azurelunatic | Interpersonal dynamics, "What the fuck are you smoking, bitch?"

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Interpersonal dynamics, "What the fuck are you smoking, bitch?"

Had a recent encounter with what the Arcata Eye would refer to as "a weirdling", someone who tripped my weirdometer to the scary side of the scale. At the time it happened, I refrained from posting about it, because I wanted to get some feedback first.

I discussed the situtuation with mutual acquaintances, and found that other than the person who has gotten their weirdometer fine-tuned by so many bad experiences, I was the only one getting this precise level of "What the *fuck*?!?!" from the weirdling's weirdness.

Somehow, though, we managed to hit on an explanation.

As the weirdling's attention is focused on me, I am the one bearing the brunt of the "WTF??!?!" perception. Others, not having the weirdling paying attention to them, aren't moved to label it a weirdling, because it is acting like a decent person around them. Me, it acts like a weirdling around. Those who have observed its actions around me agree that yes, it's a weirdling if ever there was one.

Epiphany time. This is one of those weird interpersonal dynamics things. Several of my friends have weirdlings, weirdlings who behave badly around them, but manage to simulate decent human beings in nearly every other way except where my friends are concerned, where there are just a few, or more than a few, screws missing.

One friend has weirdlings, and mutual friends of them and the weirdlings are convinced that the weirdlings are wonderful, decent human beings, and my friend is utterly wronging the weirdlings by insisting that they are weirdlings, and really should be giving them a chance. [Insert digression to FAQ #6 on the 'give them a chance' thing...]

From the friends' perspective, they see a normal, healthy, human being, with a few human quirks. Yet somehow their friend is insisting that this normal friend of theirs is a potentially dangerous weirdling? The usual response is, "What the fuck are you smoking, bitch?"

If a weirdling like that makes it bigtime, the phrases "S/He kept to []self, mostly," and "S/He was always a good student / a bit of a loner," are what tend to pop up on the evening news from those who knew the weirdling in better days as a human. No one wants to believe that a weirdling will go all weird until it's too late, except for those few who the weirdling shows the weird face to.

I know that I've been a weirdling in the past, mostly in my high school freshman year. Several of my classmates decided that I was the one most likely to snap in a dangerous fashion. This was before Columbine, even.

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I'm learning more and more to rely on my instincts about people. That "give him/her a chance" thing, I am realizing, is almost never a good idea.

The one exception is now one of my very best friends. BUT...he just pissed me off, he did NOT give me a skeevy feeling. And my very first impression of him was good.

Yeah.

And, it all depends on what kind of things get picked up in first impressions.

The first time I saw dear

pyrogenic, I decided I was going to avoid him, because he was untidy and had long hair.

I learned that this alone was not a good thing to base first impressions off of, very quickly thereafter, and we've been good friends since.

I have experienced people who were weirdlings to me and perfectly normal to everyone else. And yet I wonder, is 'weirdlingness' an inherent quality, or are all people someone else's weirdlings? I like to think I'm generally pretty not-weird (in that way, anyways), but there are people who make me feel super bitchy and mean. Is 'weirdlingness' an inherent quality of someone who is creepy deep down, or is it more of a surface quality of someone who may honestly be normal otherwise but has one personality facet that has been rubbed the wrong way by one specific person that they then act out against?

I think it's a little bit of both. I'm fairly sure that everyone's at least a bit of a weirdling to somebody, to a greater or lesser degree. It's the same effect, but it depends on the case whether it's a personality conflict or an outlet of the Weird Inside, and only time will tell...

Though I'm sure that most people who are noticing that N is a weirdling are convinced that N is a weirdling deep down...

Yeah. I once recieved five pages of nearly incoherent and overly creative death threats from someone because I kissed her boyfriend and the email I sent her saying that I didn't want to take him away from her got interpreted to mean that I *did* want to take him away from her. Things like wanting to scoop out my eyes and make omelettes out of them, stuff like that. And she was in the military, which sorta convinced me that she could follow through if she decided to.

She'd been perfectly nice to me before, though, and even people who had dated her for a long time knew she was messed up a little, but not that deeply unstable.

Me, while I can be a bit strange or rude to people, I've never gone quite that into weirdlingdom.

Perhaps everyone has a little weirdlingness to them, but some people are just off the deep end?

Wow. I suppose everybody's got their "Convert me into an instant weirdling!" buttons.

I suppose that the scale of weirdlingness is a two-axis graph -- one axis being the focus of the weirdness, one end of that being equally weird to everybody, the other end being weird to only a select few or one; the other axis being the depth of the weirdness, the one end being only mildly odd, the other extreme being, well, extreme.

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