{"id":15714,"date":"2007-02-20T15:12:00","date_gmt":"2007-02-20T20:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/hameblog\/2007\/02\/20\/inverse-shyness\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T07:49:46","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T10:49:46","slug":"inverse-shyness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/2007\/02\/20\/inverse-shyness\/","title":{"rendered":"Inverse shyness"},"content":{"rendered":"

I went to a music cabaret tonight which was supposed to start at 7, and no one was there. I sat in the pub, read my book — the first few chapters of George Monbiot’s Heat,<\/em> which states that our carbon emissions actually need to be reduced by 90%<\/em> for us to avert the catastrophe caused by the “positive feedback” loop that a rise of just two degrees will likely trigger.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

I had a pint.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

After a while, the bartender turned the volume up on the football, making reading impossible, so I necked the pint, packed up, and went downstairs, where a few people were straggling in, but nothing was really set up.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

I went back home.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

I wasn’t going to sit with three or four people I didn’t know trying to ingratiate myself while they assembled their instruments, or sit in a corner trying not to look like a killer.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

This afternoon I had a test-call with the assistant of someone I’m going to interview for a Strategic Coach article. I used SkypeOut to call her and it was utter rubbish<\/em>. Normal Skype<\/a> is about 85% successful when I talk to my mum or my editor, but this was just awful<\/em>. As I wrote to Skype’s support desk, “I felt like Alexander Graham Bell calling to Mr Watson, except Watson was being filtered through ‘The Matrix’.” It was embarrassing.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

These two experiences underscored something odd about me: I’m comfortable standing up in front of a large audience and presenting to them, but I get shy about making phone calls or showing up alone at other people’s events (which I normally do because my friends here generally aren’t into the stuff I am).<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

~<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Today I ordered a new OS for my [#$%ing] computer as well as office software. I now own a legal copy of almost everything I use. This has been important to me for a while, and I’m almost there.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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I went to a music cabaret tonight which was supposed to start at 7, and no one was there. I sat in the pub, read my book — the first few chapters of George Monbiot’s Heat, which states that our carbon emissions actually need to be reduced by 90% for us to avert the catastrophe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15714"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15714\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}