Oddly enough, Reddit helped me. Before last week, I was a daily visitor to Reddit, would spend hours perusing comment threads. Over time, I started to notice patterns, outliers; and at the same time I found myself growing slowly anesthetized to what I previously found hostile and insulting. I became less of a social justice warrior, learned to appreciate chaos, conflict. In being exposed to a wide variety of voices, hostility, ignorance and whatnot, I learned to take it less personally, to lower my expectation, and I became more detached, c'est la vie. Whereas before I was a ragged monkey caught in the fray, voice getting clobbered in the din, feeling attacked and confused... now I am the monkey sitting up in a tree, quietly munching on leaves, watching with a calm smile all the drama of the monkeys on the ground.
How did you manage to say all that with a straight face?
(I suspend myself in time and ponder the relative dimensions of my face)-- Yet still I'm perplexed. And at this point I consider that I may truly be an alien, and so I genuinely ask: in what way is my "Oddly enough..." comment assumed to be satire? I will take notes if someone answers, and put them in the notebook I carry around with me entitled "How to appear to be human."