thruthelookingglass

I walked to the coffee shop today. This is the first time I’ve left the house, besides to take the garbage to the curb, in … I guess since last Friday. So not all that long I suppose, but long enough. The walk is only about 2 - 3 blocks but it was a good reminder that I am still not well, that I need to take it much easier than I think or would prefer. This is the thing I hate the most about post-pneumonia life, the ramped up fragility of my own body, the betrayal of my own immune system. I sympathize deeply with people who have long COVID because this isn’t new. I’ve had it for years and no one has believed me, just under a different name.

I have always wondered if my work in the library preservation lab was also a factor. That job was an interesting mix of actual document preservation and exhibit work, and among the exhibit projects we had to do was creating custom plexiglas mounts. We would use a saw to cut the plexiglass, then use a heat machine to superheat small portions of the plexiglass and bend it to perfectly the fit the item being displayed. A hazard of that job was that cutting the plexiglass results in tiny plexiglass particles being released, like sawdust, but incredibly tiny and of course, sharp because glass. We were supposed to wear personal protective equipment (PPE) when doing this, but naturally I was like 23 and didn’t do it, didn’t wear my 3M respirator like I was supposed to. And I have long wondered if my lungs were damaged by a million tiny shards of plexiglass. Let this be a lesson: always wear your PPE, friends. Always wear the earplugs at the Dinosaur Jr show. Always.

I had to walk to the coffee shop tho, because the alternative was walking to Arco and paying too much for milk to put in my coffee. So I instead opted to pay too much for a coffee that someone made for me.

Real question, how do people make friends with cashiers and shop owners? I feel like some people who are regulars of places end up becoming very chummy with the proprietors, and this has never once happened to me. For one, I’m not often a regular - I tend to want to try new places and end up having more like a cyclical pattern of establishments I visit. But sometimes I have been a regular, and while people will start to recognize me, I rarely get to that “friendly” stage. I’m a naturally quiet person but I do make small talk. I just truly don’t understand it. How does it happen? What do people say? Maybe I need to ask more questions, or be an oversharer? 

This is the biggest quality that makes me feel like maybe I don’t have ADHD, is that a common trait described is that of oversharing or not knowing when to stop talking. For me, it is the opposite. I am a chronic undersharer. You probably can’t tell because I’ve shared a bunch of shit on this blog, but writing isn’t the same as in person conversation. I get overwhelmed easily in person and have a hard time focusing on the conversation at hand. This is where possible ADHD tendencies DO come in. I lose track of the conversation quite quickly if I don’t really work to pay attention. It’s not because I’m not interested in what the person is saying. It’s more extreme distraction or mind racing with other things, usually things that they inspired - something they said a minute ago has me on a completely different tangent, and I’m waiting for them to stop talking so I can ask about it. 

The biggest thing though, and this is what pulls me back again and again to this non-diagnosis, is the brain fog. I truly feel I spent the majority of my young life in an absolute fog, with little recollection of what the hell was happening in school. I got by by being quiet, by being funny when I did talk, and getting generally good test scores. But I never remembered my homework, never reviewed my notes, my notes were almost always just a series of doodles anyway. I did my reading, because I liked reading, and did well on writing assignments because I enjoyed writing. If something did not have a writing component, however, like math — forget it. I often had no idea what was going on.

I once even missed a flight, one of the first times I traveled alone, not because I was late - I was sitting there at the gate. Watching the flight get called, watching others go in around me. I just literally was in such a brain fog that I didn’t realize it was my flight. No one called my name or anything, so I just sat there, and daydreamed, and eventually realized that I think the flight number had changed, but the gate hadn’t changed. Nothing else changed. It was just me, not paying attention. This was pre-cell phones, so I wasn’t even screwing around on my phone. I think I was just literally sitting there, maybe doing a crossword.

Back to the brain fog. I feel it less now. I do sometimes feel it, but I see through it at times, like patches of sun through the clouds. I’ve learned to recognize my high points and note that they tend to fall at a certain point along my menstrual cycle. I have learned to work with those times of clarity as much as possible. I’ve developed a lot of coping mechanisms that have served me well. But I wonder what would have happened if I’d learned those earlier. If anyone had recognized that I was completely out of touch as a child. Completely unaware of what was happening around me most of the time.

We’re going to be getting B evaluated in a few weeks. B is my kiddo. For what, I am not sure. I just know that he works a little differently than other kids I have observed, and from my own experience, I want to give him the tools to work with his unique brain. Whether that’s ADHD or depression or anxiety or something I haven’t yet identified. I don’t want to pigeonhole him into a diagnosis because I actually really dislike the neurodivergent / neurotypical dichotomy. Like neurotypical isn’t a way a brain can be. It’s an impossible standard, a category we’ve created to describe “ideal” behavior, to establish a set of expectations for how humans work and interact in the world so that we can auto-function in society without having to take the time to check individually with each human we come across, and I don’t believe anyone falls squarely into that category. We all have brains and they exist somewhere on a spectrum of which one end is neurotypical. Some people may be pretty close to that end, but I don’t believe that anyone is truly neurotypical. That or I’ve done a great job never meeting a neurotypical person. We have to create categories in order to get diagnoses and I understand the human and practical need for this, but it frustrates me at the same time because it makes it difficult to get help and support when you don’t fall neatly into a predefined category. 

This is where I get on my library science shit again! 

Categories are so useful. They are such an important shorthand for our brains, to be able to generalize and group things into like buckets based on sets of shared attributes. They enable us to do things that, for better or worse, make life easier. Fast fashion. Browsing menus. But they also trick us into believing that the categories we create, that we made up — nature doesn’t have categories in the same way — into believing that those categories are truth. That they solidly define the edges of what is and what isn’t, and the older I get, the more I realize that’s simply not a thing.

I almost said “nature doesn’t have categories” and then modified it because clearly it does, but not in the same way humans conceptualize them. I recently read the book “The Botany of Desire” by Michael Pollan, which reminded me that in terms of species and sexual reproduction, nature absolutely does have categories. Some species can reproduce together, but even if they can, the offspring are typically not sexually viable. This fact is probably the biggest source of our thinking that categories do represent rightness in nature. Because we see that tigers and lions are different, they look different, they act different, and you can mix them but the mix is novel and unusual and doesn’t create a new species. But sexual selection is a great deal different than most of the things we create categories for, like “womens’” and “mens’” clothing, which is really just based on a set of somewhat arbitrary measurements and ratios that kind of align to a very generalized sort of body type, but in the end ultimately mean that most clothing doesn’t actually fit anyone. What did Hopper say in Stranger Things? Compromise means “halfway happy”?

I think about categories literally all the time, on the job, when I read to my kid at night, when I meal plan, for fun. The more I live and the more I read, the more I believe absolutely everything is about categories. Whether they are right or wrong. Whether we need a new one. Whether we need to merge two into one. Whether we’ve correctly named the category. In another life, one where I got help as a kid and discovered that I love math much earlier, maybe I studied category theory and not library science. But this is the life I’m in. 

I also think about how dangerous categories are, when we conflate the existence of certain categories as truth or good or rightness and anything outside of that as false or bad or wrongness. A big part of my job is the creation and maintenance of categories that on the surface, when I’m creating them, inform customer browse experiences on websites. (I might need to start locking entries so I can talk more about this. We’ll see.) But those categories are often taken by the metrics people doing data science, by the machine learning engineers, and used to create models that ”explain” user behavior, or describe patterns of purchase in terms of personae, or create recommendations around interactions with combinations of categories, and I worry about this. Because what are leaving out, when we can’t see everything? I have a real problem with data-driven culture, to be honest. In some ways I love it. Collecting data about myself has proven incredibly useful as a motivator or as a light to shine on behaviors of my own that maybe I want to change or understand better. But it’s also a trap that keeps us locked in the past. It’s way to not see the possibilities of the future, by focusing on historic patterns. We talk about the “cold start problem” a lot in tech. Is it a problem though? Can we not name this something else, think about it in a new way? 

This is actually one reason I started this blog, because these thoughts about categories are constantly floating around my head and I capture bits of them in notes across computers and in my paper planner/journal and I have really wanted to start collating them in a more meaningful way. This is also why I’m kind of tag-happy on this journal. Despite my just moaning about data-driven culture, I am kind of looking to do some of this relatively unstructured writing here and then come back to examine it and see what patterns emerge. I’ve noticed I’m pretty bad at planning when I don’t have a clear goal in mind. But I’m good at collating information and reacting to it and coming up with a plan based on the information. So this is me hacking another problem I perceive, with how I operate, an experiment to try and make sense of some things that have lived rent-free in my head for some time. Time to pay up, thoughts! 

I should go though because the fam returns in approx 2.5 hours, my last 2.5 hours of freedom. And there are a few things I wanna do before then, like throw away or at least hide, in preparation to throw away, papers that B has surely forgotten about but once he sees them again, will decide are of critical importance. Will I return after they return? Stay tuned for the thrilling not-conclusion!