Introversion Studies: What am I being asked to give

In American culture, it's rude not to give someone 100% of your attention. I think this is the root of a lot of the problem. Extroverts people who have bought into the American value system, who can be of any persuasion because culture is like that, think they are simply asking for an acknowledgement when they say hi, and I agree with them that a lack of any acknowledgement would be rude. But I feel like what they are actually asking for is for me to drop everything I am thinking about and give them 100% of my attention until they choose to return it, and that is horrendously unfair. It's like walking into a factory where people are working and demanding they scrap everything they are doing (including widgets that are 95% done), pushing one whosit through the production line (necessitating leaving workers idle or throwing away unfinished whosits at the end), and then letting them go back to the original widgets. And being mad at them for being inefficient, although that's probably internal pressure in my case.

If people would agree that a distracted nod was sufficient to fulfill my social obligations when they held the door for me, I would not resent when they did so.

It's an issue even with people I like though. I have a good friend with whom I have many fascinating discussions. I tend to clean my house while we're talking. She herself is notorious for having a variety of fidgets in her house. I've taken to doing puzzles while talking with my boyfriend sometimes. It looks like multitasking, and I do feel somewhat less responsive. But what I'm actually doing is taking the energy they're giving me and turning it into something else immediately, so I have more room and can keep talking to them. Going back to the assembly line metaphor, I'm keeping a full pipeline going so I don't get a pile up at their station.

This makes me wonder if context-switching is less expensive for extroverts than introverts. Maybe they can hold things in their head better, maybe they find it less costly to wind up and spin down. Maybe they are more like craftsmen than assembly line workers, so trashing all in-progress work is less costly.

Nose plague documentary round up

As is my custom when sick, I've been watching depressing documentaries on Netflix. Here are my opinions:

Hot Coffee: opinion piece saying tort reform has been driven by corporations, that said corporations have used money to corrupt the justice system to their advantage, and that the popular examples of lawsuits gone awry were legitimate suits distorted by the media. They raise some interesting points that run counter to my existing beliefs, and I want to acknowledge that this makes me defensive. Nonetheless, I think documentaries are a bad medium for disputes of fact, and it fails to do a good job at documentaries' natural role, sharing the emotional truth of something.

Bully: follows five children who were viciously bullied. This did a great job of conveying emotional truth, in that I WILL KILL THAT BITCH PRINCIPLE IF IT IS THE LAST THING I DO HOW DARE YOU TELL A VICTIM IT'S THEIR FAULT FOR BEING BULLIED BECAUSE THEY REFUSE TO PRETEND IT'S NOT HAPPENING. Bully is this illness's winner of the coveted "I'm stupid for watching this when I'm low on cope" award.

The House I Live In: "The drug war is bad and not motivated by genuine concerns of public safety." Somewhere in between. It's definitely advocating a position, but it also works to show some of the feelings of devastation the drug war brings. I was already well on board with its position, but I did learn a new fact or two. I don't have a single friend who isn't already convinced the war on drugs is an excuse to control and destroy poor people, and I can't judge how it would do with the uncoverted.

Lost Angels: Skid Row is My Home: how life feels to residents of Skid Row, Los Angeles. This is what documentaries are supposed to be. It makes me retroactively downgrade The House I Live In because it's so much better at being a documentary.