Backlog plan

Over the course of a few years I filled a text file with ideas for blog posts, which are mostly between the quick note and the draft stage, all connected by the fact that I wrote them, but otherwise the topics are very loosely related or not at all. I diligently kept adding ideas to the file, and today I found a way to publish at least some of them : I will pick the oldest first, with the hope that respecting the timeline of some of the recurring thoughts helps following them. I will try my best to tag them and connect them, at least every time I notice a connection. I’ll mark the posts both as flotsam and as backlog.

I plan no more processing than this. It will be some kind of metaphorical yard sale or beached shipwreck : feel free to pick what makes sense for you, it may make more sense for you than for me even if I wrote it myself (and in most cases, for myself, but sometimes leaving myself puzzled). I do hope that some of you come back home with a cool object or some usable wood planks.

Me-paper

“you are exhausted and depressed, you have to heal, recover, and then you will be fit again”
“no. I’m made of paper, and paper is not a tired or depressed piece of plastic.
there is no healing that makes paper withstand water while being 100% paper –
of course one can laminate paper (masking?) but then it’s not paper anymore,
it’s plastic between paper and the world,
it would behave as plastic even with no paper at all ;
I’m made of paper and I can’t withstand water”

Self as music

applying corrections to text that refers to the self (one’s own, or another person’s – like a CV, or the expression of emotions, the description of the self)
is like correcting written music according to how it looks like on the page,
it makes no sense from the point of view of the music,
because written music is the transcription of the sound, except in some special contexts
where the goal is to destroy rules, so the sound is not the starting point, and is only accidentally the result of that activity ;
and the rules of musical writing even in the case of counterpoint
are rules based on sound, not on the appearance of the written form

correggere del testo che si riferisce al self (di qualcun altro, ma vale anche come loop)
è come correggere della musica-scritta in base a come appare tipograficamente,
non ha nessun senso dal pov della musica,
perché scrivere la musica parte dal suono, tranne in casi speciali
dove il pov è il distruggere le regole, e non si parte dal suono, né il suono è più di una conseguenza ;
e le regole della scrittura nel caso del contrappunto
sono regole di suono, non di apparenza del testo scritto

Flotsam XXX – memory

(today I saved a file from the internet and the timestamp on my device’s disk is the timestamp of the creation of that file, which is before my device was first switched on. It made me reflect on the mechanisms of preservation of information)

Traces of the past are stored on supports whose integrity/readability in time depend on two factors:
the intrinsic durability of the support,
and the intentional additional effort of either refreshing the trace or copy it elsewhere.
What I see is that when this effort is guided by a narrative
instead of mechanical preservation (or slowing down mechanical decay)
it ends up filtering, cherrypicking,
or at least labeling traces as expected or exceptional for the economy of the story.
Remodeling the narrative seems necessary for functional filtering and for processing of the past,
maybe even for “growing up”
but I can’t get the grip of it
so I keep running (or attempting to run) full backups of information I possess,
and information loss happens as consequence of damage or of lack of resources/space.

Masking : acting/reading music vs. standup/improvisation

I was listening to classical music and remembered how I used to play music: I was supposed to follow the score together with other musicians, we took months of repetitive patient work to align all notes at the expected time. Doing this requires a mindset+skillset that is so different from musical improvisation (think jazz but not only) that they can be considered to share only the mastery of musical instruments, but barely anything else.

Improvisers may have a script-based background, but there is a significant proportion of people who start with written music and never “evolve” improvisation (more in a Pokémon meaning than biological) and enough known cases of effective improvisers with no script-reading competence (whatsoever!) to make me think that improvisation is essentially not script-based, and vice versa. At best, someone can be separately effective in both techniques.

In the same vein, acting by scripts is as distant from standup comedy (or improvised rhetorical/entertainment contests) as script-based music from improvised music. Not only expectations, but rules+skills are essentially non-overlapping. Again, control of voice/tone/body are shared skills, but basically nothing more.

It made me think about how several people describe autistic/neurodivergent social masking as equivalent to acting, while what is expected in most social interactions is improvisation. This would explain why masking with the mindset of acting ultimately fails, either because there is no script fragment ready for a specific improvised interaction, or sooner or later for the very high hidden costs in terms of preparation time/energy.

On modes

(this draft is several years old but I’m going to publish it unedited, as most of it still describes how I function now. Maybe what changed more since then is how elliptic my ordinary use of words has become.)

These last months have been very intense on the front of routines: new job, new city, new people, new hardware, and most of it still not in its final form. I navigated the rapids with unexpected success and most always with the smile of confidence, but there were moments underwater that were honestly frightening.

It made me reflect on the difficulties I had to face in my life so far, and I can’t really connect the biggest changes with the highest perceived stress. I traveled alone to South Africa and worked there: it was challenging, but I never felt overwhelmed, for sure not anywhere near the overwhelming feeling I had in way more ordinary life situations in the years afterwards.

I have an intuitive model about mental modes, so far including two options: emergency mode and standard operations mode. When I’m in emergency mode, I take decisions without thinking how much they cost, because the only goal is getting the task done. Of course this is not sustainable on the long run, but it has been inevitable too often in the past. The standard operations mode, that I was able to enjoy only for brief periods of time, has enough mental buffer space to allow me to budget my energy expenses and have several weeks of planning ahead, with focus on sustainable usage of resources – and scheduling breaks, which are simply not allowed, even if possible, during emergency mode. The main marker of standard operations mode is me being able to fully breathe. The fact that I spent most of my life on various levels of holding my breath is plain wrong, but I’m here to tell the story, which was not the most likely outcome.

What I noticed is that when I’m in one of the modes, it is the mode that I apply in all domains – at home, at work, with friends, alone. The trigger to emergency mode can come from anywhere and will cascade the switch in all other domains. This sounds obvious, but the consequences are dramatic.

While writing this, I notice how incredibly obvious it sounds to even define such modes, especially for people who mostly live in standard operations mode. Coming from the opposite front (sic), my default is the emergency mode, and it’s so ingrained that it became the most straightforward decision path: I would need to actively stop and rethink most default actions, which costs in itself extra time and often extra energy. But maybe the biggest struggle is the clean switch to standard operations mode. I rarely have the confirmation that it’s safe to do so, and I have too much to lose by being less than ready to fight/flight.
Luckily I at least know the feeling of standard operations mode, so what I need to do is to find a way to rebuild the conditions for it. For me the solid ground that I need under my feet is made of clear expectations, and announced changes – if they are announced, I can get ready for anything, while every single surprise is a problem. I know I may look over-sensitive, but I want to be upfront, and I want to give other people accurate information about how I function.

That’s all I can write for now about the topic. I have a few more related posts in mind, and will cross-link them accordingly.

Text and bodies

I came to the understanding that text can be reduced to a series of summaries of decreasing length according to various criteria and level of content loss, but the body can not – the body in the extended sense of anything physical : living bodies, nature, mechanical contraptions, music…

not in the sense that it’s not possible, but that it is widely accepted that text summaries are both structurally sound even without parts of the original text and can be used as equivalent of the original text, while bodies can exist as such only when composed of all their parts (when parts are removed, they are mutilated, and single parts can not be used as equivalent of the body they come from)

that’s why I can’t draw (portraits) any longer, because I have the perception that it’s a body, so I would have to draw everything, and I am both intimidated and incapable to choose where to start from

so I just stare at the picture I would like to draw, I do the systematic work of observing all lines shapes shades, and have to remember to breathe

Semantics (as usual)

This morning I thought about how several past interactions have derailed when we approached how (differently) each of us categorised other things.

The most common case was about what one considers a “problem”. In my use of language, I call “problem” some situation that has to be changed in order to get better for at least some of the involved parties. For others, “problem” is only applicable to the subset of such situations where they actively do something. The consequence is that they will not call the rest of situations “problems”, which does free their mind from them, but doesn’t fix them (definitely not for the involved parties). The discussion usually turns to a fight when I insist that the situation is still there regardless, to which the other side thinks that I’m pushing them to act on it by the trick of using their word for the situation-where-one-does-something, despite me clarifying that it’s not my intention and definitely not my goal. I guess there is some sort of threat of power play and even (memory of) manipulation that triggers the reaction in the form of “you don’t make me do things” and “you are not Powerful Enough to make me do things”, which are both inaccurate in different ways, but both bring the other person to fight mode.

The only possibility left is for me to use the words as the other side uses them, which I do for the sake of being able to interact, but it costs an insane amount of brain cycles when done in real time and makes it often impossible with more than one person.

Language variants

As parallel to the post about drawing variants, I realised that my use of words during interactions falls in somehow equivalent buckets:

  • raw descriptions correspond to 1:1 pictures or copies, with modifications required by the technique/tool, not by the original
  • simplified descriptions correspond to vector copies, by deliberately choosing less detail and modifying shapes/lines more pervasively
  • boundary-based interpretations correspond to line-only drawings, shaped more by the tools/primitives than by the original’s features/appearance
  • non-descriptive text corresponds to caricatures, because there is no shared content with the original and even the markers used for identification are heavily edited. In the case of the verbal form, distance from the original can also take place in time (talking about future or past events)

In my personal self-loop I only form thoughts in raw descriptions. I can barely keep up with the decoding of any of the other forms when others use them to interact with me. I don’t produce any of those other forms myself, only when forced to, and invariably feel like someone else talking about me as if I were unable to do so myself, and moreover speaking of their idea (caricature!) of me, not on my behalf.

I don’t see it as a loss of ability to produce derivative work from raw descriptions, because the ability was never really there: if anything, I was able to produce credible processed text, until the internal suspension of disbelief stopped working. It is not a choice to unmask or anything, it’s… gone? despite it being a fundamental skill for survival in a society that keeps sending me its bills, in all forms.