Atomic Nerds

….Or, well, it is, in the sense of being a thing that happens to you from the age of 5 or so to 18, it just in no way will resemble the rest of your life.

Backing up a bit, last week I ran across this post at Jennifer’s place, featuring a video by Felicia Day and the Guild crew. They seem to do one big music video release per season, and they are always awesome, and this one is no exception. As is a common theme with geeks and other people who spent middle and high school on the part of the social totem pole which is buried in the ground, and go on to wind up as perfectly respectable and likable people who are awesome in their own right, the theme is celebrating going from the bottom to the top.

I tapped my foot along with it and thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing. Then I got to thinking, successfully transcending the social realities of high school isn’t that much of a thing to celebrate so much as getting over with as quickly as possible, just because life immediately ceases to be like school the second you leave it. Lots of people continue going through the motions as though it were, but it’s because the only patterns they know and no one bothered to tell them that contrary to preparing them with rigorous accuracy for adult life, school gave them a highly artificial reality that must be adjusted away from. There should really be some sort of an exit briefing at or after graduation, just so you are warned, whether or not you choose to listen to any of it.

1. Never again will the norm of your life involve moving through a highly regimented schedule you did not choose with a peer group that all closely resemble each other, monitored by authorities who take an interest in everything you do.

Unless you go to prison or join the military, which are the only two adult-life environments that have any close resemblance to school. Even in the military you volunteered to be there and the end goal is for you to either leave after having performed adequately, or become the authorities. Only in prison are you treated as an incompetent population to be managed as closely as possible for a time-based sentence.

After school, you are free- and expected- to manage your own time, which you may do as well or poorly as you choose to, though if you consistently do it badly you will find yourself with a shortage of people willing to give you money in exchange for your time and efforts. Authorities largely do not care about your life beyond your performance, though strong leaders may take an interest in helping you manage those areas of your time that relate strictly to your job. If no one is paying you for your time currently, you can do whatever the hell with it you wish so long as it’s not actually illegal, and no one but you will care. This is the point in your life where you find out for yourself that staying up all night all the time and eating ice cream for dinner actually make you feel like crap with no input from your parents or any other authority at all.

This is one of the areas of transition from the school system to universities that is easiest for students to miss completely. College looks like school, and feels like school, but now you have a lot more freedom, including the freedom to look at a scheduled class you don’t really want to go to and then not go. However, instead of being warehoused by an educational system, now you are actually paying to be taught things at specific institutions; using your freedom to blow off “authorities” is actually a shot downrange at your own feet. This phenomenon is one of the major disconnects between adult students and students transitioning in from high school.

2. Your social life isn’t a zero-sum game anymore.

You are no longer bound to a particular age and location-based peer group who can only be escaped via a major life upheaval that can only be ordered by some other authority. Never again will you be with any people other than your family who care what you did when you were thirteen, unless that something was the sort of thing that will get the justice system to try you as an adult. If they find out anything about your life when you were in school, it will be a mildly interesting background note in contrast to who you are now, rather than finding out Who You Really Are.

If there’s a clique and they don’t like you and exclude you? You can just leave, and find some people who enjoy your company. They need have no relevance to you at all. At the absolute worst, they could be your co-workers, but at least then you can be making an evaluation of how much your job is worth to you in money, time, and aggravation factor to remain there even though the working environment is chilly and hostile- and you can go get a different social life outside of work.

You still do need social skills, you don’t get allotted friends, and acquiring them may be an uphill battle if you were raised by wolves and are essentially starting from scratch.

However, you aren’t restricted to a single pool of people who all know each other and have all known YOU since the third grade, you aren’t in a hierarchy in which every person who gains in popularity must do so at the expense of someone else, and the people you think are really cool may not think this of themselves and probably don’t really think of themselves as being in any way above you or others. (If they DO, this is generally because they are a narcissist. People behaving the way high school students do normally as adults are behaving pathologically.)

If absolutely no one wants to spend time with you and you are regularly expelled from the company of others, it may be time to do some serious self-examination (especially if you have the vague inkling you may have been raised by wolves and do not know any of the social rules others seem to take for granted), but for the most part even obnoxious trolls can find other trolls to share under-bridge space and trollish camaraderie with.

3. Your hobbies are just your hobbies, not your identity.

Adolescents are in a weird psychological space where they’re transitioning from having their identities mainly defined by their parents to being self-generated, and being adolescents in a social species, they tend to accomplish this first by letting anyone OTHER than their parents start providing some of the definition. Our culture has a lot of easy tropes for kids to fall into and build a self-image around, so that art mirrors life and life mirrors art pretty much Because. This is how a kid can believe whole-heartedly by the time he’s twelve that if he excels at math he must shun athletics, or if he excels at athletics as part of the conditions for membership in his tribe he can never reveal he really likes Star Wars.

In the adult world, your hobbies are what you do or work on because you enjoy them, not defining aspects of your identity. At your job you’re just another person in a business suit or uniform, and no one gives a shit if you were a geek or a nerd or a jock or a stoner or a metal kid or what have you. You can be a powerlifter and also have a serious investment in your D&D group and no one will care. Your gym buddies will probably not want to talk about your campaign and your DM will probably not want to know about your squat PR, but who knows, especially if members of both groups are actually friends rather than just friendly.

Speaking of, nothing of what you internalized in school about what you can and can’t learn or do, for fun or otherwise, is true. Even if you were fat and slow and uncoordinated in school, you can be a powerlifter or rock-climber or be a speed skater or whatever the hell you want to, as long as you’re willing to put in the work and practice at it. Even if you sucked at math, you can learn it later, and better yet you can shop around for a teacher who can show it to you in ways you can grasp. If you really want to you can put all your focus into developing your strength to mass ratio and join the damn circus, though it will be a tremendous amount of work and sacrifice for not much unless you REALLY want to be an acrobat.

The bad news is that seriously doing anything takes work, practice, and tolerance for frustration and failure, and due to the limited number of hours in the day and weeks in the year, you have to pick only a handful of them to be really good at any of them. But you aren’t restricted from any of them because of what little tribes in the artificial world of school you belonged to.

4. You can never count on everyone having closely shared experiences again unless you work at it.

In school, everyone is your age, most other people are probably your ethnicity, if they aren’t the standard norms of gender/sexuality they probably won’t have admitted it yet, you’re probably from about the same socioeconomic background, and everyone is, obviously, in school together. If nothing else they have a shared experience called Mrs. Johnson’s Math Period.

As an adult, any given other person you meet may be from a radically different background from yours, may be from an entirely other country or culture, may have had formative experiences so different than yours you may as well be from different countries. You may have nothing whatsoever to relate to each other over other than whatever experience you are currently sharing.

If you work hard enough at it, you can avoid this as much as possible, and some people do spend their adult lives making as sure as they can that everyone they are likely to encounter is going to be extremely similar to them. This does come with the downside of having the same narrow perspective, and the same constant experience of everyone constantly comparing each other to everyone else, forever. It can be very refreshing to be dealing with a group where nobody thinks to make very many comparisons because there are very few meaningful ones to be made.

5. In the real world, people’s tolerance for bullshit is directly proportional to the rewards of putting up with it.

The most common incentive to put up with inefficiency, byzantine and bizarre rule sets and authority structures, bureaucracy that exists for its own sake, and other soul-suckers familiar to anyone who’s been through a school system, is called a paycheck and it can make up for quite a lot. In school you do it because the alternative is not-school, which is generally a much harder row to hoe, in real life you are much freer to put it down and walk away, and people will. This is particularly true if whatever activity you’re engaged in is a for-fun hobby group where the paycheck incentive is absent.

In an extra-curricular group in school, you do it because you signed up to do it and because it will nebulously look good on your college transcript. You learn a handful of things about how people behave in small groups and if you are very lucky one or two other things.

In a local sports league, gaming group, book club, cooking circle, or any other collection of enthusiastic amateurs who get no rewards other than those intrinsic to the group or the activity, either someone or several someones have excellent skill at managing people with no reason to be there other than those rewards, or you find out what it looks like when a group of people collectively realizes they do not have to put up with bullshit and the only authorities are self-appointed.

If you were wondering, I went to a good school (private), and while I definitely wasn’t climbing the social ladder, I wasn’t the fat kid in the cafeteria getting milk poured on her either. You can make things better or worse with different school systems and approaches, or you can sign up for an entirely different set of problems via homeschooling, but a lot of things that make school a weird and artificial world stem entirely from the fact that the people inhabiting them are children, and as such are not yet mentally or emotionally mature. Everything that happens in school is of devastating emotional import even when the people involved are worthless jerks because the world of a schoolchild is very small, because they ARE still a child.

We shouldn’t celebrate becoming better and stronger and cooler people than we were in school, though broadly speaking being better and stronger is always nice. We should celebrate having left the world where any of it matters more than an footnote.

Well this one just managed to sneak right up on me, but apparently it’s time for the annual NRA Convention again. And while I’m not going, those of you who are, might I make a request?

Drop by the HS Precision booth, and ask about their choice of “celebrity” endorsements. I mean for fuck’s sake, even if you’re a “Yay government they do no wrong!” jackboot cheerleader, and you don’t consider Lon Horiuchi a murderer excused by federal fiat when justice came looking for him, then at the very least he’s a spectacularly bad shot.

What sane company would use either of those options to endorse their product?

Oh wait. HS Precision isn’t sane.

So yeah, if you’re going to the NRA Convention, please drop by the HS Precision booth and find out if they’ve perchance seen the error of their ways. But I wouldn’t bet on a friendly response.

Trolling the interwebs for content, which is an activity much akin to stirring bogholes with a stick, I came across an article title that inspired a “You really have to ASK?!!” reaction in me: Rick Santorum: What Went Wrong?

No few of the respondents had about the same reaction I did, which was that the reason for Santorum’s dropping out of the race was self-evidently contained within his campaign and within Rick Santorum in general, but a lot more chalked it up to having less money than Romney, having somehow failed the timing on the early races, not getting enough media attention, incorrect humors, or whatever other reasons than that only a minority of even Republican voters found him palatable.

Santorum’s campaign in general, and most especially what I saw in his supporters, struck me as yet another case of election-year Just Exactly Like Me Syndrome. This malady can occur at all times of year, but never attains its full flowering at any other time than election year. The most susceptible victims are those who have been living under opposition party power for a few years.

The central disorder of JELMS, from which all symptoms flow, is the idea that the vast majority of Americans are just exactly like the afflicted voter or candidate, with all clear and inarguable deviations representing lunatic fringes or tiny minorities that the “real Americans” dislike and automatically dismiss as irrelevant. The problems, priorities, and perspective of the average American, who obviously represents a clear majority, are assumed to be functionally identical to the JELMS carrier, so that objections to positions or statements of the candidates in question must obviously be trivial because they don’t really impact the JELMS carrier. Since they are not his problems, they are not really problems, or aren’t important problems but rather trivial special-interest gadfly issues. If they are sufficiently oppositional objections, clearly the objector represents the JELMS carrier’s idea of everything that is wrong with America that real Americans are fighting tooth and nail against. In that case, they may not only be dismissed, but active vilification is encouraged. Sandra Fluke and Joe the Plumber should get together for a beer sometime.

Class issues are common plagues of the JELMS-afflicted, since essentially all political candidates and most of the people who make a living commenting on political issues or have the time to lustily follow them share a perspective that has certain luxuries attached to it. Whether it’s talking as though all Americans have the capability to welcome and support as many children as come along within a family (often while simultaneously demonizing the “culture of dependency” welfare brings), or attempting to empathize with difficulties obtaining enough arugula while simultaneously lecturing Americans for their eating choices (without realizing that “fattening” food is often interchangeable with cheap food), speculating about the racial overtones of pickup trucks, or attempting to draw derogatory comparisons between one candidate’s level of extreme wealth in comparison to one’s own, no matter which side of the aisle it comes from, the JELMS sufferer manages to reliably alienate while assuming that it won’t matter to the people he’s alienating because, as it is not a big deal to him, it obviously won’t be to them.

Other common symptoms of JELMS:

- When managing to alienate sections of a different group in numbers large enough to show up in the polls, the discussion within camp is framed as that group being stupid and easily manipulated by the opposition.

- When asked by a perceived in-group member why candidate is not concerned about (issue they believe to be important), the answer received boils down to, from the candidate’s perspective, the issue is not important and some other issue more important to them should be discussed instead.

- Candidate’s perseverating on issues supporters have vaguely realized aren’t highly important to a majority of voters is framed as “messaging trouble” rather than a major disconnect.

- Successes are credited to the “just exactly like me” assumption being fundamentally correct rather than compared against the weaknesses of the competition.

- The successes of the opposition in past years are credited to having deluded the real American majority as opposed to having offered (and even sometimes given) them something they wanted.

- Mockery of the NJLM outsiders fliply phrased in class, race, gender, and other “outsider” pejoratives, with no apparent consciousness of alienating people who might be something other than a tiny and deeply entrenched oppositional minority.

JELMS is bipartisan and equally likely to occur on both sides of the political divide, though its most serious carriers are usually found within the party out of power. This makes it all the more difficult to highlight the perils of the problem, since by the time the dust in an election settles multiple different carriers on both sides probably had the opportunity to do plenty of damage that will not be recognized as such.

I have a subject for a post. I had all my ducks in a row.

Then a purely metaphorical meteor came through and I went through some kind of time space distortion where something that should have taken fifteen minutes took an hour and a half, and now it’s dinnertime and well. I had other things that needed doing today as well. Sorry. Jam tomorrow.

It is definitely springtime in Los Alamos. Flowers are blooming, pollen is flying, mosquitoes are breeding, the roller girls have moved outdoors, the Easter snowstorm has come and gone and been replaced by afternoon showers.

Also, the mystery object that sounds like a flying saucer is launching or a death ray is warming up has returned to randomly making voooooooooooorn noises somewhere in the distance. At this point it goes right next to the hummingbirds and flowers as signs the season has truly changed.

If the population of Neverland consisted entirely of feral boys, Indians, fairies, mermaids, and pirates…

Whose shipping was Captain Hook and his fleet preying on?

While I was finishing my coffee and trying to motivate myself to get up and get everything done today that I should, a man in a kilt bolted pell-mell through my office chasing a hundred-pound puppy with a bottlecapper.

I nonetheless feel my life is not unusual.

Just ’cause Stingray pointed out the obvious solution to me spinning around in my office chair debating if there was anything I could possibly find to say more than a Twitter’s worth of words about today.

A great deal of time and energy has been spent on the domestication and social behavior of dogs, because they are an obvious candidate; they’re our oldest domesticated species by far, they’ve played the most different roles in our species’ history and forms of civilization, they’ve returned to feral states in a few times and places along the path and provided that additional data point, and being dogs, they are generally cooperative with our efforts.

Another thing that makes dogs particularly felicitous to study as the ur-example of domestication is that they have a life history and ecological niche that is relatively close to ours; humans and canines are both group-living, cooperatively foraging, cooperatively breeding generalist predators. It was not a huge leap for a canine to allow us to share care and raising of their young, as packs of canids generally all pitch in to a litter of puppies. We understand each other relatively easily; even if we are wide branches apart in our physiology and history, we have a shared world and outlook.

Cats are different. Canids have a long and robust history of group living and sociality, but felids are most often solitary with a few scattered species here and there that have some degree of group living, or at least mutual toleration. Lions are the only felid that has fully embraced group living and cooperative breeding and hunting, and even then it’s the former rather than the latter that truly benefits them. Two to three lions would do best bringing down the biggest game that would give the whole group the biggest share of food, and indeed that is the size of the groups the bachelor males tend to form when between prides- more lions gives less food per lion for the same general amount of effort. Big prides don’t bring lions more food, they bring them babies that live- Having a few lionesses looking after the cubs at all times brings them a much lower infant mortality rate than other felids can manage, even accounting for the attrition of unlucky cubs to new incoming males*.

Until the last twenty years or so, the generally accepted dogma was that lions were the only truly social felid out there, and any and all other social behavior witnessed was due to adaptation to unnatural conditions. It is now known that wild male cheetahs will do some cooperative group living and behavior under the right circumstances, and that colonies of domestic cats, whether feral, living within shelters, or living within households definitely feature some wide-scale organized social behavior as well. As an artifact, when reading older literature about cat behavior, you’ll often see their social behaviors framed in terms of redirected fragments of other behaviors; cats rub against you because they’re scent-marking you as their property (not true, rubbing is an affectionate feline social gesture, and one most commonly directed from someone lower in the pecking order to someone higher), cats relate to you as though you were their mother (because it was thought that the only relevant social behaviors cats had were from mother to young or mate to mate), and so on.

As it happens, groups of domestic cats act much like lions; when they form on their own without human influence, they tend to be centered around groups of related females, the territory itself tends to be held and inherited among those females, and males come and go, sometimes forming partnerships with brothers or even unrelated buddy males. (The latter types of coalitions between unrelated intact males are more fragile for domestic cats than they are for lions, but they do happen- male lions simply need each other more.) Domestic colonies tend to be much more stable than lion prides, with fewer dramatic ousters of resident males and more males being able to coexist in relative peace.

Cat societies are less rigid than canine societies; while dogs tend to have a fairly structured heirarchy based on sex, relatedness, and seniority, with strict conditions on who is allowed to breed, cats tend to have one or two boss cats, a large middle stratum of member cats, and the odd pariah cat, who often will not stick around long if he or she is able to leave. Even within that structure, the rule of possession tends to prevail; a boss cat may have privileged access to prized sleeping spots and have other cats move out of his or her way as they go, but won’t be able to take food or a mating opportunity from a subordinate cat without a fight.

Behaviors and gestures once classified as crude uses of fragments of territorial and maternal behavior are probably more like the basic feline toolkit of relating to one another; they probably DO have their roots in those behaviors because their roots are indeed in solitary animals, but they seem to have much more flexibility and specificity as social behaviors than we once thought. Cats have a wide range of temperaments; while a dog is a social animal down to its bones, a given individual cat may range from completely solitary (and effectively untamable, even with recent domesticated ancestors) to gregarious and highly preferring the company of other cats as friends, far beyond the potential to mate. It IS known that kittens have a window from about three weeks of age to twelve weeks in which the species they are readily prepared to accept as friends and companions- and which as food- but it’s not completely hard and fast. A feral cat may still be tamed as an adult, but it really is more like taming a wild animal than adopting a pet domesticate.

It’s possible that, even without much direct effort on our parts, that humans are responsible for turning cat-as-we-know-it from a solitary species into a sociable one. Even before it occurred to the cat or the human that friendship would be a good idea, there would have been pressure on cats to coexist in denser numbers around the rich food supplies that colonies of rodents in human grain fields and storage would represent. Even most species of wild cats will live more densely when food supplies are rich, mostly in the form of maturing young spending more time with their mothers and females tolerating the company of their local ranging males for longer and more sociably. Once humans started bringing cats into hearth and home rather than appreciating their good work in the field, the pressure for cats to be capable of- and even thrive off- companiable coexistence would have been quite intense.

Still, evolving from a basic-but-present level of sociability to a more complex and intense form over thousands of years instead of millions shows in places. Dogs seem to have more, and more sophisticated mechanisms for resolving intra-group conflicts and relieving pressures; cats mainly rely on avoiding one another until either everyone calms down or someone can leave altogether. Displacement aggression is much more common in cats than dogs, as are spiraling anxiety-rooted behavior problems. Cats that must live in a group but aren’t friends tend to establish small sub-territories and live around one another rather than with each other, and when they are forced into each other’s territories, problems sometimes explode into existence.

Personally, I find it likeliest that cats know exactly what we are- a non-cat species that can be befriended and can act like a mother, sibling, or baby** as the situation and the roles shift. Thankfully mate stays off the table; we smell all wrong for that.

*Lions are interesting in that they are one of the few species with male infanticide where mothers, and coalitions of related females, will regularly unite to defend as many young as they can from the males. If the cub is old enough to have a fair shot at survival, a mother may leave with her subadult cub. In most other cases (as in primate) the mother and child are more or less screwed, and in a pack of canids the most likely individual to kill a mother’s cubs is her own mother or other older, dominant female relatives. There is now some evidence that related female domestic cats may mutually defend kittens from marauding nonparental males as well.

**The likeliest explanation I have seen for why cats bring us dead or wounded prey as gifts is that they are trying to help us start out hunting. There isn’t, so far as I’m aware, another context to this gifting behavior seen among wild cats.

like normal when

sound

get ready to fight for life against

now making noise like

…carry on then.

This week sucks, we’ve had enough of it, and it’s only Wednesday. Have an unabashedly silly, terrifically nerdy thing.

nerdcore 4eva