camwyn | Another way you know you're me...

You hate hate hate meeting people's eyes if you don't have to, because it feels like you're staring. Looking straight into someone's eyes seems rude under most circumstances, and you'd rather pay attention to someone by looking in their direction and pointing an ear at them, because the important thing is that you hear and pay attention to what they say. You sometimes wish you could wear sunglasses more often because then you wouldn't look like you were staring if you wanted to look at a person's face, but generally, as far as you're concerned, a person's eyes are part of their Personal Space and ought to be respected as part of the sphere of privacy that includes the territory around their body. You'd rather be stuck in a subway train crushed up against a complete stranger's back than stuck in that same subway standing a foot away from the stranger, but forced to maintain eye contact for that length of time.

. . . wait, that's how you tell you're a New Yorker. . .

Anyway, you get the idea. Damned if I know where it came from. My best guess is that when I was little and my mom would yell at me for the standard kid infractions, she'd get extremely angry if I didn't look her straight in the eye while she was yelling, and the whole process became intensely uncomfortable for me. I don't want to give the wrong impression about my family, the yelling wasn't much in comparison to the overall really pretty wonderful rest of childhood; I'm just saying that when I got yelled at or otherwise lectured I had to stare my mom in the eye or risk getting the lecture extended. And my God, how I hated that.

The important thing is that now I don't much like making eye contact unless it's someone I'm extremely familiar with and know won't mind the familiarity. If it's work-related or something official, I'll do it because otherwise they won't trust me, but I won't like it. It's easier to do if I'm a few feet away from the person rather than close up, because then it doesn't feel as much like staring. I'm not looking them Dead in The Eye, I'm looking at their face and the eyes happen to be in the middle of that, and that's more okay.

And yes, I had a tremendous pang of sympathy and/or familiarity when I read about how Native American kids were often yelled at in White schools for not looking straight at the teacher because their culture taught them that to do so was rude - and when I read about how Japanese body language and feelings on what's rude and what's not have a tendency to complicate international business dealings.

Today's pulp survival tip is #153. It is probably best to ignore the words of anyone who screams out the names of combat maneuvers as they are executing them. The ones who aren't flat-out insane have a nasty tendency to lie, and either way it all ends up with their foot protruding from your eye socket.