The Ryno Pen

“I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” - Groucho Marx

According to this site:

In the roaring ’20s, Groucho was finally a star. The Marx Brothers were the toast of Broadway, with hits like The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers. They had struggled for years in obscure theaters and, now, Paramount Pictures had signed them to a fat contract. It was then that an exclusive country club in Sands Point, N.Y., invited Groucho and his family to join. Of course, that invitation was withdrawn when they found Groucho was Jewish.Club officials explained that Jews weren’t allowed in the pool. “What about my son? He’s only half Jewish,” Groucho said. “Can he go into the water up to his knees?” Years later, another ritzy country club offered Groucho membership. That’s when he refused to join any club that would include members “like him.” Perhaps it was the greatest statement ever made about social climbing.

========*========*========

It’s a standpoint I can identify with, from the perspective of the excluded and the exclusive. I won’t go into Asperger’s Syndrome to any great degree: there’s a useful FAQ for a usenet group with a significant autistic population here, and all manner of pages using anything from rank speculation to proper research to arrive at various answers as to cause, management and What Should Be Done.

When all the wind has died down, there we all still are, everybody still an expert, and with recommendations running from eugenics a la 1930s fascism, through laissez-faire, to the cloud-cuckoo land of those separatists who think they’re Humanity v1.1 or similar.

I don’t align well with any of the above either: like the Emo Potato shirt John Allison designed, I’m an indie-vegetable.

I suppose my lack of gregarious ways is a combination of factors.

I was always fairly self-sufficient in play. As the eldest kid, followed by a string of sisters, there was bound to be some element of separation. My play was often the solitary, introspective sort anyway. I learned to read quite early, and was enjoying my mother’s old school books at three. The subject matter included Greek and Roman myths, Shakespeare and various of the English poets; all the fodder of a jolly-hockey-sticks girls’ school curriculum.

Reading matter like that isn’t going to make a kid popular with anybody. Add the “baby professor” vocabulary and unusual nonverbal communication, and you haven’t exactly got somebody who’s getting invited back twice. Oh, okay, sometimes dragged back to apologise.

At least as far as the memory tells me (and this memory is hellaciously good at stuff like old phone numbers, numberplates and the like), I didn’t voluntarily try to connect with groups as a kid. Certainly, there was a lot of parental urging, with some pretty disastrous results. I would like to apologise the the poor helicopter pilot whose canopy bubble I liberally coated with panic-induced BLUUUURGH when I was maternally dragooned into the ironically-named joyride “because all your friends are going. Just line up: you’ll like it.”

Well, no actually. Ditto the parties I had to go to, or (worse yet), host. The numerous children of parental acquaintances… “You’ll have fun.” Still a fairly big nope.

========*========*========

Leaving the idea of larger herds groups alone for a while, much to my relief, I can say I’ve had friendships I enjoyed. I hope my friendship in most of these cases has been good for the other parties as well. I don’t make many friends (being behaviorally odd is a great preventative) so not many relationships have had a chance to mature in single malt terms.

There’s my friend Beako, who has survived near-marriage with one of my sisters, yet still emails me from his new eyrie on the other side of the globe: he’s known me for over thirty years.

Others have fallen away for varying reasons, or we’re out of touch because our previous common denominators (work, etc) aren’t common any longer.

Herself was a friend, albeit a reasonably casual one, for years. I hope we haven’t ruined the friendship… (Rather Large Smiley Picture Goes Here)

========*========*========

But groups? No thanks. I’m not a great delegator, and the non-verbal stuff just goes by me unnoticed (that’s when my own body posture, blush response etc aren’t being wildly misinterpreted with fairly non-amusing results).

Online, I’m a mind at the end of one of those myriad tubes. Most of the interaction is one-to-one, even if the distribution potential is wider. I’ve had more visitors to this blog (and none unwelcome) in the last couple of weeks than I would have invited to my home in a few years.

========*========*========

As to what prompted this outpouring… (I had to get to the point in the end, I guess)… I’m reasonably glad when people from my old church pass me downtown without recognition: I wasn’t with them, per se, at all, it seems.

We may all be on the same path, but that shouldn’t be a cause for assumptions about the reasons for, or conduct of, the journey.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 8:23 pm and is filed under asperger, autism, groups, people stuff, sociology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.