HOW TO BE FUN AT PARTIES

With or without a basket full of jammy dodgers

Neither of the two personality styles on offer to humans, i.e. introvert or extrovert, ever completely appealed to me, so for a while now I’ve opted out of the binary. I’ve chosen a third way, that of the ambivert. This is at least in part because it annoys people who consider themselves to be introverts and therefore morally superior to those of us who are able to conduct conversations and have a laugh with other people without needing three days off work to recover. I’m an ambivert, so I only need one day off.

There’s a widely shared description of introverts and extroverts which says that introverts get energy from being alone, whereas extroverts get energy from being with others. Many introverts interpret this to mean that extroverts are like vampires sucking the lifeblood from those around them, while they, the introverts, are like beautiful sensitive plants that bloom in isolation and quickly wither and dehydrate when subjected to any kind of attention, especially from extroverts.

I think it just means some people are more fun at parties.

Don’t get me wrong. Only monsters can’t stand to be alone. Personally I find myself quite brilliant company, highly entertaining and wonderfully resourceful, and obviously I need to be alone at times to process my genius, which would otherwise be too overwhelming. But it’s fun to spend time with other people and drain them of their lifeblood once in a while, too.

I’m rarely invited to parties, for obvious reasons, so I generally satisfy my extrovert tendencies by striking up conversations with people who work in shops, elderly people, and anyone else who looks like they wouldn’t be easily able to run away. Weirdly, I sometimes get the impression that my victims actually enjoy our exchanges. Yesterday, for example, I had several long conversations in the B & M in Rhyl, and they were all very jolly, including the one with the man waiting next to me at the checkout, who had a basket full of jammy dodgers – surely a notable event worthy of discussion. He certainly seemed to think so, referring to himself as the Cookie Monster and then, somewhat confusingly, launching into an impression of the Count. ONE jammy dodger – A-HAHAHAHA!

Then there was the chap on the till in Aldi, who had War of the Worlds tattoos along his arms and who told me with great passion about his many trips to see Jeff Wayne’s musical arena production, which does indeed sound incredible. Or the young woman on the till in The Range who told me she was going to spend Easter Sunday lying in bed eating chocolate truffles. To which I replied, “Well… Goals!”

So yes, I know, I am that person. The person who will randomly ask you what Easter eggs you got, simply because you’re sat at a till for eight hours going beep beep beep and I think you might be up for a silly chat or for someone to notice you’re a human being. Little do you know that I am actually just using you for your lifeblood and when I walk away, you will feel terribly depleted and weirdly alienated by the hollow laughter that echoes in my wake. Damn extroverts, you’ll think. But you’ll be wrong! Because I’m actually an ambivert. Just a normal human being/part-time energy-sucking vampire.

Introverts sometimes express the idea that extroverts are not as good as them. There’s actually a whole book about how introverts are better than other people. This is, of course, outrageous and absolute nonsense. No one is better than anyone else. Except for ambiverts, maybe, but only because we’re so chill.

What is true is that other people can indeed be draining at times. In my experience, this is inevitable when two factors are in play. One, that the other people in question are behaving like dickheads. And two, that you are for some reason not allowed to mention this or tell them to fuck off. Maybe because they’re your children. Or maybe for some other reason, such as – in the case of writers – that you’ll lose your career and your friends and have to retrain as a long distance lorry driver.

I’m not sure that ambiverts would make great lorry drivers, to be honest. I’m not sure I would, anyway. I’d enjoy the alone time for a bit, but then every service station would see me engaging unsuspecting strangers in all manner of conversation. This would be hard because, unlike the people of Rhyl’s shopping village, people in service stations are notoriously miserable. Then again, I suspect that after a while on the road I’d make friends with other long distance lorry drivers and on our breaks we’d meet up to talk about our novels-in-progress and swap menopause advice. I’m imagining something like a Fahrenheit 451 remake but instead of sad old men wandering in the woods reciting their great works of literature to the trees, in the end, it’s all middle-aged women driving through Europe in massive articulated lorries with copies of their own banned books in a box behind the seat.

When I lived in Japan in my twenties, I heard the following phrase often: The nail that stands up must be hammered down. How terrible, I thought then, to be raised in a society where individual differences are hammered out of you, and conformity enforced! Little did I know that thirty years later, I could get the same experience just by joining any writing group on facebook.

Many writers have of course found that the best way to avoid the hammer is to become someone who simply does not have anything interesting to say for themselves and who will therefore never risk saying the wrong thing and having to get their HGV license. We all know people like this and of course it’s easy to see the flaw in their plan, which is that it makes them terribly, terribly dull. No matter what kind of vert you may be, hiding behind groupthink and conformity and fearfully going along with the crowd is no way to live.

Personally, I embrace the fact that wherever I go, emotions are stirred, thoughts are provoked, and desires are aroused. It’s just part of the fun of being human. And if I also manage to drain an innocent introvert of their lifeblood while I’m at it, then so much the better.

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ONE notorious ambivert! A-HAHAHAHA!

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P.S. I’ve been super busy lately working on new enterprises and projects, all of which I’m sure I will be banging on about to you soon. Plus I’ve got another substack on the go which some of you might want to check out. It’s called Palette & Pentacles and it’s mainly about art, tarot, and also robots, although the robots haven’t had much of a look in yet. I’m planning to go a bit more in depth over there about what I meant when I said I quit writing and how that came about, which I imagine might be interesting to some of my readers. But fear not! The Distractionist is still my funny little child and I’m not abandoning it. The challenge of trying to be funny for a thousand words every week is very real, and when someone comments or messages to say I’ve made them laugh, it’s the best thing EVER. But I expect I’ll have to change my posting schedule from weekly to fortnightly, at least temporarily. I don’t want to let anyone down, but at the same time, I am only one person, and these posts take a lot of work to craft into something that might actually be funny and entertaining to read. I’d rather send out a brilliantly hilarious post once a fortnight than something a bit mediocre more frequently, and I hope you’ll agree that’s a wise strategy. I will keep you fully updated, of course. In the meantime, thank you, all of you, so much, for your support of my writing and your money and your attention. I know you don’t have to give any of it, which is why it means so much that you do (or have done in the past). Onwards!