Funbligations and other conflations...

When big-time buldak neurospice is the energy we're bringing to the party.

God, when does the compulsion to start every post with hello* end? Does it ever end? Is it hideously uncool?**

Hello! Happy New Year :)

Thanks for coming.

I have decided to make this a free post because you can immediately tell if choitotheworld is a hellspace for you. Or if it is exactly your cup of tea. Or if it lives in the hairsbreadth between smelly and yummy and you will be the kombucha lady face about it...

Anyway, tonight I have a thing. It’s a fancy thing that is far from my house. Emotionally, it feels like I have to be at the airport at some point in the day and I’m already worried about how to time my dinner since there’s an inverse relationship between the fanciness of a thing and food that can actually hold a person down. As in, protein and fiber.

Why do they do this? Why do passed hors d'oeuvres disproportionately represent miniaturized versions of central business district hotel food? Why is there always seared tuna with black sesame seeds that will get stuck in your teeth? Why so much dairy? Why not pass breath mints when everybody is skulling wine on empty stomachs? These are questions.

In any case, I was thinking about Rachel Sennott at the Oscars + Beta Blockers and how challenging it can be to prepare for an allegedly fun thing and how most of my difficulties re: activities can be attributed to incorrect taxonomy and expectation.

(God, I love her hair and makeup and nails. It’s giving Valley of the Dolls as a whole life ethos).

Anyway, yes, taxonomy.

And, yes, I am equating this thing I have tonight to the Oscars!*** because my brain does not know the difference between my thing and the Oscars. I want to pretend that I know the difference but (and you will hear me say this many, many times) my brain is a cat in a cat carrier who believes it is going to the vet no matter what because whenever I am thinking about a FUTURE THING my nervous system is aflame.

Is this ideal?

No.

Can anything be done about this?

Absolutely not.

BUT, I know this about myself and it helps. I can acknowledge the efforts of my brain/cat and go, Wow you are working so hard to warn the rest of us. That is so kind. Thank you for helping.

Sidebar: “helping” is almost always a pejorative in my house. Like when you’re rushing to the table holding a hot bowl of soup and someone reaches up for the unsolicited assist, upsetting the intricate equilibrium you had going and everything spills and you have to clean it up when the whole point was that you were already too lazy to get an oven mitt or a tea towel.

That’s when you go, Thank you! Were you helping?

And the abashed interloper has to be like, Yes, I’m sorry. I was helping.

That is helping. It’s a little like “job.”

In any case, when I was diagnosed Autistic in May 2023, and then wrote about it for New York Magazine last summer, part of the essay that didn’t make it into the final piece (I’ll probably do a big thing about the essay itself at some point because there’s so much I wanted to add that I didn’t get to for space), was this thing I have about funbligations.

Funbligation is a term that Leah Rose, co-host of Broken Record podcast, coined when she was a columnist at Missbehave Magazine, where I was editor-in-chief one billion years ago.

And it’s the category of “outside unit” that I frequently get wrong.

It’s basically exactly what it sounds like, Fun + Obligation.

Part of what’s been hard about the Autism diagnosis is that it’s made me have to interrogate all these, usually apocryphal/masking notions of what I like and dislike. This includes people and events. And it’s painful to feel like a little data-mining robot rummaging around in treasured memories and reconfiguring them all because it makes me feel like a fraud that I tell stories about humans for a living.

It also tends to make me feel lonely. Anyway, this as an outtake from the essay:

I then listed the names of my friends. I felt deeply conflicted about this. Even now, it makes me sad to think about. I want to love people and be loved and feel it somewhere inside me all the time. But I don’t. Without this list I will forget who my friends are. Without this list I will agree to whatever plans are made with whomever as long as I’m free with no thought to how it will make me feel.

After a while another pattern emerged.

There were friends whose company left me feeling light, happy, nourished... And then there were others. Stunningly—and I genuinely hadn’t known this prior to the exercise—most of the people with whom I felt depleted, people I used to have to be high or drunk to be around, were not hypocrites or energy vampires as I’d suspected, they were simply folks I only saw at particular moments. Most of the occasions spent together, had been those ambiguous events that resemble a social gathering in pictures but are underwritten by marketing companies or brands, affairs that seem glamorous but aren’t and are often a necessary, exhausting part of networking within a creative field. In short, work.

But it wasn’t that I was a bad friend. Or that they were bad friends. It’s that most of them were not friends at all.

So this thing tonight is work. It’s not even my work. It’s my ActualFriend’s work. And I know that my job is to go and be supportive and celebrate this person who I genuinely love but not expect that person to be my ActualFriend in this place.

(They might be on Beta Blockers. Or whatever genius endocrinological system is mimicking the effect for them.)

This is advanced. It is just way more confusing when an ActualFriend crosses streams for a Very Special Episode of The Function.

But! I will not mistake it for fun or expect to feel nourished when I get home. I am bringing a date and there’s a very real chance that person will have fun because their brain is different from mine and they have a real yen for adventure and enthusiasm for new experiences. It is dazzling to be with this person. It’s like being on vacation.

I will have a too-big snack when I get home if not a full-on second dinner and I might zone out while crunching away rabbitably, ruminating on things I should have said or done differently and reflecting on why it was that my ActualFriend had PartyEyes the whole time and wasn’t just with me like it was a weekdayhang in fuglypants and why I can’t be more like my amazing, fun-loving date, then I will transcend all of it and remind myself that it was a funbligation and then go, Thank you brain it is time for sleep. You are the best helper. Job.

*I feel like “hello” is like not knowing how to use your front-facing camera at 0.5x for selfies but that is OK.

**Have you noticed that truly cool people never post selfies? It’ll usually only make it into main in a large dump of a whole season and even then the picture of the person that leads the gallery is uniformly taken by someone else.

***The other fun thing about the Oscars is that when Zoe Saldaña screamed Mami! right into the camera and burst into tears, I had the thought, clear as day of, God my mom is too old. I am not going to get to bring her to the Oscars when I accept my Academy Award because she’ll be dead and I will never get an Academy Award.

And then I got kinda sad? Does your brain do this?