Quirkyalone

Dear Quirkyalone: Send Us Your Questions and Concerns, Compliments and Complaints!

Sep 21, 2009 - Written by Onely  |  Filed under: Personal Growth, Quirkytogether, Single Life

Dear Quirkyalone: Advice for QuirkyLiving is a weekly guest column by Lisa and Christina at the singles’ advocacy blog Onely. Our column appears here every Monday — but we’re running low on questions!

So, dear readers: Do you have dilemmas, conundrums, burning (or mundane) questions about quirkyaloneness and quirkytogetherness? What questions do you have about optimum quirkyliving? What’s come up in your life recently where you could use some advice, a pep talk, or maybe even some tough love? When you’re making up your own road map for (quirky)living, you need thoughtful advice. We’re here for you — and more importantly, we want to HEAR from you!

Please send your questions and concerns, compliments and complaints to: onely AT onely.org

In the meantime, Happy National Singles’ Week! We’re celebrating with a blog crawl sponsored by Single Women Rule — check it out!

– Lisa and Christina

Dear Quirkyalone: Why am I less remarkable to sober people?

Sep 07, 2009 - Written by Onely  |  Filed under: Dating, Friendship, Personal Growth

“Dear Quirkyalone: Advice for QuirkyLiving” is a weekly guest column by the authors of the brilliant blog Onely. It appears every Monday. When you’re making up your own road map for (quirky)living, you need thoughtful advice. We’re here for you. Quirkyalone and Onely welcome your questions; send them on to onely AT onely.org.

Dear Quirkyalone: I’m a Quirkyalone from SF, kinda floating between school and not school right now, and I was wondering: I often feel like the rest of my generation of college aged folks is only interested in interacting with one another while drunk. In recent exchanges at parties, I find that I am remarkable to my drunk acquaintances, yet less so on days after when they become sober. Why do you suppose that is?  – Gian

Dear Gian,

In order to answer your question, I’m going to make two assumptions:

1) that your new acquaintances were not simply too drunk to remember you afterward; and

2) that when you say “in days after” you’re not talking about “the morning after”.

I think you already know that you can’t use a person’s drunk personality as a barometer for how they’ll treat you in the sober times.  Now with that caveat out of the way, let’s look a little deeper:

Drunk people are likely to be more interested in anyone and everything. That’s why people drink–to see the world in new ways. Or maybe that’s LSD. But in any case, when your drunk interlocutor told you, “Gee, your worm farm sounds just fascinating,”  he (we’ll assume he’s a he) may very well have meant it. Alcohol suppresses activity in the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain responsible for planning and decision making. So at the time of your conversation, his impaired prefrontal cortex caused him to “forget” or overlook how much worms remind him of some unfortunate experiments on the playground in middle school,  or the fact that dirt in his fingernails gives him the willies. But when his brain sobered up, the realization that he’s not really that into mulch and compost came blasting back into his consciousness, along with the headache. Hence his decision, “I guess I won’t call that nice worm girl after all.” 

Continue Reading →

Multitasking Dementia

Sep 01, 2009 - Written by Sasha Cagen  |  Filed under: Featured, Personal Growth, technology

I had no memory of where I parked my car. Why? While I was parking the car, a friend called. Against my better judgment I took the call. I wanted to talk to him, and I found myself so engrossed in the experience of telling him everything that happened with our mutual loved one (who is suffering from cancer) over the last month, that I had apparently no memory of where I parked the car. All I could remember was the sensation of walking over a pedestrian overpass, and looking for the spa, where ironically, I was going to relax.

The theme of the day was multitasking. I blamed multitasking for the incident. I lost my car, but first believed it might be stolen. It’s always fun when those two questions obsessively course through your brain: Did I lose my car or was it stolen? After 30 minutes of scouring for it on foot, I flagged down a cop who amazingly helped me find the car by driving around with me. He was my savior. After thirty more minutes we found it. I gushed, “Thank you, thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart.” I think he thought I was the most tightly wound woman in San Francisco.

Some defenders call it, “continuous partial attention.” I think they are kidding themselves. Just that morning, I found myself unable to stop emailing while listening to an absolutely riveting KQED Forum radio show about our increasing propensity to text, IM, email, and watch videos while doing everything else. The Stanford study expected “heavy media multitaskers” to have special abilities, but instead, but all they found were deficits in their memory, efficiency, attention, and organizational skills, as compared to non-heavy-media multitaskers. HMMs have the illusion of productivity, but the brain’s switching costs, from emailing to IM to video to writing, are too high. The brain can only process one string of information at once.

Continue Reading →

Dear QuirkyAlone: How do I make new friends?

Aug 24, 2009 - Written by Onely  |  Filed under: Friendship, Personal Growth, Single Life

“Dear Quirkyalone: Advice for QuirkyLiving” is a weekly guest column by the authors of the brilliant blog Onely. It appears every Monday. When you’re making up your own road map for (quirky)living, you need thoughtful advice. We’re here for you. Quirkyalone and Onely welcome your questions; send them on to onely AT onely.org.

Dear Quirkyalone,

Many of my friends are having children, and this is putting pressure on our friendships.  Not only do they have next-to-no time to catch up, but all our conversation centres on their children. So it’s time to find new friends –but this is proving really really difficult.  Can you talk about the phenomenon of having very few friends and where and how to make new friends (either single or childfree friends)? Thanks.

–Singal (in Australia)

Dear Singal,

I think many readers will identify with your problem. But before I answer your question, let me offer some annoying unsolicited advice: don’t give up on your friends right away. Friendship is about weathering life changes together. It’s normal for people–especially Quirkyalones or Quirkytogethers–to develop different goals and interests through life (would you want to be friends with them if they didn’t?). Consider yourself lucky that your friends are not taking up B.A.S.E. jumping (or something more terrifying, like scrapbooking). Some relationships can survive such shifts in interests, and others can’t.  In any friendship, one person will sometimes tax the other’s patience–think of vacation slideshows. But when a friend really hurts or neglects you, try to decide what would be least stressful: abandoning the friendship, or taking action to fix it–whether through a frank talk with your friend, a simple apology, a monetary stimulus, interpretive dance, whatever. Use this handy formula:

Continue Reading →