The Unexplainable PAX Phenomenon

PAX is a bit of a spirit walk for me. My first encounter with it (and, coincidentially, the first time it existed) came about two years ago, when the event took place at the Hynes Convention Center. I was taking the Green Line, waiting for my stop while also feeling an overwhelming sense of shame.

A video game convention. I'm going to a goddamn video game convention. Why am I doing this to myself?

I was intent on leaving after just a few hours. Even I, an out of the closet nerd, cannot possibly fall this far down the section of the geek hole they reserve for "convention goers." While hating myself, and attractive girl with multi-colored hair clips and Skullcandy headphones sat next to me. She looked at my lanyard.

"What are you heading to?"

Great. That's just great. Now I need to tell someone attractive that I'm going to hang out with sweaty people that play Dungeons and Dragons so I can wait in lines to play video games that I'm probably already going to buy. Let's see how quickly she takes off after this.

"It's this terrible nerd thing," I say, shaking my head at myself. "It started out on the West Coast, but it got so popular they're trying it out here. Video game companies come out here and set up booths with demos of their new games to play. I honestly have no idea how long I'm going to stay, but I had to see what it's like. I'm probably going to hate it."

She spoke before I could tack on another self-deprecating remark. "That sounds like a lot of fun! Is it the whole weekend?"

"Uh, yeah...but I only got a one day pass."

"It sounds pretty interesting, I wish I had the time to go to it."

"Wait, really?"

"Yeah!"

A pause. She's screwing with me, right? Maybe not. She's talking to me about her job and, in an oddly casual manner, mentions she plans to quit today. Maybe this is the type of person who really would go to PAX.

My stop came up. I wished her luck. She did the same to me, the look on my face still showing panic over the upcoming show floor.

My silent-until-now friend looks at me. "That girl was hitting on you," he says.

"Fuck," I retort. What the hell is going on?

There's a point to this, and I'm not just bragging about a girl being nice to me, though I won't say I'm above that. PAX is so silly, so stupid, so out of its non-existent mind that it wraps around itself and becomes brilliant again, like some sort of zen parable or something Burroughs would write. You get a bunch of people who like the same things together, let them run wild in a building full of those things, set very basic rules, and let them do their thing.  The best part? Anyone with even a passing interest in nerdy things can come on in and have the same experience.

That's a lot of people, including pretty girls with cutesy headphones.

Sadly, the show has become a bit more focused on larger companies over the year, shedding itself of that hometown, "let's throw some video games on a wooden table and see if anyone plays them" vibe of the original in favor of bigger, more extravagant booths and triple-A titles. But the people stay the same, and as long as there's one really confused yet extremely excited person running around the show floor, tiring themselves out and having the strangest conversations with people around them, I'll always be happy with PAX coming to my city.

Introversion

When I started drinking at around 18 years old (I was a late bloomer), I started going out more. The not-giving-a-fuck-ness of alcohol led me to parties and gatherings I normally would have not gone to. I was out with my friends doing things, and my friends finally considered me to be social, and joked about how drinking made me less of a shady character.

I still go out and drink sometimes, but there are often times where I don't want to. In fact, there are times where I kind of don't want to do much at all. This happens often, and it hurts me. It makes me feel like that shady caricature my friends joked that I once was. 

It's not the fact that I'm not drinking which bothers me. It's that I feel no need to go out, and for some reason I am uncomfortable in how comfortable I am with that. Society doesn't really look at introversion as the "normal" thing. People like to get out of their houses, meet people, to party. Sometimes I don't.

I am writing this at 8 o'clock on a Friday night. I have no intention of leaving the house. I just returned from Jersey to visit my father and oversee some slight surgery he was having. Even though I traveled quite a bit today and am wiped out, part of me still feels bad for not wanting to go do something. 

Most people would consider what I do alone to be laziness. I do dumb stuff online, I daydream, I read things and write in notebooks, I play video games and watch movies. Until tonight, though, I never questioned why I did this, I just figured what everybody considered to be correct; I'm a lazy, shady sad sack individual. 

Here's what I do know about myself: I feel like I need to recharge on occasion. Sometimes it's after a busy weekend, and sometimes it's after doing something as simple as going to a movie. I feel the need to process things that happen in the day, because my mind moves very quickly and I analyze, admittedly, too much. What I didn't know was that this was normal.

I don't know why I forgot all this information, but there's many books out there about introverts, and my old therapist was telling me about one at some point. Maybe I wrote it off because I didn't like him all that much and kinda ended up firing him. Regardless, I did some more digging tonight and found the author he was talking about. Her name is Marti Laney and she's a researcher, therapist, public speaker, and many other things. The point is she knows what she's talking about and this isn't some random self-help nonsense. Her book deals with myths about introverts and why they act the way they do. 

Introversion is not about being shy or awkward (me being awkward is completely my own fault). Introversion does not mean the introvert is afraid of or hates crowds. Introverts still go to parties, they still find significant others, and they still talk to other people. Introversion is not a disease, but a personality trait. It is seen as normal to be an extrovert, and while this isn't problematic in any way, it leaves some introverts feeling lonely, isolated, or weird. I am reminded of Kids in The Hall alum Bruce Mccullough, who, on his comedy album, asked "why are there so many lonely people? Can't they just, you know, buddy up?" Only 25% percent of the population are true introverts, and introverts actually like hanging out with introverts, but that's hard to do, considering they're, well...introverts. And just so I can say that word one more time in this paragraph: introverts.

I am slowly coming to terms with being an introvert, and I feel significantly less weird about not doing much right now. In fact, I plan on going to a block party on the 4th, having a lot of fun, and then spending the rest of the week to myself.

And I won't feel bad about it.

Ventures in Online Publication

If anyone out there is reading this, I'm writing for a website now:
Freakin' Awesome Network
My articles
I'm not a fan of the name...or the design, to be quite frank, but I do think the majority of the content is sound, and I'm just happy to be out there, somewhere.

Incoherent Thoughts: 1/17/2011

Times have been a little tough since that last essay I wrote (which was for a class, but I had fun writing it so decided to put it up here as well). I've completely forgotten about this whole thing and every single time I decided to sit down and write something, I wondered why, exactly, anyone would want to read about me. It was as if this blog needed some sort of purpose or gimmick for me to fully attend to it. It almost makes me long for the days of LiveJournal, when everyone knew what they were in for when they read something by you. It is a journal, after all. I guess the point is that I don't know where to go with this. I certainly don't have the energy to write full five-page essays everyday, nor do I think anyone would really read that.

Maybe I should write about what has happened since I last wrote. It's a long enough story, at least. Basically, the drive to and from college was giving my nerves a workout, and the thought of living there again was as welcoming as a cheese grater to the face. I did the best I could given all my neuroses and diagnosed nutbar issues, but in the end it was just all too much. I didn't drop out, thankfully, but I did change my major to basically the same thing, but in an online format. I think the cons of such an idea are apparent, but it took so much pressure off missing one or two days, wherein I would miss so much work and information that the very idea of catching up made me even more nervous, to the point where I would have panic attacks about panic attacks.

As you can imagine, life as been...hermit-like, to put it lightly. My anxiety is mostly gone, but replaced with depression. If I've learned anything from this experience, it is that our minds like to create little barriers to protect us (my therapist actually tells me that "spells" is a common term for this). Once one of our problems is gone, the mind has to create something else to either put all that misused energy, for fear that something might be wrong with our way of thinking. Of course, this isn't actually the case, and while it can make things worse, it is actually a sign of progress. I defeated this bout of anxiety, and now my spell, in its noble yet misguided ways, wants to protect me from the very things the anxiety was protecting me from. Unfortunately, being social and productive are not at all things one should be protected from.

I haven't found a way do defeat this just yet, but I am on the lookout for someone to help me change my medication. In the meantime, I'm working on doing small things, like writing in this, for example, to energize my creativity. There is obviously some way to break out of this and enter the next phase of my life. While I keep looking, I will keep documenting, and I hope that as much as the writing helps me, the results of whatever I find can help someone else.

Better Living Through Composition: A Literacy Narrative

I don't think I ever really liked reading or writing until I was told I was good at it. I believe this was in the fourth grade, when Mrs. Krippendorf told me I could be a funny Steven King. Most of my memories of reading and writing before this amount to nothing but both physical and psychological pain. I was a fairly neurotic child and, as of now, a fairly neurotic adult. I often needed validation from outside sources in order to feel good about things. I'm not saying this because I want sympathy; I'm saying this because it is key to understanding why I began to love writing in the first place.