I’ve switched locations today in an attempt to mix things up; give myself a new environment, a new flow of creativity. So now I’m sitting at a Panera bread wishing I had just stuck to Starbucks. There’s no music to drown out the sounds of unofficial lunch meetings and girls in “study groups” taking selfies. Instead of the beautiful whir of espresso machines there’s just the clanging of silverware on plastic trays. I would say it feels like my high school cafeteria except this is “fancy.” As in, I just spent $9 for a coffee and a scoop of tuna wrapped in a piece of lettuce fancy. Glutton for punishment I am!
Anyway.
I was supposed to see friends last week, people from college I haven’t seen since last Christmas. We were all excited until the time came to solidify our plans- at which point everyone seems to turn into the tentative, noncommittal weirdos that have overtaken our generation like the pod people. We were supposed to go bowling and then go out for drinks. Bowling would at least give us all something to do, something to interact with and bond over. Nothing gets people relaxed and laughing like a little friendly competition!
Oh right, and alcohol. As expected, everyone bailed last minute on the bowling idea and decided to just meet for drinks. I’ve come to realize that if plans involve anything outside of meeting somewhere to get hammered there is no interest. I ended up not going at all because a) I have no interest in meeting in a place where I can barely hear myself think and b) Just before I was supposed to leave I… had an accident.
I was attempting to make some homemade sweet potato chips using my handy little mandolin slicer and I mandolin sliced my fucking thumb.
Don’t’ get me wrong, it’s an excellent tool. But a word of advice: Use the hand protector. Blood soaked sweet potato is awfully tangy. So that put a damper on the night. Of course my sliced thumb was also an all too convenient cop-out. Technically I could have gone… but at the same time I just couldn’t.
A recent study was published to the Psychological Bulletin entitled Loneliness is a disease that changes the brain’s structure and function. Taking an excerpt from the brain research digest,
“Functional imaging evidence also shows lonely people have a suppressed neural response to rewarding social stimuli, which reduces their excitement about possible social contact; they also have dampened activity in brain areas involved in predicting what others are thinking – possibly a defence mechanism based on the idea that it’s better not to know. All this adds up to what the authors characterise as a social “self-preservation mode.”
So basically, loneliness has the proven potential to perpetuate itself. Lonely people self isolate. I can obviously attest to this. So how to break the cycle?
Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
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