"Thank you, I've worked hard to become so." - The Man in Black

So I had the weird experience today of being told that I had wonderful social skills and a sunny personality, and that I contributed greatly to the flow of teamwork at my Coffee Shop Job.

Those who knew me as Awkward Intellectual Adolescent Issue Girl (welcome, comic book speak, welcome!) will be wondering how this could be.  Was I faking it?

No, I was not, and here is my semi-deep thought for the day: Learned behavior is genuine behavior.

A lot of geeks with behavioral issues I know seem to believe that they must find love and appreciation for their most fierce and prickly selves, because anything else is Less Than Genuine.  What I have learned is that social life is an art form that is created by the participants, and that positive contributions to it require a learned skill, just as successful art requires one to learn formal skills of composition, color, placement, etc.  Successful social discourse depends on underlying structures that must be learned and either observed or deliberately flouted - not ignored because they are difficult.

We would never tell a painter or poet that their work is "less genuine" because they have studied composition and form; similarly, our social lives are not less genuine when we study and apply the forms of the medium.  They are simply more skilled.

There, that's my pontification of the day.