Categories: uncategorized
Date: 05 July 2006 15:35:47
I was appalled at my reflection.
It's always embarrassing when someone else has to point out how obnoxious you're being, but it's good to have friends prepared to do that. The tricky bit is persuading them to stay friends after they've discovered how unpleasant you are. (Perhaps I should have written "how unpleasant you can be" there, but that's not how I feel - I think the unpleasantness is always there, like the drone of a bagpipe, and it's just occasionally hidden by some more reasonable behaviour).
So, anyway, I was watching another DVD (yes, I've been watching a lot lately, but that's deliberate) and one of the characters featured was a geek. Quite an extreme example - he was fairly tongue-tied but obviously very intelligent, and he looked awful - bad hair, bad glasses, terrible clothes etc. Ok, no deviation from the clichés there yet. But he was also obnoxious - foul-mouthed and bad-tempered. Somehow that's not what I expect of a geek, and I suppose in a primeval way I see a troubling contradiction there. Obnoxious behaviour is, at heart, trying to pick a fight - if you're obnoxious then you're inviting someone to punch you. And if you've the traditional 7-stone weakling geek body then that's a strange/foolish thing to do. Somehow (and this is probably very discriminatory, but I'm not in a PC frame of mind) the geekness made the obnoxiousness even more unappealing. Which made it quite unpleasant to recognize just how close I am to being that character. It's not a huge surprise, being something I've been aware of off and on for a long time, but I suppose it's a ball that I'd taken my eye off, and it's a pain to have to handle it on top of everything else that's going on. In the past I've dealt with it by biting my tongue, and that's probably the best strategy still. So if you meet me in the next few weeks and notice that I'm quieter than usual, then you'll know why.