Currently in an anxiety / self-loathing spiral over having had to make a 5-minute phone call.

I managed to make the call - so yay me. But, I prepared for it with 20 minutes of muscle-cramp-inducing anxiety. And now I'm winding down from it with 20 minutes of self-loathing over not being able to just make a quick phone call like a normal person.

Grah.

This happens every time. Has happened for at least 20 years. Never gets easier. I've arranged my whole life around avoiding phone calls.

Weird thing is, in recent years I discovered that I'm way, way, way more comfortable having conversations in person.

Like, need a haircut? I'd rather make a 10 minute drive to have a face-to-face chat about it than call.

I thought it was just plain all-round social anxiety, but I suspect it has something to do with overthinking missing cues over a phone

Like, text chat on the internet? Computer mediation is enough of a buffer that I don't feel all that anxious.

Face-to-face? I feel like I get a good high-bandwidth stream of social cues as feedback.

Phone? Seems like there's just enough to make me feel like I'm facing a person, but not enough to grok whether I'm fucking it up. So of course I feel like I'm fucking it up.

@chromaticranger@mastodon.technology Yeah, I've kind of thought it was only me too, especially the face-to-face realization. But I've had a few people give me this same "wow" reaction, so maybe it's a thing? :)

@CorvusRobotica Thanks, it's nice to hear even if I feel cruddy to have a need to hear it :) Brains are weird

@chromaticranger@mastodon.technology Right?! Like, I can rationally identify from memory that this has gone just fine, probably 100s or 1000s of times before.

LOL, nope, doesn't matter

@checkervest It's like you know I'm probably terrible at self-care! :D

I need a bucket to deform into

You know what thought just popped into my head? I wonder if Odo from DS9 can see out of his butt?

Like, those weren't real eyes in his shapeshifted head, were they?

@checkervest Yeah, I always wonder how like Cuttlefish can see such that they can arrange the right camoflage patterns, whether it's through their whole skins or some other way

@viciousviscosity @polychrome Would second person perspective be, like, Nintendo Labo?

@cstanhope Well, I mean there was one episode where Odo posed as a bag of money, so I assume he could see & hear that whole time

Oh, huh. TIL

"To camouflage, cuttlefish do not match their local environment pixel by pixel. Instead, they seem to extract, through vision, a statistical approximation of their environment, and use these heuristics to select an adaptive camouflage out of a presumed large but finite repertoire of likely patterns, selected by evolution."

https://phys.org/news/2018-10-elucidating-cuttlefish-camouflage.html

I'd like to make friends with a cuttlefish, but I get the sense that cuttlefish want to be left alone.

@KitsuneAlicia@octodon.social Hah, yeah that sounds pretty much right!

This is the point in the bucket-dwelling evening where I wish I could tell the grubhub driver to pick up a bottle of whiskey and some sweet vermouth on the way