as small as a world and as large as alone

9:35am July 28, 2014

pervocracy:

“Publish and answer everything I say or you are not engaging with your critics” comments are so infuriating and sort of hilarious.  I feel like I’m on Sixty Minutes or something.

“Mr. Pervocracy, you haven’t spoken publicly about allegations that you were slightly wrong on a blog post you made three years ago about butts.  Why the mysterious silence?  What do you say to those who claim you are failing to engage with your constituents?  This won’t just go away, you know.  You owe the public some answers.  YOU WERE WRONG ABOUT BUTTS.”

HEEEEEEEE.

I’ve had people do that.

I’ve had people say things like “So in 1999 you described the number 5 as olive green, but in 2004 you described it as dog turd brown.  Synesthesia doesn’t change over time, so obviously you were lying about one or the other.”  

(Actually this had a very simple explanation but the person clearly didn’t want to hear it.  It had to do with the fact that there’s a set of colors that I see as all one basic color, and someone once referred to one of those colors as ‘olive’, so when I described a slightly different color that 5 is, I added 'green’ after it because 'olive green’ is a common color phrase and I pick up phrases rather than single words.  The color itself, of the 5, is a dark yellow color that really is between green and brown in color and I consider some shades of green, yellow, and brown all to be one basic color, regardless of how I describe them.  Also many olives are the exact same shade as many dog turds.  I’m clearly not lying about my synesthesia because I passed an exhaustive synesthesia battery well enough to participate in a genetics study.  Some of the battery included a test of split-second reactions, which was actually the part of the battery that showed the strongest signs of synesthesia, so… yeah.  This person was full of it.)

But I’ve gotten detailed personal questions involving “On this date you wrote this and on this other date you wrote that so clearly you’re lying about one or the other,” which is maddening for someone with a communication disorder that affects how precisely accurate my communication is at any given time.  And just detailed personal questions in general, which are invasive but if I don’t answer them people think I’m hiding something.  I think there’s a weird culture around celebrity where people have this sense of entitlement to information about other people’s lives, and they’ve transferred that culture to bloggers as well, expecting us to open up our entire lives as well.  (Which shouldn’t even be expected of real celebrities, mind you.)

I’ve also gotten one really frustrating kind of interaction, where I get asked a question.  And I can’t answer it right away because I’m still reading what the person wrote, or coming up with words, or whatever.  And then by the time I’m capable of answering, whether that’s a matter of seconds, minutes, or days longer than the person wanted, they ask “Why did you answer me at exactly this time?”  As if I need a reason that my brain could finally handle communication at a particular time.  There was one person in particular who would bombard me on IRC chats with questions and information at a rate far faster than I could take in the information, and then when I responded out of sync with her expectations (which were basically that I should both think and type at over 160 words a minute, as far as I can tell, just because she could), she’d demand to know why I responded at just exactly that time and what the significance was.  

It got to the point there was no way to communicate with her because the entire conversations consisted of her spamming me over and over with “Why haven’t you answered my question yet?” (each time she said it made it take longer for me to answer because I had to read what she said) followed by, when I did answer the question, “Why did you answer right then and not instantly after I asked you?” (Followed by “Why haven’t you answered my question yet?” repeated ad nauseam.)

She may have been an extreme version, but there’s a lot of people who reacted more or less that way to time-delayed responses.  As if there’s some special significance to the time my brain takes to process information.  What pissed me off about the above person was she claimed to be like the autisticest person in the world, but she couldn’t relate to language processing problems, or anything that made a person take time to communicate, or any processing speed problem that made a person take longer to do anything in general, and seemed to expect that the entire world should be better than she was at everything, even things where she was far better than average (like her thinking speed and reading speed and reaction time and writing speed including brain-to-language speed, all of which was lightning-fast).  And if an autistic person had a problem she didn’t have, she’d claim that the problem wasn’t really part of autism or that the person was lying.  She also claimed to know absolutely nothing about autism (and this was a point of pride with her, that she had no interest in autism and therefore hadn’t researched it and knew nothing about it, unlike “all those fakers” in the autistic community), and yet she always claimed to know what “real autistic people” were like as opposed to people in the autistic community, and she’d claim a lot of common autistic traits as personal traits that belonged to her and nobody else was allowed to have.  

Anyway, I blame our culture’s fixation on celebrities for the way bloggers are treated.  People think they have a right to know all about the life of anyone who is in any way public, even if they’re just a blogger.  And they think if we don’t want to answer their questions then we must be untrustworthy or hiding something.  Rather than that we’re just people, and react like any other person to invasive personal questions.

By the way, it is okay to lie in response to overly personal questions if you can’t find a way to get out of answering.  People act like lying isn’t ever okay, but I think lying to protect one’s privacy is a perfectly okay thing to do.  I don’t make a habit of it, but with some people, I’ve done it, and I don’t regret it at all.  Especially since one such person turned out to be asking the personal questions in order to gain access to even more personal information through cyberstalking.

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