You’re a freaking know-it-all! You have to be aware, intelligent, informed and competent (or at least, appear that way) ALL THE FREAKING TIME!!
You can never just relax and be silly or lighthearted and when you try you just look goofy. You actually can’t pull it off because YOU DON’T KNOW HOW!! How could anyone actually not know how to be silly? How come you have to be so dead in earnest, every second?
No wonder no one wants to hang around with you anymore. You are a drag! It’s like hanging out with Mr. freaking Spock! “Fascinating, Captain.” That’s fun at parties!
And when you aren’t being like that, you’re at the other extreme – you’re the only one in the audience dancing or you’re being all effusive and glowing about some damn thing nobody cares about or otherwise making a fool of yourself. You are hopelessly weird and you have no social skills and you do NOT know when to shut up!
How can someone go through life as much as you have and STILL be a total clod around other people? You’d think, if you were all that smart, you’d have picked up a thing or two along the way about how not to be an ass. Once in awhile. Just for a change of pace.
Here’s a suggestion, have a fight with this fellow half way up a mountain then fake your death from strangulation, your return should elicit a smile from him.
Then there’s the other extreme - the guy who always goes for the punchline, funny or not, appropriate or not. Dunno what to tell you - um, listen more, speak less?? Learn to juggle? Read some stupid tabloid and turn your brain to mush?
It sounds like you’re a natural straight man, brujaja. If that’s the case, you could be silly just by finding the right person to be a foil to. A la George Burns to Gracie Allen, or Bud Abbot to Lou Costello. Let them do all the work, simply be yourself, and bask in being the center of attention at parties.
And sometimes correcting them is just futile. I used to try to correct my landlady when she would spout off about how incredibly dangerous aspartame is. I learned pretty quickly that that wasted my time and accomplished nothing.
brujaja, did I ever tell you about the time that OtakuLoki hopped the fence to climb up to the Hollywood sign, and Jessica Alba was wearing the totally wrong shoes for the hike (honestly – pumps for doing that?), and she broke a heel just trying to keep up? I swear, it’s always a party with this guy.
No, wait, that’s accurate. Ummm…Pisces? No, that’s true. When you say, “exact opposite”, do you mean “lie”? Or something cute, like “slippery when wet”?
See what I mean? I don’t know how to be anything but dead-in-earnest. I over-think everything.
Even though I know there’s lots of guys here on the board who think smart girls are sexy and many who married one, I never meet guys like that. I have one good male friend who tells me I’m “conservative” and “prim & proper”; which is like, the furthest thing from how I am!! But I must somehow come off that way.
When I was coming up in the 80’s/90’s, there were a lot of us punk-type chicks who knew how to fix stuff and didn’t whine or play games and were mostly self-reliant but still madly romantic. And the guys seemed to like that just fine.
Now I’m grown and I don’t know where all the punk guys went. I’m not expecting them to all still be partying 24/7 and playing in garage bands. (well actually, the garage band would be okay.) But I don’t meet guys with even a punk ethic anymore. When I do, they’re way too young for me. I go to hardcore shows and everybody looks at me suspiciously like I’m somebody’s mom checking up on them.
So I feel like a fish out of water all the time. I’m not a chickenhawk at all but most of the people I know are younger than me and that gets really weird after awhile.
About the only people I get to talk to who are smart and quirky and open-minded and maybe close to my own age are here on the SDMB.
What’s the matter, did everyone cool move out of California or what?
Were you at the next table at the restaurant the other day? There was this moron there with his wife and two other people and the guy made a huge to-do analyzing every goddamn mouthful of food and sip of wine. “The red wine will accent the raisins, while the white wine will bring out the corn.” Seriously. He spent three minutes passing his cup of coffee under his nose with his eyes closed, but peeking out between the lids from time to time to see if anyone was noticing. His wife’s body language was hilarious: leaning away from him the whole time with a pained expression on her face. This was NOT a high-end restaurant, and it was the lunch menu, fer cripes sake!
Just pick one and go with it. You’ve got the basic idea.
Personally, I think astronomy is pure, unmitigated crap. (We Scorpios are like that.) But it makes for fun interactions. It takes the pressure off of “Just the facts ma’am” conversations and injects a little weird into them. Try it out.
Some other fun conversational goofiness is role-playing, which you’ll have a lot of fun with when our polka band is touring Outer Mongolia. I know that right now you’re thinking of cold reading, and you’re right, that’s another fun thing to try. I’d tell you about misinterpretation, but you rattled me with your “slippery when wet” comment, you little minx. I’m not that easy. (OK, I am, but don’t tell anyone else in our polka band.) Hmm, there’s a fourth fun thing to do, I just can’t remember it. Help me out here.
So anyway… Pisces? Do you taste good with lemon and butter?
