I’m not the most comfortable person in social situations…

Dunno why. Maybe it’s that I was raised in a household with a hippy, potter (not pothead) mom and a mad professor dad. Either way, I never quite learned the standard party openers, you know, first 10 questions to ask or ways to be instantly known as the life of the party.

And, I have to admit, I kind of resented this lack of proper social grooming for a lot of years.

Because everyone I knew seemed to have a much easier time than me. But, with age, comes wisdom (also known as eccentricity), and I eventually realized my parents’ socialization skills were actually pretty killer. They were just finely tuned to the very narrow craft-world and academic communities in which they operated. Hell, my dad could throw down with the best cognitive scientists out there and my mom could talk gas-fired celadon circles around your average potter.

Problem is, outside those counterculture cliques, mainstream America operates differently.

And, while they were comfortably ensconced in their worlds, I was growing up in the bigge