Too much empathy?

A friend said something in their journal about a feeling that their friends were only friends out of pity, so they had to be careful not to impose too much on them lest their annoyance outweigh their pity.

I said this in a comment there:  I've never been conscious of the feeling that people only did things with me out of pity, but I am frequently conscious of not wanting to intrude on people and of always imagining the worst case scenario of how something could turn out and letting that inhibit me from talking to someone or trying to join in an activity.  It keeps me from forming many social relationships deeper than casual recognition.

I felt that was significant enough for me that I wanted to repeat it in my own journal.  I feel that I spend a lot of time alone because I'm afraid to reach out and make connections with others, not because I'm afraid of their hurting me, but because I'm afraid of offending or hurting them by saying the wrong thing or being in the way.  It seems like most people don't take care enough about how others feel to let it influence their actions, but I feel cursed by caring too much.

Any discussion?  Insightful comments?  Mental keys to avoiding the trap of letting the imagined worst case scenario keep me from saying or doing anything?

Russian Astrologer Sues NASA for Deep Impact

From the please tell me this is just a joke department, we get this story at CNN.com.  The first paragraph reads:

MOSCOW, Russia (Reuters) -- A Russian astrologist who says NASA has altered her horoscope by crashing a spacecraft into a comet is suing the U.S. space agency for damages of $300 million, local media has reported.

Even in the U.S., I wouldn't expect a case this stupid to go far, and I doubt that the Russian courts are more tolerant of utterly frivolous suits than ours, but the fact that it could be reported at all as "astrologer is suing", rather than as "astrologer and lawyer arrested for wasting court's time and trying to make court look stupid" is a sad commentary on our (global) society.

Book Review: Major Ingredients

Today's book review is Major Ingredients: The Selected Short Stories of Eric Frank Russel, edited by Rick Katze.

This book is part of the NESFA Press series of significant works of science fiction that have fallen out of print.  I believe it's a worthy part.  Russel's name is a slightly familiar one, but prior to this book I don't believe I had read any of his work.  These stories date from the 1940s and 1950s, and show their age somewhat in unquestioned assumptions of the time about technology and about society.  The stories are well written.  Their greatest weakness is that the characterization is weak; it is difficult to identify emotionally with anyone in these stories.  Their strength is the ideas.  Although these stories take place in various futures with various technological marvels, physical science and technology are not the important parts of these stories.  The technology exists only to make the situations where the stories take place possible, and Russel does not belabor explaining the details of imagined technology.  If he had, these stories would probably be unreadable, but he keeps things vague enough to not get in the way.  The stories are mostly about ideas of social psychology and political economy, and the virtues that ultimately lead to success in Russel's universe.

Taken together, these stories make a good book, one that a serious study of SF should not skip.  Individually, most of the stories are fun, and since the stories are completely independent, there is no need to read the whole rather hefty tome at once.  In his afterword, Mike Resnick argues that the reason Russel is mostly forgotten while Asimov is beatified is that Russel's stories that got the most attention were some of his least worthy, so when someone 20 years ago, or today, becomes curious about him, the work that he finds is not the best recommendation.  I would agree with that; I find the strengths and weaknesses of the two similar.

8 out of 10.