke at the party of being on equal footing with his fellow workers at the college, people who were super-smart with PhD's. He doesn't have a PhD, as far as I ever knew, and he never told me he did. Yet somehow he always seemed to have the respect and ear of these people who worked with him while having the sacred parchment tacked to an office wall. (Oddly enough, as another side note, I tend to notice that there are a lot of people without the high-education documents that insist they're just as smart as, if not more educated due to their "school of hard knocks" life, the people who spent huge amounts of time earning a PhD in their field. I don't know if it's compensation for something or what, but I've run into that a lot. A full comparison of this topic is beyond this post's scope, however.)

He is talented, as far as I could tell. He wasn't stupid by any degree. He made a hobby in high school of playing with assembly language (remember the friend at the beginning on this entry, the guy having the birthday party? He likened Mr. Man's fascination with assembly programming to building a beach one grain of sand at a time. I always loved that comparison because in the world of programming it's pretty accurate). Mr. Man was simply obnoxious and off-putting, even to someone as socially inept as myself.

Where does all this tie in to the title of this blog entry? I believe the vast majority of people seek affirmation for ourselves on others. We want to know how far from "normal" we are and base it on other people, other relationships, to make these judgments. Our perception of ourselves is heavily influenced by our perceptions of others.

This guy for all his flaws was great at making others kind of feel like dirt. He was literally living in a room the size of a large closet and still I would end up envying his skills (though not his ego). He would talk of the fantastic job, the collection of pinball machines and video game stand-up systems like you find in arcades that littered his apartment. He had a fantastic honeymoon-wedding in Hawaii.

Seeing my own situation, stuck in debts, frustrated at certain employment situations, stresses from the surgery and coping with my own mental buggers...the picture he paints is one deserving envy.

Then I remember things like his distortion of the situation; never lying, per se, but he always had a talent for highlighting just the right features to make his talents and situation look a little better and downplay the faults. My own situation isn't the best in the world and I am aspiring to something better; I finally am starting to get off my arse and try for the next rung. I'm moving from a tentative plan to actually trying to do something about it. Maybe he doesn't deserve my envy as much as I had thought; maybe, like the once-removed relative I briefly mentioned, his world is partially in his own perceptions and my inability to tolerate living in a fantasy world once the illusion is broken is part of my problem.

Either way I wish him the best. He's obviously happy with the way his life is now and that's fantastic. Maybe someday I'll have a life similar to the canvas on which he paints. For now, though, I need to get my paints and start working on my own masterpiece.