State of the Bean Address: Moved!
Originally published at Encaffeinated!. You can comment here or there.
What a year it’s been so far!
I’m currently recovering from a move of apartments (from which, I have discovered that I have a subconscious ability to fold space and time, at least so far as cramming my stuff into an apartment), and taking a moment between a convention (Balticon) and a conference (NCRC) to blog a little, to get (back?) into the habit of sharing thoughts, dreams and notions with the world, in the terribly vain and unsubstantiated hope that it will mean anything to anyone. Including me..
(Pardon me, I’m exercising my freeform writing skillz. Been a while.)
I often find myself in the odd position of finding myself in an odd position about something or other. It disturbs and fascinates me that my life is simultaneously exceptionally duller and extraordinarily unusual simultaneously.
For example, the previous paragraph originally began with “I often find myself in the odd position of wanting to both share and conceal myself.”. And then it diverged into a meta-discussion about the fact that such positions arise commonly in my life..
I have no real basis for comparison for my life. I’ve never lived a so-called “normal” life, never associated with people who might be living the golden standard for how a life should be - or even really conversed with anyone who had any solid idea of what such an ideal life might actually be described.
I often live life in an unplanned way, yet strongly desire to have some sort of plan or organization to most everything I do. Some have seen me seemingly unwilling to do anything, but internally I’m actually paralyzed by the process of trying to decide what to do - externally, the same visual description, but internally a universe of difference.
I live life, it might be said, in a series of branching pathways, and I attempt to navigate them all with a sort of prioritizing A* algorithm. (AI geeks will appreciate the reference. Personally, I can’t even remember if that’s right any more; I’ve forgotten more things than I can remember..)
Let me explain it this way: at every moment of my life, there is a decision to be made, and several competing alternative actions to be done. However, in choosing any one of those actions, the other does not go away, nor does the original action get simply resolved. Rather, making any selection leads to another collection of actions, some that must be accomplished sequentially, and others which serve as further temporal alternatives.
For those of you with a computer bent, I visualize this (well, in a metaphorical sense, as I have little actual visualization skill but a well-developed and prominent non-visual linguistic visualization skill) as a stack. My brain is a stack processor living in a n-ary tree universe, and it copes as best it can, with limited memory and a parallel analysis process which occasionally re-prioritizes elements on the stack, culls old ones or even injects others.
Yes, I really do think that way… and I even had the opportunity to build something which worked that way, in a certain fashion, for a software project once. The design was only apparent to me, however, and while the code worked, we ended up using a less-flexible but more straightforward design. (One which, however, turned out to be far worse implemented and overly rigid.)
(I’m pretty sure the reflection of my mind was not apparent when I designed the system, but it seems terribly obvious now..)
I think that you, gentle reader, may also detect this sort of process when consuming my writing. This is terribly problematic, as it also requires attention, or I will definitely end up wandering far from my original destination, literally lost among the trees.
Curiously, I also realize that this same outlook is what makes me a pretty good navigator. When driving or walking in an unfamiliar area, I can almost always infallibly return the way I came if I find myself “lost”, if I’ve been paying attention. It’s that last part that gets me in trouble, however, as attention is something I have increasingly smaller amounts of, these days, and yet am in desperate need of.
So, pop, pop, pop, back up to the conundrum of sharing on not sharing… I’ve often found that I overshare on Twitter, usually during my most despairingly emotional of moments. What impression this brings, I cannot say, but I fear to damage the few connections with humanity I have, yet yearn to have someone - anyone! - hear, understand, sympathize and perhaps reflect and advise on my state of being. I find myself so frustratingly alone at times, in a world that no one understands and without any of the emotional supports that supposedly “normal” people have.
See, there’s an example of the worry of oversharing. I sound like an emotional basket case, looking for a few good crutches to lean on. I don’t think that’s the case - although I’ve served as a crutch to others in part because I recognize how much I’d appreciate it myself. Rather, I would delight in sharing my life and sharing someone else’s life, as shared experiences always seem to be so much more richer and fulfilling than solo adventures.
And yet, I’m solitary by nature. Contradictions abound!
I’ve just returned from Balticon, which is always an emotionally overwhelming experience. But this year, unlike years past, I had good friends to share it with more closely than ever, and that made all the difference.
Pop, pop, pop, and… pop! I’m done.
Blogging, podcasting and radio broadcasting will resume next week, after NCRC. In the meantime, I’ll see what thoughts come to mind and blather them here. If you are reading this, you deserve a medal…
Or perhaps you are just as weird as I am. We should form a club!
Do I continue to share my doings and goings on? Does anyone read this? If you do, please comment and tell me. Although that might encourage me, leading me to more of the same..
I’ve just posted a semi-coherent essay on Understanding Podcasting!. Read it if you are interested in podcasting. More will come later.
I haven’t done a new episode of The WEIRD Show recently, because I’ve been traveling and really busy… Although I’m on the long-list for the Parsec Awards again this year, and have to devise an entry to see if I can make it to the short-list…
Writing-wise, I’m going to try to return to the universe of Tainted Roses, which I wrote in a flurry last summer. I’m also keen to get a move on with some audio drama and short-story writing, but I haven’t reached the appropriate place in the brain-stack yet.
There are more things to say, but my brain is as cluttered as my apartment, this post as stuffed full as it, too.