Rerun-appreciation as warning sign

In the grand tradition of "Hitler was a vegetarian," we now have another heap of disparate data points about Connecticut killer Adam Lanza. While to his credit, Andrew Solomon doesn't explicitly invite us to look at each new detail as the key, and makes clear (to those who read the whole thing) that Aspergers (where many of the more symptom-y details seemed to point) might be a red herring, it's hard not to read such pieces this way. And what do we learn? "He loved reruns of 'The Bob Newhart Show' [...]," for example. An appreciation for old sitcoms is now a warning sign? Great. So, too, is writing fiction that depicts something that would be unsavory in real life. Oh well. And remember, we've already established that a dislike of hair-salon chit-chat is a something to keep an eye on.

The essential in Solomon's piece comes far too near the end, i.e. that part of long-form articles almost nobody gets to:

Adam Lanza was a terrorist for an unknowable cause who committed three distinct atrocities: he killed his mother; he killed himself; he killed children and adults he’d never met before. Two of these acts are explicable; the third, incomprehensible. There are many crimes from which most people desist because we know right from wrong and are careful of the law. Most people would like to have things that belong to others; many people have felt murderous rage. But the reason that almost no one shoots twenty random children isn’t self-restraint; it’s that there is no level at which the idea is attractive.

Precisely. Randomly killing children is incomprehensible and impossible to relate to the rest. We have a pile of biographical information, all of which we're unavoidably reading through the lens of knowing what this man went on to do. That changes how we interpret the spectrum-type details, but also the mundane ones provided to show him as, in his father's words, "'a normal little weird kid.'" Even the "Bob Newhart" reruns - and could a show be any less violent or controversial? - read as suspect.

Images and neurosis

-Every form of social media has its own neurosis, it seems. First Facebook, now Instagram. I don't use Instagram (not out of some principle, just never got around to it), but having looked at it, I could see how this would make sense. It's the photos that inspire the greatest neurosis on Facebook, so a site that's just pictures is bound to do the trick. And boy do neuroses vary! I can't imagine caring that a friend had constructed a "bar" out of mashed potatoes. I've cared (in that fleeting-but-neurotic way) about other, no less ridiculous things, but, like, what's stopping any of us from buying some potatoes and putting them in cocktail glasses? For me, it's photos of people's trips to Japan, especially but not limited to meals consumed. Planning a Japanese-home-cooking extravaganza this evening, but I suspect it's not the same.

-Nothing new to say at the moment about Lulu and her well-squeezed lemons, but I wondered about Heidi Moore's observation here: "Insecurity is a big money-maker," she begins, and thus far, agreed. That's why models are so much younger and thinner than they'd seemingly need to be - it taps into the two classic insecurities, and allows even young or thin women to feel inadequate. "Happy people don't buy things," Moore continues, adding, "Unhappy people engage in 'retail therapy', and buy clothes, jewelry, electronics or even food that makes them feel as if they have higher status." This is where I'm not so sure. What about when depression (clinical or colloquial-use) manifests itself as an indifference to stuff? I know that my own interest in the-shiny tends to be greater if I'm feeling generally positive about things, lower if crankier.

-Elle Fanning stars in a short film about body image. I saw this and my first thought was, that seems about right. Fanning is a pretty 15-year-old actress, and we're living in a society that asks grown women to hate themselves for not looking 15, and 15-year-olds for not looking like actresses. Anyway, that's not it at all - Fanning is playing a teen girl who thinks she looks horrible. While there's no reason someone with body dysmorphia or the less-extreme variant (aka being a teenage girl) wouldn't be that conventionally attractive (the idea being, you don't have an accurate sense of what you look like), I'm not sure what I think about the casting. Because the best response is rarely going to be, 'Don't worry what you look like, you're movie-star gorgeous just the way you are.' Not sure how one would go about telling young girls, 'You're probably within normal limits, and that's just fine,' but ultimately that's the answer.

How to clean a carrot

Young People Today don't know how to do their own laundry. Apparently. This has been the thing - the meme before memes were a thing - since forever. And I've never understood how this caught on. Is laundry so difficult? If this hadn't yet come up, you get to college, you see the machines, you figure it out. It will be the very least momentous challenge you face as an adult.

Of course, you may make mistakes. When I last did laundry, I noticed tiny bits of carrot greens in the washer where I'd included a tote bag that had, evidently, once held carrots. Then sure enough, after the dryer runs, I open the door and out pops what it took me a moment to realize was a carrot - a full carrot that had been through the wash-and-dry cycles. It looked really odd and I regret not taking a picture.

This was in any case quite, quite far from my first time ever doing laundry. If I were 18, we might blame helicopter parenting; I'm 30, so we're instead going to blame my not having noticed a carrot remained in some tote-bag fold. But with all my laundry-doing experience, I could very well see that the clothes (and, let's not forget, tote bags) were just fine. Once you have the basics (keep red stuff away from the whites, and don't put sweaters or bras you care about in the dryer), laundry is tough to screw up.

Well! It turns out that 30-year-olds with laundry issues are this great sign of the times. Or something? I feel as though this sort of thing has come up before, but should we really be looking to a therapist to diagnose a generation? Aren't the people who seek therapy inherently unrepresentative - more troubled and likely wealthier than the norm? Brooke Donatone tells us, re: the 30-year-old laundry-phobe, "Her case is becoming the norm for twenty- to thirtysomethings I see in my office as a psychotherapist." Perhaps so. But of twenty- to thirtysomethings more generally?

Here's the bit I found most baffling:

A generation ago, my college peers and I would buy a pint of ice cream and down a shot of peach schnapps (or two) to process a breakup. Now some college students feel suicidal after the breakup of a four-month relationship. Either ice cream no longer has the same magical healing properties, or the ability to address hardships is lacking in many members of this generation.

Feeling or becoming suicidal after an objectively minor romantic disappointment seems if anything a kind of ancient approach to love, at any rate not especially millenial. Certainly not in the alleged era of hook-up culture.

But more to the point, the difference here isn't generational but just a more general matter of well-being. If you're typically happy and have friends (as is the implication) to share the ice cream and schnapps with you, a breakup is less devastating than it is if you're already on the edge of some kind of crash. Some young people will always be in one category, others in the other, many somewhere in between. (The gap between suicidal and so blasé as to need only a dessert and a drink to get over someone you were hung up on is, needless to say, tremendous.)

What I'm missing, I suppose, is where the millenial angle fits in. The relevant questions would seem to be a) whether more people today are depressed than used to be, and b) whether today's depression manifests itself differently than earlier variants. Doesn't depression traditionally entail a sense of hopelessness, a feeling of just the kind of incompetence that would make a task like laundry seem impossibly daunting?

On the need to call things by their proper names

-What are "skinny jeans"? Are they a) the jeans you wore at your skinniest (after reaching your full height) or bought too small (what Zara jeans?) and occasionally try to squeeze into; b) the narrow-cut, stretchy jeans that were ubiquitous until stores went all-out with jeggings; or c) jeans that make you look skinny? This can get confusing, particularly when stories about Item C are illustrated with photos of very slim (is "skinny" pejorative?) women in what may or may not be skinny jeans in the Item B sense of the term. In any case, my on-again, off-again quest for jeans without stretch is now that much more futile, now that "the technology behind Spanx" is involved.

-Where does entitled male behavior cross over into a mental-health crisis where yes, you feel sorry for the woman, but you kind of also have to feel bad for the guy as well?

Bisou endorses this post

The latest study about how loneliness will kill you has conveniently made headlines just as I'm on some serious deadlines, and my husband's spending a couple weeks away at conferences, and I'm living in the woods, the kind of hyper-busy demanded of those my age in the year 2013, but without a heck of a lot of face-to-face human interaction. Am I lonely? I don't think so - I have friends and family I'm close with, even if they're not any of them in the woods with me at the moment, unless you count a poodle, which, why not? And I'm enough of an introvert that the woods-jogs and gosh-darn-getting-work-done marathons this permits are fine by me. But if I were going out tonight, rather than staying in with the no-sleep-till-Introduction-is-polished goal, I think I'd be OK with that. Of course, if Hulu had Season 4 of "The Bob Newhart Show" (no television, but out of cheapness, not principles) and I could knock back a couple of those rather than finishing this task, I'd be OK with that as well.

Still, it's like, uh oh, what if I'm actually basically neglecting my health by not getting out more? What if I find myself talking to said poodle, things other than dog-commands and cooing? (What if I asked my dog to read my dissertation and make edits? If only.)

But left with all this thinking-time (one cannot, after all, dissertate while poodle-walking), I got to thinking: maybe part of what we're calling "loneliness" comes from a very modern sense that everyone else is socializing more than we are? Not just among woods-dissertators - we have our own particular concerns, which we are sharing with our poodles as necessary - but also among urban office-workers with happy-hours and the like? (Yes, office-workers, we the dissertators believe that the grass is greener.)

First there were the 1990s sitcoms, which gave the impression that adulthood means forming a tight-knit group of friends, who are like family, without anyone ever drifting in or out of the group. If you were someone who - because of temperament or geographical constraints - has close friends who are not all also close friends with one another, or if you're someone closer with your similar-age family (siblings, spouse, cousins, etc.) than your friends you see at the coffee shop (although there were siblings on "Friends," I recall), you may have felt that your life didn't match up.

Then, of course, came Facebook. The thing not only reminds you of all the people hanging out without you, people you would not even remember existed if it weren't for the site. It also presents this distorted overview of how people spend their time. Evenings out are documented. Evenings in are not. Introverted adults who are frankly relieved that they're no longer expected to be at bars or parties several nights a week all of a sudden find themselves wondering if perhaps this is expected. The age-old question the young ask themselves - 'Am I a loser for staying in on a Saturday night?' - is now something those who are 45 and married with kids may find themselves wondering.

And I'm leaving out the obvious: adults are now expected to have hundreds if not thousands of "friends." Even though I think we all understand that no one has five hundred confidants, the list-of-friends phenomenon invites us to quantify our social lives as never before. It poses a question. Well, different questions, depending one's circumstances, depending one's neuroses. The question might be something like, 'why is it if I have over a thousand friends, only fifteen of them wrote on my wall for my birthday?' Or: 'why, if I have two hundred friends, do I not have plans for this weekend?' Or: 'why does X have twice as many friends as I do?'

Point being, you're left with a sense of what a typical social life is like that probably doesn't bear much relation to what others are actually up to, and with an impression that social life can be quantified, that you can numerically fall short. Again, it could be just something I'm imagining, from the vantage point of an especially woods-hermit-ish week. But I wonder if "loneliness," which is apparently distinct from solitude or not having a large group of friends, can actually increase in proportion to our perceptions of how numerous and fulfilling the social lives of others must be.

Showing your face

Does not being on Facebook imply that you're deranged? I'd like to think not, given that some of my own good friends have, for good reasons, left or never joined. But I do think there's an obvious-if-you-think-about-it sense in which not sharing can be almost as self-defeating as sharing the wrong information. We hear all the time about how dangerous it is to put information about yourself online, lest a potential employer or similar find it. But what if the information reveals you to be a reasonable person who would along fine in an office? If Facebook means a return to small-town life, then opting out means accepting to be thought the town eccentric or worse.

And plenty of people do pick up on this, having an online presence despite being in fields where they need to seem ultra-professional, but crafting their personae in such a way as to show only the best and most work-friendly side. Not that these are people whose offline selves are terribly racy. It's just that the bits that are highlighted will tell the most positive story possible, the one most in keeping with how they wish to be perceived.

But it's not just about those somewhat in the public eye being careful. It's also that an online presence might reveal, say, that a woman enjoys shoe-shopping, reading Us Weekly, and hanging out with her friends. These might not be traits she would highlight in a job interview, but they reveal to potential employers that she's relatable, conventional, and not spending her spare time conspiracy-theorizing about the government. Whichever photos might reveal a non-work life, perhaps even silliness, social drinking, time spent on Facebook, things of that nature, but the net result might actually help her. This is an age of collaborative work, and even in fields where one expects a lack of social skills, social skills never hurt.

The unfortunate converse of all of this is that being someone who doesn't come across as friendly and normal on social media, while a drawback on the job market, is by no means the crime of the century. What we don't want is a society in which anyone who opts out of personal social media (updating your company's profile is something else), anyone who fails to demonstrate normalcy through these channels, to be automatically deemed suspicious in the homicidal-maniac sense of the term.

Between Penny and Sheldon

Much like Isabel (who, as seems relevant for the content of this post, I "know" only via blog), I've been following the Asperger's stories as they appear, from the perspective of someone who reads these things and thinks, uh oh! And then remembers: no, not really. We all of us feel special and different and unique and all that fun stuff, and those of us with concrete evidence to support it (consider your standardized-test-score to gregariousness ratio) can't help but wonder.

But this is what I've concluded, anecdotally of course:

-There is definitely a thing, whether we're calling it Asperger's, mild autism, or something else, that explains a certain type of behavior that anyone who's taught, anyone who's been a student, certainly anyone who's spent time in nerdy environments will recognize as being more-than-nerdy, more-than-awkward. It's if anything more obvious in a geeky milieu that this thing is not simply awkwardness, because there's so much run-of-the-mill awkwardness around. People with the capacity for speech, but not for holding a regular conversation. I can think offhand of two kids in my high school class (one boy, one girl) who fit the bill. And then there were the Magic kids, the mathiest of the math kids, the debate kids, etc. Many would have been outcasts at a normal high school, and had that distinctive know-it-all speech pattern, but they were (and are, I suspect) functioning just fine if not far better than fine. I can think offhand of maybe two kids at my high school who didn't fit this, and they were these upbeat blond girls on the soccer team who were always kind of mysterious, like they'd been dropped in from a New England prep school and weren't entirely sure what to make of their surroundings.

-So there's another thing, a type of person who, when introduced to the 40 peers with whom they'll be sharing a Birthright Israel bus for the next ten days, or the 35 other kids in their gym class, will prefer to be alone or to gravitate to one or two like-minded sorts. There will be a requisite libertarian phase. Do you mostly prefer staying in to going out, but sometimes you do get stir-crazy? Do you attract friends who are snarky and/or good at math? Do you have a blog that isn't devoted to posting cute outfit pics? This is the Daria-Sheldon spectrum, and if you're on it, you know who you are, and I have my doubts that this sort of person is any more deserving of a medical diagnosis than someone who's incredibly outgoing and up on the Kardashians. There are entire milieus of people like this, and if you're like this and you find yourself in one, bingo. You won't suddenly want to go out every night, but nor will you feel that only a couple of people get you.

Personally, I'm something of a hybrid between this second thing and no thing in this regard whatsoever. If I'm around a bunch of Pennies, I'm a Sheldon who can pass as a Penny but who, given a Jane, will be a Daria. But if I'm surrounded by Sheldons (which is where I'm most comfortable), I'm aware of my Penny-like nature, my VIP status at Zappos. If we're defining "the spectrum" to begin with Penny and end with Sheldon, I'm on it. But if it starts with Sheldon and ends with severe mental disability, not so much. The question that I (and all the other NYT readers, no doubt) keep coming back to is whether "Sheldon" is a medical condition, or simply a personality type with its plusses and minuses like all the others.