Dream Log: Social Awkwardness In Bonn

In real life I spent the 1989-90 academic year as a student at the University of Bonn. Other famous alumni of that university include Marx, Heine and Nietzsche, so it makes sense that I was a student there too. The former palace of the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne --

-- houses the humanities departments of the university, so when I was there I regarded it as pretty much the entire university. Turns out they've got a lot of other stuff going on in different buildings. The title of Elector signifies that the Archbishop was one of the 7 princes who elected the Holy Roman Emperor. The palace, built in the late 17th and early 18th century, looks pretty much the same on the outside as it always has; on the inside, very disappointingly, it looks exactly the same as a huge university building without big enough windows. Lots of concrete.

Last night I dreamed that I returned to Bonn. Just as in 1989-90, I moved into a student dormitory and spent little time or energy on academic things, concentrating on my social life instead. Some of the people I had met in Bonn as fellow students 27 years ago had also come back.

I felt that a lot of them were shunning me. I wasn't sure, but that's how it felt. That's how it feels being autistic a lot of the time: socially awkward, entirely unsure how welcome or unwelcome one is in a given social situation.

Someone I knew from 1989-90 was spending some of his time with a tight-knit group of younger students, students of a more typical age for college attendance. At one point I and my friend from back then and a small young man from the younger group were sitting at a long table in what may have been a university cafeteria. Whatever the building was used for, at that moment it was relatively empty. The younger guy was very energetically working at a large notebook, drawing things which looked liked artistic images and scientific diagrams and equations at the same time. The three of us were talking and to me the conversation felt rather strained. In the conversation, it came up that the young guy could do Rain Man-level arithmetic in his head. I was like, Oh yeah? and gave him pairs of numbers to multiply in his head. He fired products back at me right away, without slowing down his work in his large notebook. The problems were to large for me to do in my head, and I was a little annoyed with myself that I didn't write them down along with his answers so that I could check them later with a calculator. I was unsure whether he was calculating accurately or just messing with me. In any case, he knew enough that his answers had the correct numbers of digits and ended with the correct number. for example, if I'd asked him to multiply 563 times 477, his immediate answer had 6 digits and ended with 1.

I was completely uncertain, not just about the multiplication: I didn't know whether the work the young man was doing was art, math, science or all three simultaneously or something else; I didn't know whether he was doing this as schoolwork or for some other purpose; and I had no idea whatsoever whether my presence there was welcome, indifferent or unwelcome to the other two.

Then it was night and I was outside and it was cold. I saw a friend or acquaintance of mine (I didn't know how he would describe me to others) going into a house where a party was going on inside, and I slipped inside right behind him.

John Goodman, the actor who played Rosanne's husband and has appeared in many Coen Brothers movies, was sitting at a table just inside. In the dream, he was one of the people I knew from Bonn 1989-90. He saw me immediately, and rushed me straight back outside into the cold and started walking me briskly away from the house and the party. Sometimes it's clear to me that I haven't been welcome somewhere, and this was one of those times.

At the same time, though, John Goodman's attitude toward me was not clear. He said something to me about my being dressed all wrong for the party. I had no idea whether I really was unacceptably dressed for the party, or if I was unwelcome there for other reasons. I didn't know whether the problem was me specifically or if any party crasher would've been rushed right straight back outside. I tried to get some clarification from John about this, but I didn't get anywhere with that. He was talking to me a mile a minute, and I didn't understand what the problem was at all. Maybe John and the other people at that party never wanted to see me on any social occasion, and John's talk was intended to keep me from seeing this too clearly and becoming enraged over it. I didn't know whether John and/or others had heard that I was autistic, or if some of them equated "autistic" with "crazy" and "crazy" with "dangerous." (The truth is, I'm as harmless as a puppy.) Maybe there really was no problem here except that I was in jeans and a T-shirt and sweatshirt and hooded winter jacket instead of the somewhat slicker attire of the other guests: nice-looking button-down shirts and overcoats for the guys, skirts for many of the ladies, like that. Maybe that really was the only reason why John rushed me out. Maybe it was somewhere in between. I had no idea.

At this point, I just wanted to get away from John and from the party. John mumbled something about his having heard I'd been diagnosed with something, and asked what that was about. Again, I was completely unsure whether this was friendly concern, or an attempt to muddy some waters, or something else entirely. I yelled at John, "It's called autism! Millions of us have it! Google it! Good night!"

Derek Flood And Søren Kierkegaard

Two theologians, but only one philosopher between them. I thought long and hard about how best to describe Derek Flood here, but it's hard to top his Huffington Post author bio:

A longtime voice in the post-conservative evangelical movement, Derek’s focus is on wrestling with questions of faith and doubt, violence in the Bible, relational theology, and understanding the cross from the perspective of grace and restorative justice.

Yeah. Stick that in yr pipe and smoke it. In his HP icon Flood's mane of hair looks a bit like Kierkegaard's. Like Kierkegaard in that one portrait of him we all know, Flood stares at you earnestly, but while Kierkegaard has a twinkle in his eye and the hint of of a smile, Flood looks deadly dull. Kierkegaard looks like he might actually be interested in you and what you have to say. Flood looks like he thinks that what he has to say to you is so important that it may not even have occurred to him to listen to you unless it's to see whether or not you've understood him. In every piece I've read by him, Flood can't go for 2 sentences in a row without being unmistakeably Christian. Kierkegaard talks about all sorts of things other than Christianity without constantly distorting them in that theological way we all know and love. Not only does he quote many pre-Christian Greek authors, he clearly also likes them the way they really are. No distortion required. He sometimes goes dozens of pages at a stretch without giving the slightest sign that he's a Christian theologian. This of course is what makes Kierkegaard the most appealing of all Christian theologians: he's the one who least resembles a Christian theologian. All the others have no end of urgent things to tell you, such as how they understand the cross from the perspective of grace and restorative justice. Kierkegaard's interests are much wider. He's receptive.

Of course, autistics, such as myself, are not receptive so much, that is to say: one of the major ways you can tell we're autistic is that we have a hard time switching from telling everybody what's what, to listening. At least when it comes to face-to-face conversation. We may be good at absorbing written communications -- although there can be problems there too -- but that often breaks down in face-to-face communication. "Face to face" is even a misnomer in some conversations with autistics, because some autistics have a very hard time maintaining normal amounts of eye contact. I pretty much can't do it with most conversation partners. Don't take it personally, I have a problem.

But at least I know that it's a very serious problem. And I know that a lack of eye contact is just one of the ways in which I routinely fail to achieve what most people think of as the normal back-and-forth and give-and-take of conversation.

But that doesn't mean that I don't want to have more give-and-take with you. I doesn't mean I don't care. I realize that it often looks like I don't care, if it doesn't look even worse, as if I'm hostile or something like that. It's a technical problem with the interface. Don't worry, people are working on this.

Is It Me?

Do I struggle so to explain simple things to simple folk because of some flaw in my pedagogical technique? If so, and if that flaw is obvious, please tell me! Once again, for your amusement, The Wrong Monkey offers an unaltered transcript of my struggle to communicate with someone. Maybe it's me. Maybe it's been me all along:

HIM: (reacting to an article about how the age of the Gospel of Judas manuscript had been confirmed) Who cares?

ME: It's a manuscript which appears to be over 1700 years old. That's kinda cool.

HIM: What's cool is that it's a fake which naturally means con artists have been around forever.

ME: In this case, "authentic" means over 1700 years old -- regardless of the manuscript's content, the character of its author, whether Judas, or Jesus, ever existed, or what you want "authentic" to mean.

HIM: In other words if it were 1699 years old in wouldn't be authentic, but at 1701 it would? Good grief. I was curious if that was true or whether you were loony, maybe even both. My thesaurus has similar words for "authentic" from accurate to valid and lots more in between. But there is never a mention of any particular age the subject must be. And if you'd care to validate that just find an authentic thesaurus and you'll see.

ME: No, if it were 10 years old, or 150 years old, then it would be a fake, a fake which had been made to look like it was 1700 years old (GIVE OR TAKE!) And yes, I am loony. My Mom had me tested. By a specialist.

HIM: Are you suggesting if I were to build a fake Ferrari from one of those kits that are seen in all car magazines, when that fake Ferrari becomes a particular age, in this case 1700 years old give or take, it ceases to be a fake Ferrari and then somehow becomes an authentic one?

ME: No. It would never be a real Ferrari. But 1700 years from now it would be an authentic 21st-century artifact. Something built 1690 years from now and artificially aged to make it look like it was made in the 21st century will never be a 21st-century artifact.

At this point, to my astonishment -- I had been settling in for a long, long haul -- he said he understood, and who knows, maybe he really does. Could it be that my pedagogical technique, although still abysmal, is improving? It still seems that I may be enraging people when I'm trying to explain something. Sheldon, on The Big Bang Theory,seems to constantly enrage other people in the process of explaining things to them. But then Sheldon doesn't seem to care about his effect on others, or perhaps it's more that he rarely notices it. Maybe I need to be much, much more discreet about such explanations, and only offer them when requested. Maybe so, but the effort which would be involved in such a great change in my behavior, and the distress I would feel in seeing uncomprehension and doing nothing about it, makes me cringe already. Again, your feedback is welcomed.