There are situations in which I think I must have mild Aspergers or some similar social-misunderstanding disorder. Usually immediately after I think this, I chide myself for diagnosing myself with an easy excuse instead of simply accepting that I am socially awkward and have the capability to change it.

Do I have the capability to change it? As time goes on, I get less certain. The way people respond to me is entirely at odds with how I think they should, and how they perceive me, when asked, is entirely at odds with how I perceive myself. Up until now I sort of thought that I just had an expressionless face that tended towards looking annoyed and so people just figured I wasn't interested (in them, in anything). But lately I've been making a concerted effort. To smile longer than I think is appropriate, to look people in the eye even though it's supremely uncomfortable for me, to act excited and bubbly when the situation seems to call for it.

None of it makes a difference. I suspect that smiling becomes grimacing, eye contact becomes staring, excited becomes manically excitable, and bubbly becomes bubbling over. All without my knowledge, because I can't see myself through a normal person's eyes. I can honestly say I have no fucking clue what draws people to one another (conversely, what repels them from one another). Or even what looks merely normal and acceptable.

I had a meeting with a professor the other day and she noted that I seem 'blunt and straightforward - a scientific approach - but very impatient'. Another professor noted today that I am 'clearly introverted'. When I first started working for the graduate student I am still working for, she asked me if I was nervous about sixty times.

These attributes: quirky, yes, maybe even nerdy, but abnormal enough for most people to react as though they think I hate them?

Inadvertently I reminded my mom that I used to lie to her all the time by bringing up corn on the cob.

"What do you think he'll really like me to cook, though?" she asked me, referring to my boyfriend, and dinner.

"Well," I said, "his mom's allergic to corn, so I guess he's never really gotten to eat corn on the cob very often. You could make that."

"We could eat it with chopsticks, just like what's-her-name's family, that girl you were friends with back in... middle school? Elementary school?"

"What girl? You mean Yexin?"

"Yeah, Yexin."

"Her family didn't eat corn on the cob with chopsticks. What are you talking about?"

"You told me they did."

"I did? When?"

"When you were a kid. You came back from dinner at their place once and said that they made corn on the cob and ate it one kernel at a time with chopsticks. You were really excited about it."

"Ummm... I made that up."

"No, you didn't! I remember you telling me."

"And I remember making it up. How could you eat corn on the cob with chopsticks, anyway?"

"I don't know. I guess you couldn't. Why would you make something like that up?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know??"

"No."

It always really bothered my mom that I did that. Once, I guess (this is all via her, because I don't remember) I came home from kindergarten and wove her a long, complex yarn about some kind of kindergarten drama that unfolded all over me that day - it had kids making fun of me, and teachers yelling, and construction paper everywhere, and crying - and when she went in to talk to my teacher about it she found that it had never happened. Not only that, nothing close to it had happened. The day in question was an especially normal day.

I guess that when I came home that day and she asked me that omnipresent question: "How was school today?" I didn't want to say 'Fine' like every other day. I would have rather had a story. Even now the act of saying 'Fine' as a response to anything puts me in a bad mood - 'How are you', 'How's your day going', etc. It's boring. It's small talk and it means absolutely nothing. Not just something shallow, even, but literally nothing. Nobody ever says 'it's going terrible' or 'I'm feeling a bit off today' (even my officemate, who's British, just responds with 'fair to middling' no matter what the situation is). People are always saying 'How are ya!' to me by the water cooler and it makes me visibly cringe, because obviously I am a complete sociopath.

Now that I'm not in kindergarten, I obviously know that I have more than those two options (saying 'Fine' or making up a long, complicated, and completely untrue story). There is always the option of taking the truth and telling it like a story. This isn't hard for me; I've never had a day in my life that I felt could be summed up by 'Fine' - there's always the tiny victories, like a bus coming as soon as you round the corner to the stop, or a man yelling 'you dropped your wallet!' after you as you pedal away from a stop sign, instead of just stealing it and leaving, or the weather warming to 68 in the middle of winter - or the tiny battles, like locking yourself out of your house on the day you have to rush home and get ready for a fancy dinner. These are all true and have happened, and have story-worthy details that I've forgotten only because it's been awhile (except for the fancy dinner one, which happened on Valentines Day). I try to stick to these kinds of true stories now that I am 23 and should know better than to constantly lie to people I love.

But sometimes you just want an explosion, you know? Sometimes you want to have run into your favorite celebrity at the beach. It's not even the attention - I can live without attention; in fact, I prefer it - but rather the thrill of telling it, of inventing it convincingly as I go along.

My mom used to tell me - she said my kindergarten teacher told her to say it - that if I wanted to tell her a story like that, it was okay, as long as at the end I said 'just kidding' or something similar. I remember very clearly having none of that. It sucked all the fun out of it. I said, 'okay,' and just kept doing it my way. My mom, rather than recognizing me as the lying little brat I most certainly was, took me at my word, and believed my stories from there on out. Because of this, we're constantly running into things like the corn on the cob story where I have to, once again, remind my mother that hardly anything I said to her as a kid had any basis in reality. It's sad. More accurately, in a detached way it's sort of sad. I don't feel it myself at all, because it's how my reality has always been, and hard as I try, I can't feel anything wrong about it, even though I can recognize it objectively as something that's probably sad for her. Strange.

In high school it was a lot easier to write. In high school everything was do-or-die, everything was of utmost importance, it could make or break me. I would have experiences that I thought if people misinterpreted, it would color the entire rest of my life. I used people's initials in online diary entries and thought that it was enough, that people somehow wouldn't pick out their initial from the alphabet and hundreds of identifying details from the sidelines of my entries. It was astonishingly naive of me. Luckily, I was also pretty unpopular and no one really cared about my online diary. I could have, you know, been really popular and thrown it all away through passive-aggressive online gossiping instead. The horrors.

Actually, my sneakiness factor hasn't gotten any better. I am still as stark and obvious as a bloodstain on a white couch. When I was a kid I would pick my nose sitting next to someone on a couch if we were watching TV, working under the assumption that their peripheral vision couldn't possibly be operative. And now I seem to think that just because I'm six feet tall and crowned by fiery blonde hair doesn't mean that I can't blend into a crowd (it does mean that. It absolutely does, and just because it's unfair doesn't make it untrue.).

The same goes for gossip. I can be talking about someone right in front of them and I think they somehow won't hear me. I can tell a secret about someone to their best friend and think that their best friend bond will temporarily break, especially for me, and the secret won't be passed. I'm just incredibly socially immature like that, and I'm starting to think it's permanent. My solution to this problem thus far has been to talk about everybody to everybody, to put everything out there in the most blatant terms possible, and to disclose this before someone tells me a secret, in case the secret-teller doesn't like the way I handle information. I see this as honest and egalitarian and I don't think anybody in the world agrees with this sentiment. What say you, internet?

I’ll admit it, right away; I used to surf craiglist like crazy, and not just a tiny part of it. I surfed the personals, especially those that didn’t apply to me. m4m is especially intriguing, and then especially those that post short sharp blurbs, sometimes consisting of less than a sentence, and attached is a giant .jpg of their penis, made horrific by its closeup detail, zoomed in, sometimes grainy, rarely with body attached, and almost never with a face. This must work... right?... because people haven’t stopped doing it. It amuses me to think of two bodyless penises meeting up for a drink. Knocking on doors, sticking through holes. And they would recognize each other immediately.

m4m may be the most prolific section, but the personals in general never have a blank day. Women who bemoan the lack of a lesbian ‘scene’, who want to find one, but don’t really want to start one. Men who longwindedly list the requirements for an ideal ad respondent - my favorite ones are the ones who list clearly intellectual/habitual/ emotional bullet points, then at the end sign off with a warning: no pic, no response. My favorite of those favorites, because that’s a surprisingly big subsection, is those in which the poster does not include a photo. People who admit to being lonely, even people who beg, shyly bring up depression, past lost loves, the cruel bare walls of their apartments. On the other side of it, people who shun craigslist, shun the people who use it – these are the people who will invariably start their ads with ‘I would normally never do something like this, but...’ or ‘my friends dared me to...’ – and then act throughout like they couldn’t care less whether someone responds. That or they act like they’re expecting so many responses that they’ll have to screen them.

All these people, lounging in their boxes somewhere, thousands of other people in their little boxes within less than a square mile, probably less than half a square mile, and they’re typing these pleas onto a screen in order to try and entice the right person into the fresh air. Why do we have so much trouble with this? Humanity teems, seethes, around us, and we shun it, try to leave buffer seats on the bus and the train, keep our eyes studiously averted from people we pass on the street... we actively do these things!

I see this, I do this, I write about this as if it’s far removed from me, but it isn’t, and though I can’t explain it, it’s knee-jerk. You’re walking along a fairly empty sidewalk in the afternoon, alone. In the distance, you see someone walking alone as well, in the opposite direction as you. You’re getting closer. You think, when is the right moment to acknowledge this person? Ten feet? Fifteen feet? Less? Maybe four? You obsess over it, fail to come up with an acceptable norm... how should you put your face? Toothy smiles, close mouthed smile? Words, no words?... and you decide, fuck it, I’ll just look at the ground as if some extremely fascinating caterpillar is crawling along in the shrubbery beside me, and keep looking until they have passed. Then there are no bizarre social decisions to make. But, oh, wait. Wait. Is this person a different race than me? Shit, because now... if I don’t acknowledge them, they might think I’m racist! Am I racist? If I weren’t racist, I wouldn’t have even thought about their race, would I have? I would have just registered them as just another human being... right? Shit.

And maybe they’re ugly, and if I don’t look at them, they’ll think I’m averting my eyes to be kind. Or maybe they’re drop-dead gorgeous and if I look at them they’ll think I’m checking them out, hitting on them, flirting with them, ogling them, and they’ll think I’m some sort of rapist.

Racist, rapist – all the terrible things it’s so easy to be wrongly perceived as when you pass a stranger on the sidewalk!

So, as a compromise, and as a safeguard, you pass the person and you make that tight little anus of a smile that every normal American makes in this situation, a barely perceptible upturn of the lips, although ‘upturn’ may be a generous word for the kind of grimacing that I’ve seen go on. (I called it the ‘bule smile’ in Indonesia, because Indonesians don’t do it.) The other person does the same. pass, and you think, ‘was that awkward? That was awkward.

You shiver yourself free of this feeling and are suddenly overcome with a crushing loneliness. And you go home and write an ad. People, please, please, people. Strangers, even. So long as you’re people. I’ll be nonchalant, I’ll pretend I don’t need you, I’ll pretend this is frivolous. I’ll make up engagements, time constraints, an inflated schedule. “Oh, I can only meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays because of dance class.” “Oh, weekends are tight for me, usually I’ve got friends coming up to the city.” You have nothing, actually, but you can’t admit that, or this stranger that you’ve managed to entice from their box might think you’re pathetic and reject you.

When people like this meet other people like this, how does anything at all of substance bubble to the surface? You can’t mix nothing and nothing and get something. There are probably a couple of dates to be spent making fun of society. But society can’t be made fun of forever. (Okay, it can. But bitterness can’t be sustained as attractive for that long, I don’t think.) And if either person were the type to subvert the dominant paradigm, no matter how likely it is that that person is the type to use phrases like ‘subvert the dominant paradigm’ in everyday conversation, they’d be out subverting it, and not in a bland, safe-meeting-place coffeehouse talking about it. And not in their house using craigslist to try and find subverting partners either.

No, dominant paradigm-subverting comes from, when you pass that stranger on the sidewalk, pasting on the most giant smile that your jaw can handle, grabbing their hand, pumping it up and down, and introducing yourself. Maybe inviting them out for a fun-filled day of shopping-cart racing down at the Safeway, or a night of dumpster diving. And even this is a relatively mild paradigm shift – people do have the context to understand you if you do this, even if they will almost always think you’re drunk or on LSD or ectasy – but it happens rarely enough that I can’t believe anyone would expect to find that perfect, quirky, lifesaving person on a network of people who spend all of their time on that network.

That’s what we want, right? For the heavens to somehow align and to find someone who will assimilate us into their full, satisfying, perfect life, and we won’t have to make an effort to build that life ourselves. Because someone leading a full satisfying life will surely, SURELY, be posting ads on craigslist. There are hundreds of people in your city who have everything they want – a wonderful group of friends, enriching hobbies – but just lack that ‘someone special’ to share it with.
There are if you believe all of those qualifying first sentences: ‘I wouldn’t normally do this, but...’ Do you believe these sentences? Have you ever looked at the other ‘social’ sections of craigslist? Activities. Community. Events. Nobody’s posting there. Because everyone who already has a community won’t bother with craigslist unless there’s money/publicity to be had. Why would they? Their circle is complete. Their needs are met. And if they’re not, and I’m sure that, sometimes, they’re not, well, then they seek help from their living, breathing social circle. That’s what social circles are for.

And that’s what craigslist is trying to be to people. It’s succeeding, I think, in the sense that people are using it as such. There’s no doubt that there is a new virtual social circle emerging, where online personas can replace proximity of physical bodies, where discussions can be had, discoveries collectively made, without the participants ever having actually met. I don’t think anyone is arguing anymore about that. But are online social circles enough to keep the loneliness that comes from physical isolation at bay? I don’t think so, or else the personals section would be obsolete. Which it most certainly is not.

People who claim to be fulfilled in every other way are still pleading online for contact while ignoring strangers on the street. This is what comes from this bizarre mishmosh of virtual and real contact, where social mores are completely different in each. If you sit next to a stranger on the bus and start talking about how lonely you are, that’s crazy, that’s unacceptable, that’s pathetic. Post it in a personal, though, and it’s fine. Countless sympathetic comments and emails will appear in your inbox. From this perspective, it seems like online contact would be enough... you’re getting responses, feedback, validation. It’s warm and fuzzy, or seems that way, anyway.

But have you noticed that it’s never enough? Angsty 14-year-olds with livejournals who whine about the most mundane things are only encouraged, when given sympathy, to do it more, and seek more, and more, as if sympathy were a drug. It’s expected, that you’ll get frowny faces and emoticon hugs and a virtual outpouring of virtual support. It’s expected.
If you were to whine like that to a stranger on the bus, however, and got the same response? That would be a landmark day. You’d be driven to tears, unable to believe your luck. Fate. Destiny! You’ve met one of those kind strangers you read about in books but never thought existed in real life! Your life has been forever changed!

A comment, though, an email – even if the exact same words were written/uttered – that’s just normal. That’s just online. It doesn’t count. If it did count, online sympathy would be enough. But it’s not.

That’s why people use craigslist. It’s an attempt to use the world with the less threatening, less nerve-wracking social mores, to get a companion in the world where companionship actually feels like it means something. Does that work? Can you really take the easy way out like that? I don’t think so, but I’d welcome argument.

Cold water from a 'hot' tub, hot only in name, waterfalls into colder water. The sun isn't hot enough for this. My swimsuit is the wrong size. At the slightest hint that anybody may be looking at it, I contort myself into ridiculous shapes to keep myself from falling out of it. I still feel odd in a swimsuit, because I know that in Jayapura I could, and would, have been arrested immediately for wearing it. So when a friendly man appears in the door of the clubhouse and asks if I want a mat for my deck chair, my mind processes it as gibberish. Quick Indonesian, maybe. I yank my towel up over my body. He laughs because he thinks I am shy. Shy is... perhaps the wrong word for it. Running away from my social issues into the pool is not an option, because it is freezing. Truly freezing, despite the sun having warmed it all day. Why would you air-condition an outdoor pool in Georgia in springtime?

I used to think people who could just sprint into freezing water just didn't feel temperatures as much as I did. I used to think people who could get cavities filled without novocaine had a higher pain threshold than me. I used to think people who could dance in clubs didn't have to practice; that they just automatically knew how to move. I used to think people who could party-hop for hours - days! - didn't ever get lonely, or overwhelmed. One or the other. I used to think that people who could get on airplanes, on stage, go to work, to school, while vomiting with the stomach flu just didn't feel as sick as I did when I had it. I used to think that other people didn't feel overwhelmed and exhausted when they climbed mountains.

I was wrong. People can just handle things. I've never been great at handling things - it's an only child thing. Only children don't have to handle. Their families revolve around them. Their preferences are the only ones taken into account. They don't have to do things they don't want to, or share their possessions with people. If they hedge and consider and take forever to make decisions, their families will wait. It's a bad way to grow up. No, actually, it's a great way to grow up. But it's a bad thing to take away with you when you have to become a grown-up.

Thinking about all of this is strangely relevant with my big toe trembling on the pool steps. Just jump in. Just jump in. It will be cold and that's okay.

Inching forward and willing myself to keep going, steady, not hesitating or rising up on my toes or yanking my hands out of the water or, worse, retreating. I do it. Make no noise. Distorted just under the surface, my goosebumped forearms look like Popeye's.

I wish I knew how to swim, that someone would show up and teach me. My form is spectacularly bad. It takes me minutes to do the pool crosswise, and I arrive out of breath and - oddly - vertical. My stroke is unrecognizable as anything with a name. I would have drowned had I swum in the ocean more than 5 times in Indonesia. But I love water. Even cold water. Even cold, boring, chlorine-choked pool water, or red-tinged scary stormy tropical water, or muddy brown sluggish water possibly containing crocodiles, or early-June Lake Michigan water clogged with alewive. Once a fortune teller told me I would never be happy unless I lived by water. Of course, she also told me I'd be dead by age 21.

In third grade, I was really popular. It was a fluke, of course. I was not popular in second grade and I was not popular in fourth grade. But in third, I was a princess. I could do no wrong, which was lucky since I wore turquoise stirrup leggings, giant T-shirts, and star-sparklies in my fluffed-up hair to school every day. I guess that was supposed to be hot in 1993. What else must have been hot?
Knowing my multiplication tables faster than anyone else in class, saying the answers too quietly to be heard by anyone other than the linoleum.
Doing real gymnastics on the bars in the playground, even mid-winter, and ignoring everyone else.
Having two best friends who constantly fought over me and wrote notes like: "You are my best friend. Am I your best friend? Check yes or no. Be honest and you can't say maybe I don't know or anything like that."
Not being able to run the mile, or even walk it, to be honest, even though I could do about a hundred cartwheels or backbends on command.
Being really, really tall and skinny and knobbly and pale and awkward.

The point of all this is to say that nobody has any idea what the hell is supposed to be hot at any given time, least of all me. Usually, I am routinely taken in as a human being by other human beings, and either discarded or given more thought. In Indonesia, everybody gave me more thought. I was a bule, and that merited LOTS of thought. I was probably the only one they were going to see for a few years. So, okay. I understand that.

But occasionally I am in the States, looking the same as always, acting the same as always, gangling awkwardly around town and talking really quietly and unassumingly acting rude just by having an expressionless face, and people suddenly start being really interested in me. All at the same time. People start asking me out. And having asked me out, they immediately attempt to make out with me.

I find this situation extremely uncomfortable. I expect that girls who somehow manage to be attractive to people all the time, and not just randomly placed occasional times, know how to deal with this smoothly and effectively, and escape the situation still friends with the attempted maker-outer. I do not. As sexually liberal as I think I am, I just hardly ever particularly want to make out with strangers I just met, and, even worse, I find it amusing as hell when they try, and I have to escape, snickering like some kind of overgrown mutant 7-year-old and making impossible all possible future contact in the process.

This isn't entirely true. I probably would be more receptive to strangers if I thought that they had even the slightest interest in my personality. Who in the world has ever succeeded in impressing a girl by greeting every story she has to tell, everything she has to say, with a prolonged silence and then either a 'this happened to ME' or a 'Hey, do you wanna make out?' Has anyone ever succeeded by doing this? If so, I'd like to hear about it. Do other girls just get magically more and more receptive the more ways you underhandedly try to make out with them without possessing any conversational skills - or any sort of communicative skills, unspoken or otherwise - or any sort of PERSONALITY - whatsoever? No, I want to know. Perhaps they just give up trying to fight the onslaught.

Yes, I'm fully aware that I'm raving, and that I'm likely just suffering from American-dating-practices-culture shock or something. But sometimes I wish I were dumber, and couldn't see through people as well. How do those girls who are in-demand all the time handle knowing that everyone is plotting anything - anything! - to get them into bed? It's a very fucking disconcerting feeling!

Soon, though, I will randomly become not-hot again, through no effort or realization on my part, and this will cease.

There's one for yes, continue this, there's one for yes, continue this, and there's one for write about other people at a brand-new location God-knows-where, so I think I'm going to continue this, though maybe with interludes about other people such as this one:

No, actually, I haven't seen any other people for awhile. Chicago is big and cold and lonely. There's just something about a climate that prohibits sitting out on the lawn that makes people seem rude. They rush past you to get to their warm car, and who can blame them? but it still stands that they rush past you.

There's something about the sky being darker than the ground. Snow and a constantly threatening storm. I rush past people, too. I rush past them to get to Potbelly Sandwich Works, which, in my opinion, is a better destination than a warm car (even). I want everything on mine. The sub guys on the line behind the counter smile like they're welcoming you to their home, like they're inviting you to come sit by the fire and eat their homemade rabbit stew. If there's one thing I'll miss when I leave here again, it's the pride Chicagoans have in their food, and the concurrent fact, somehow, that they sell it for cheap. Maybe they feel guilty charging their honored guests. Who knows?

Okay, I was in Victoria's Secret, and I was there for two reasons: one, to buy a bra, and two, to give myself the most massive amount of culture shock possible all at once. The windows reared in front of me like giant horses with posters taped to their bellies, posters of stretched out women showing me ALL of their skin and tiny, wavy, shiny triangles of material in bright orange, bright pink, bright, bright, and the eyeshadow and their legs that were taller than me and curled around other women's legs that were also taller and me and I thought... how is this legal?

I didn't think this because I think it shouldn't be - legal, I mean - but because I've spent so long being the sluttiest person in Jayapura just by occasionally wearing V-neck T-shirts, and I'm so used to looking down at myself every 20 seconds to make sure that no part of my armpit is showing, because that would be provocative...

A girl next to me holding an armful of lacy, flowery bras started talking to me about how she wanted to buy ten of them, but... 'all of them seem to show up under my clothes! Look at the butterflies. The butterflies are definitely going to be popping out under something white. And under black? Do you think this lace beige pattern's going to come out under black?'

'I think so, I mean, look at it,' I said on complete autopilot, because nobody in Indonesia would ever talk about their bras showing under their clothes, or wear something that might threaten to be thin enough to show a bra. It occurred to me right about then that I don't remember how women are supposed to talk to each other, and it occurred to me stronger later when an employee insisted upon measuring me before I bought anything, at which point I fled in terror. I think I need more time.