Back to normal.

[feuervogel]

To recap, I spent Wednesday running around (picking up the quiche, going to the neurologist) and cooking. Thursday morning we started cooking at 9:30 am and finished at 12:30, then carried everything to the hotel where the in-laws were staying and were there until about 6. Friday we went to the Ackland and saw some art, then played a board game for a little while, then went home, fed the cats, and changed for dinner at 6:30 at Panciuto. Saturday we met the in-laws at 10, went to the NC natural history museum, then had dinner at the Flying Saucer and finished up the board game, then got home around 8:30 to feed the cats.

So I've had no time to do anything like writing since Tuesday. This is Annoying.

Spending time with Ben's family is just draining. It reminds me constantly of how different my background is, how much of a disadvantage I have in comparison. His mom tells the same dozen "my kids were in the gifted program and volunteered at science museums and went to all these educational camps and ..." you know, all the things rich kids of highly-educated parents do. And I sit there and get pissed off, because I wasn't a rich kid, and my parents sure as shit aren't highly educated, and I have some serious resentment and anger about my mom telling the school not to let me into the G&T program.

So them just sitting there all "educational blah blah gifted blah summer camp etc" brings up all the things I couldn't do, because a) we couldn't afford it or b) it wasn't considered important enough.

Then there's his dad, who's a special kind of jerk. He interrupts you when you're in the middle of your sentence. He lives in this little tiny bubble of very narrow, limited experience and can't see beyond his narrow experience to realize he's wrong about a lot of things, then when you explain that he's wrong, he doesn't understand what you're saying.

Example: we went to Pepper's for lunch, and for some reason, we were discussing the Appalachians. Oh, right, we were talking about the Biltmore house and Asheville, because his mom wants to go there.

Context: Asheville isn't as hot as it is here in summer, because it's in the mountains.
him: It can't be that high elevation, the Appalachians aren't that high. It's about 2000 feet.
me: What? The Appalachians are plenty high, what the hell are you talking about?
him: Well, Mount Washington in Vermont is the most extreme place in the US.
me: !?!!? Mount Washington is in the fucking Appalachians!
him: So?
me: You just said, "the Appalachians aren't that high," but Mount Washington is an Appalachian, therefore the Appalachians ARE that fucking high, QED. It's not like I'm making giant leaps of logic here.
him: What's the highest peak in the Appalachians?
me: Like I know that off the top of my head.
Ben looks it up on his iPhone. Mount Mitchell, North Carolina, 6684 feet, highest point on the east coast. (And 400 feet higher than Mount Washington.)
me: HA. Suck that, dickweed.

There may have been less swearing involved in the actual conversation, but I don't guarantee it.

Spending time with someone who's "discussion" and "conversation" style involves attacking and looking for holes and basically treating it like a particularly brutal grad student-level course is REALLY FUCKING TIRING.

I can't think fast enough to keep up with his changes of argument or tactic; I lose my train of thought easily, and when he interrupts, it's hard for me to get back where I was. And that's me on all cylinders; since I got sick, I get brain fog more often. And I have trouble processing sounds when there's a lot of background noise (and when over half the participants in the "conversation" are shouting).

It's stressful. I hate it.

Comments

[skogkatt.livejournal.com]

That sounds really frustrating. Grrrrr.

[feuervogel]

It's not as bad as it was when we first got married. I left the dinner table in tears on more than one occasion. (It was that or break his nose.)

Spending a week in Japan with him was ... "frustrating" is an understatement. Even though we *explained* that you bow to people, when we were leaving the ryokan in Nara, the rest of us were all *bow* and saying arigatou or thank you, and he was just fucking STANDING THERE, like what we were doing had nothing to do with HIM. So I turned to him and said, pointedly, "Bow and say thank you." He inclined his head a fraction and may have said thank you out loud.

(I don't seem to have ranted about that in LJ before, but I did find another post about how family togetherness time makes me crazy, and how very different their background expectations are.)

[skogkatt.livejournal.com]

Traveling with other people is often hard, I think, just because all the little details that make people comfortable really start to come to the foreground and take on way inflated levels of importance. Add in other pre-existing tensions and it's a disaster waiting to happen. It sounds like your in-laws are really not used to stopping and considering how other people might experience the world. Bleh.

[feuervogel]

His mom isn't so bad; she's a professor, so she's had to develop interpersonal skills to deal with her coworkers, students, grad students, etc. I like his mom, and she can definitely take a hint to leave a topic. (After me saying "I really don't like talking about school," she changed the topic, and, with luck, she won't bring it up again. She's also left off how pretty my and Ben's kids' curly hair would be.) She also knows when her husband has said or done something egregious and lets him know. (Which I credit with his improvements over the last 10 years.)

His dad, otoh, is a PhD theoretical physicist who's spent the last 30 years doing freelance economics work from home, and the last few years on the school board. His idea of polite enquiry is what most people would consider rudeness, and his idea of discussion or debate, as I mentioned, is what a lot of people might consider a flame war.

culture shock

[beth_leonard]

Meshing cultures is hard. We went to visit my extended family on my mom's side in Montana last summer, and my mom said something at the dinner table that made Amber burst into tears. Jon told her, "Perhaps a better way to have worded that would have been..." and we continued dinner.

Later my Aunt took me aside and said, "Is Jon always like that" "Like what?" "So rude to your mother talking back to her like that."

Neither Jon nor my mother thought anyone had been insulted, but for my aunt, you just don't point out when other people are wrong, it's rude.

And Jon & I come from mostly the same culture and it's still hard.

I also agree with the potential asperger's thing below.

--Beth

Re: culture shock

[feuervogel]

I read somewhere that's a geek/non-geek thing. Geeks don't typically think it's wrong to correct someone, because geeks don't like being misinformed, whereas non-geeks think it's rude.

Re: culture shock

[beth_leonard]

We have a saying at our house, "Never argue with a 3 year old." Amber will frequently decide to insist something counter-factual (i.e. "I'm 4 and I lost a tooth recently." We'll challenge this assumption once so she knows we know it's not true, but if she keeps insisting, there's no reason to keep arguing with her.

"You can pretend that if you'd like."
"I'm 4"
"Ahhummmm"

I've found it's just not worth it to keep arguing sometimes. If it's a safety issue (brushing teeth counts), that's different.

--Beth

[tiurin.livejournal.com]

Does your father-in-law have Asperger's?

[feuervogel]

I've wondered that *so* many times. I'm not a trained psychologist, and to the best of my knowledge, he's never been diagnosed as such. Going down the lists of symptoms, and adding in the fact that his life has a running narrative, I could say "probably."

Edit: Symptoms of Asperger's in adults
http://www.mental-health-matters.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=895

* Average or above-average intelligence -- yes
* Difficulty with high-level language skills (reasoning, problem solving, being too literal)
* Lack of empathy -- ??
* Inability to see another person's point of view -- likely
* Problems engaging in "small talk" -- Probably
* Lack of emotional control, particularly with anger, depression, and anxiety -- ??
* Strict adherence to routines which can lead to anxiety when something unexpected happens -- he has a standard grocery list (typed up), sorted by aisle, which he checks off what he needs week to week, and asking him to find something not on his list is like asking him to find Angkor Wat
* Extreme focus on a particular interest or hobby -- he keeps hourly logs of the weather on index cards in his pocket

[tsubasa.livejournal.com]

Ben's dad sounds like my dad re: narrow eperiences etc. Except my dad doesn't talk to people at all. When we had friends over when I was in high school, they either thought my father was dead or my parents were separated (i.e. they didn't see him at all, no evidence of his presence in the house and no photos) or they would literally ask us if he was capable of speech (like, was he brain damaged). Because he didn't talk, not even to say hello when running into his daughter and a friend in the kitchen of his own house.

Re: the mountains... I live here, and I get so confused about if we are in the Appalachians, the Smokies, or the Blue Ridge Mountains. I guess the Appalachians is like the whole entire chain up the eastern part of the country, but locally people say a lot more about the Blue Ridge Mountains or the Smokies, and I have no idea. Downtown Asheville is at about 2000 feet (NWS says 2140 to be exact), but Mt. Mitchell is like 15-20 min from here and as you said is over 6500 feet and the highest peak in the eastern US. Just north of us, I-26 goes over Sam's Gap into TN at 4000 feet. And Mt. Pisgah (which is easily visible from downtown Asheville and Biltmore House) is at 5721 feet. So although the city itself is at around 2000, we are sort of in a bowl with lots of higher stuff around.

[feuervogel]

I remember you saying your dad spent a lot of time in the garage, but that's extreme. Must be something about physicists...

Yeah, the Appalachians are the whole chain that runs from Georgia up into Maine and the Maritime Provinces (minus the Adirondacks, apparently). There are subsets like the Blue Ridge.

[tsubasa.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I wonder if my dad has Asperger's too. Sometimes I wonder if I have a mild form of it myself....... ugh.