Book Club Tales #2

28 Feb, 2025

Survived another Book Club.

Book was An Abolitionist's Handbook by Patrisse Cullors. I'm thinking that I might start just dropping my copious book notes and random thoughts on the stuff I read here. I typically email my thoughts to a friend so they'd be in that format, probably (with some stuff removed at their request). Seems like a nice way to keep a log though, because the stuff I copied from this book took up so much space Gmail clipped the message and it's just unwieldy to view in email.

Didn't talk much this book club. For that matter, more people than I was comfortable with came, had like 15 people + 1 dog. But it's okay. When there's more people you don't have to talk at all, just dissociate (← already do this most of my waking life due to basic anxiety responses).

We did this little exercise at the beginning that was like sticking post-its to sheets put up around the room of each of the 12 principles. Then we didn't talk about them at all lol. This book club is very class-like because the facilitator is a (elementary? middle school?) teacher. She's very nice and I'm glad for the structure because I like structure but also she seems a little frazzled so I feel a bit bad for her also. Like someone who is clearly Doing Too Much. Hope someday she does less and gets to chill out. In the meantime I will sit in her little discussion class basically.

Old man with military background with that story about growing up under the Franco regime sat next to me briefly after the meeting to tell me that he was rooting for me. Thankfully he did not invite me to get into his car this time. I think this + the junk journaling meetup we did has accustomed me more to him at least. Still a work in progress. I think he should write a memoir or something, he's a curious person. But he also seems to have issues with paranoia so maybe that would be too much like doxxing himself.

There is going to be another art/junk-journaling meetup so I will appear there and maybe paste in more animals and more sky and more water or whatever into my journal. Or do something else like those weird spiral things that one of the members was trying out last time.

Remembering people's names is hard. Am trying, but it looks like the regulars of the book club don't really bother to use the nametags even when they're provided (weh!).

Thought I was probably just gonna drift after confirming that the art thing was happening because socializing scary and if there's a more natural, less class-like meetup for art stuff I can osmosis more information about people there naturally. But this guy that I was interested in talking to last time but gave up on started talking to me. (I was interested in talking to him because he brought up unionizing his workplace, and my sister works for a union so I thought maybe I should connect them.)

He gave off awkward vibes, even more than me, and almost immediately invited me to hang out, which surprised me. I asked him if he was looking for new friends and he said yeah, so I guess that's what's up. If he gives me information about this board game thing he mentioned I may show up, but only because the board game doesn't sound difficult. I hate games with tedious rules that rely on a lot of resource hoarding, especially if they're competitive, but what he mentioned he wanted to try sounded like literally throwing something into a hole. I can throw something into a hole. No idea who else would possibly show up but if they start doing something more complicated after throwing-something-into-a-hole I will probably just not play and instead observe them playing because rules are annoying.

I was trying to keep the conversation up by figuring out what his hobbies were that we could possibly share and do if not board game stuff, when suddenly my sister and her BF walked in to pick me up, and she recognized him.

Notes about this guy:

• He works for the tech company my sister's union works on unionizing.
• They know each other already and have spoken on the phone before.
• He is using a different name in book club than he does in his work, and my sister called him by his actual name and he immediately put a finger to his lips about it. I didn't even hear her say his name at the time though because it wasn't exactly quiet.

This made for a hilarious interaction when we were walking back (I left soon after because heck was I gonna continue trying to socialize with 2 people observing me), but when I was like, "So about that [name 1] guy..."
And my sister was like, "Who? You mean [name 2]?"
And I'm like, "No??? Isn't his name [name 1]? Did I get his name wrong???"
And her boyfriend was like, "No, his name tag said [name 1]!!"

Then we realized that he goes by 2 different names and was being weirdly private about this and started laughing. For like a good hour as we went back and forth about what we knew about this guy — why is he using another name in a book club in the same city where he works??? There are thousands of employees for his tech company here, did he really think he wouldn't get noticed?! Why does his code name have the same sound ending as his original name, is this some kind of detective fiction plot??

"Hello, my name is Robert... But my secret identity is... Albert... If you were paying attention to the clues, you would have noticed the shared -ert ending!"
(*These are not any of his names. But both of his names are extremely common, like the same level of common as these names I've picked for demonstration, which makes this name switcheroo even more baffling.)
(**What if he actually has 5 different names??? We also confirmed that he indeed has 2 different Signal accounts that he's using for this, which also made us laugh more.)

Anyway, we know we shouldn't laugh about what someone wants to keep private,¹ and if a friend told me they were doing this I would be like, "Weird, but okay," but the way we discovered this was just a series of extremely comical events.

So. Takeaways is that this guy really reminds me of my weird cousin. Who honestly seems to share similar nerdy interests (computer programming and board games, probably math) so maybe they'd get along if they ever met up. The awkward body language and stuff is very similar, as is the weird privacy habits that aren't actually like... properly structured in a way that would actually be delineating two separate identities. It's like asking my cousin an innocuous question for him to be like, "Why do you want to know?" but the way he says this isn't like offended or upset, it's like he's like trying to act sly about a secret that isn't actually a secret in any sense of the word since once you're like, okay, whatever man, he tells you anyway. That is the sense I get from this guy.

Who knows if he'll actually send me the board game meetup info. We'll see. His job seems busy lately (and my sister knows why, lmfao!), so RIP to him. I hope things get easier for him in that respect.

So anyway. That was a club, all right.

Footnotes

#life-logging