Much better

By yesterday evening, Graham was doing much better. He had made some progress in ferreting out some specifics of his seeming social isolation. He was being blackballed within a social circle by a friend who was saying that someone else was "made uncomfortable by his presence" and had devised a plan to sort it out. Find out who it was and then try to understand what was going on.

I need to remember to talk to him a little more about some of my own social challenges back in the day. Adolescence is a difficult time for lots of kids, certainly it was for me. I was never great at figuring out how to hold operate within groups, so I generally adopted a kind of brute force methodology involving lots of hustle (find out where all the parties are and/or throw parties myself, organize things like bands or alternate school periodicals, generally outparty people). Some of that worked well, other aspects of it less so. 

Over time the use of alcohol in particular as a way to leap over social anxieties hardened into a muscle memory which helped me overcome fear of other/new groups of people, even when not drunk. Sometime pre-pandemic I was having lunch with a woman in Manhattan and somehow the subject of how I was perceived in college came up. She said I was ubiquitous. Which was an unexpected response, though I can see it. I did hustle. I was also drinking then, which definitely made some things easier, at least until I was shit faced.

Another after the fact surprise was when I learned, many years after high school, that lots of the girls had thought I was good looking and that the combination of that with my intellect was perceived as attractive. I had never thought that high school girls cared much about brains. I might have played up a tier in high school. I probably even should have asked Alison Baer out, though rejection by her would have been just too crushing.