Say no to introvert-shaming and YES to boiled cookies (choco-peanut butter-oatmeal lumps)

[cimorene]

Last night while I was scrubbing the dishes after making

Boiled Cookies

1. 1 2/3 cups (4 deciliters) sugar
2. ½ cup (1,2 deciliters) milk
3. 1/4 cup (0,6 dL) cocoa
4. 1 teaspoon vanilla extract OR 1 tablespoon vanilla sugar

5. 3 cups (7,2 dL) oats
6. ½ cup (1,2 dL) peanut butter

Put sugar, milk, cocoa, and vanilla sugar in a saucepan and bring to boil for one minute.

Remove from heat and beat in oats and peanut butter quickly but thoroughly.

Quickly drop the cookies onto foil or wax paper using spoons before they cool and solidify.

, I had an epiphany. I know, I know, a dishwater epiphany is a major cliché, and I'll try to avoid them in future. My epiphany was this:

1. I am a natural introvert, who


2. has spent my life being bad at making friends with people and then


3. feeling anxious and guilty because I'm bad at it. (For instance, this past year, I've felt awful for not making friends with the other trainee teacher's assistants in my course, since most of the rest of them are making friends with each other. Am I a bad person? Am I judging people and being secretly elitist, like my Mom would always say when I was little, even while she constantly conditioned me to judge everyone from the other side of her mouth?)


4. This contains the implicit assumption that having more friends is a good thing.


5. But I've also spent my life feeling anxious and guilty because I lack the emotional energy to deal with the friends I have, because


6. my introversion is such that I frequently don't have the spoons for any social interaction, let alone for personal investment in all of my friends.


7. My anxiousness the past few weeks because I was too depressed to hold my annual Passover dinner for my local slashas* feels exactly like when I was little and would think, I haven't called Becky in months, she might think I've forgotten about her, I should do that, but man, what if she wants to play that ONE Barbie game - or her Dad answers the phone, I hate him - or if something bad happened in her life, and I won't be able to do anything about that - or what if I get tired and can't keep thinking of things to say and it gets all awkward?


8. And if I had more friends, my emotional obligations (you can debate the extent to which friendship entails obligation till the cows come home, but there's an element of emotional investment required for me) would be even more.


9. And that would be bad!

There's no reason I should have more meatspace friends! I couldn't handle any more face-to-face social interaction! So I should not constantly feel that I'm being a slightly less human organism by failing to meet some mystical invisible Friend Quota.

Time to stop feeling guilty just for being an introvert and bury my head in a book if I want to.

* Also, since I don't believe in any deities and neither do my slashas, I can hold my parents' Jewish Heritage/Hippy Passover any time I want. It hardly matters that I missed the date.

Comments

[lazulisong]

-- MOUNTAIN COOKIES \o/

[cimorene]

You called them 'mountain' cookies? Where did you get the recipe, out of curiosity? The only place my family has ever encountered them is the source - a Headstart program from Iowa in the 60's when my mom was growing up.

[lazulisong]

if I'm remembering correctly one of the cooks at my grade school made them, but I think my grandmother has a recipe for them kicking around. I guess the internet thinks you need to add coconut too, but blegh, grossness.

I think they were called mountain cookies because of their shape? I mean. One wouldn't like to call them poo cookies.

[arch]

And we call them "no-bake cookies"! They were my brother's favorite when we were kids.

[lotesse]

Introverts unite - somewhere where we don't have to talk to each other. For srs though, I know exactly what you mean. Socialization is hard work when it doesn't come naturally.

[cimorene]

somewhere where we don't have to talk to each other.

My favorite activity with my wife is - well, my favorite is watching movies, but my second favorite is browsing the internet in our side-by-side matching armchairs and occasionally exchanging instant messages! It's perfect.

[lotesse]

My partner and I do that sitting side-by-side in bed with our laptops. We call it being parallel :)

[cimorene]

Hahahhaha. "Parallel surfing"?

[lotesse]

exactly!

[everysecondtuesday]

Omnom, no bake cookies! I loved those as a kid.

[ane]

I was wandering my network page. :)

I recognize those cookies. Out of curiosity I found my old recipe box which I haven't looked through in ages and found the exact same recipe. We called them no bake cookies.

I grew up in Iowa in 70s and 80s. I remember getting the recipe in grammar school sometime. It was some class activity, maybe for open house or something, that we made them.

I agree with all the introvert things. I'd like to have more local friends but I have no clue how/where to meet people. I spend half my week out of town with a crew and tend to not want to have to deal with people on the weekend. I like hibernating.

[cimorene]

I suppose I probably wouldn't like it if I had no local friends, because occasionally I want to do things with them, but I think I'm glad that I don't have any more. Just four in the same room at the same time is kind of too many for me to handle.

[alafaye]

I think we--as a society--have been trained to believe that we are social creatures and that if we don't naturally socialize or make friends easy, there is something wrong with us.

As much as I love being a cashier, days I hate it because after about four hours--I just want to tell any and all customers not to interact with me with being social is painful and tedious and annoying for me. I can feign being an extrovert if the occasion calls for it, but mostly, I just ignore everyone and the like.

Pretending I care about my co-workers social woes and such? Ugh. I just can't do it. At all.

I prefer to spend my down time on my own, in my room (I live with a room mate) with the door shut, ignoring the world. Going so far as to turn my phone to silent, knowing if its important, the caller will leave a message and all others can be ignored.

But again, because I prefer alone time over time spent with other people...I'm strange.

This is why having internet friends is good--I can interact when I have the want to and can choose to lurk as I want.

[cimorene]

Yes, that is a nice thing about internet friends! Although for me the main benefit is, I think, the ability to select for actual things in common, as opposed to geographical proximity. I doubt I could even relate seriously to close friends who weren't in fandom in some way. I probably on the whole have more passive, one-way interactions on the internet (reading feeds and reading lists and the like) than actual conversations and exchanges, and internet acquaintances are even more dramatically superior to meatspace ones, I find, because it's quite possible to just avoid them entirely. On a day where I'm anxious or irritable, I don't have to talk to anyone if I don't want to.

[alafaye]

On a day where I'm anxious or irritable, I don't have to talk to anyone if I don't want to.

Exactly!

So much easier.

Although for me the main benefit is, I think, the ability to select for actual things in common,

I cannot tell you the things I have brought up thinking someone is going to know or understand...only to find out that I was wrong and then having to go through seeing them face to face after *headpalm*