Ground up
All the queer people I've met in person are single-on-disability or are supported physically and/or financially by a live-in partner, except one. They talk about how queer means breaking out of normative thoughts and behaviours. They talk about how difficult that is and how it's penalized in so many ways.
Today on the poly group I frequent someone talked about how he and his partner had decided to see each other less frequently, how they didn't like the feeling of routine and so they decided to only meet up when they really wanted each other. His way of gauging that was through her messages; did they seem like they really wanted him? Then they'd have a date. The comments slammed him for manipulation and he took down the post. The moderators said, how could you blame people for being triggered by withholding sex as a relationship tactic?
Autistic groups talk about "female autism" constantly. Sometimes they say "FemaleAndNonbinary autism". Every once in a blue moon someone mentions men who have something more like female autism.
People who advocate for shorter work weeks and lots of vacation time to build a more humane and even productive system slam the leader of the province for taking a vacation to travel and see his family during an official wildfire emergency, after 18 months of covid emergency, going into more covid emergency, and the wildfire folks have had their prioritization in place for years.
I think about the concept of autism a lot. I think about what about that concept overlaps with me and what doesn't. In the last days I've been thinking about how I abstract differently than other folks. Stepping out a little, I *bundle* differently than other folks.
When we learn anything from ideas to actions we learn in tiny pieces that, through use, disappear into a larger coalesced whole. In academia complex concepts get used until they're easy to compress into jargon: whole life-work ideas become one word in a sentence of many words. Physically many tiny motions and corrections and attention-directions are practiced until they come together into one fluid action and then become an automatic response. Abstraction is part of bundling this way. Driving is part of bundling this way.
The more we use our bigger bundles the more we see those bundles as a real entity and not a collection of smaller parts. We forget the reality and the precision of the foundations because our minds cannot hold each foundation stone at once and still build atop them. If "land tenure" or "species" needs to be unpacked in a statement the statement will fall under its own weight, much as driving skill vanishes when each calf muscle and each eyeflick needs to be consciously controlled.
I'm shit at bundles. It takes me a long time to put them together. I ask too many questions and can't easily exclude variations or incongruities so jargon or even language feels imprecise. I can't squint properly and blur the edges of a category with enough conviction. It takes years for me to link the perception of a particular kind of shape and colour to the tension in that calf which sets it on the other pedal with exactly the right amount of pressure without a stop in my conscious awareness and a check-- is this the right bundle for this circumstance? Is this what people do? Social behaviour is just a bundle, just like driving, just like assuming "men" or "species" means something similar in anything other than a very rough non-overlapping statistical cloud. Social behaviour is the easiest of these: this topic, that facial movement.
I think when people care about something their bundles solidify. They tighten up. The contents compress into invisibility, and just the big abstraction is left. We lose the ability to create new bundles and double-down on what we have. We hit the gas or the brakes without thinking; we double down hard on categorizations; we say words louder and with less nuance.
The bundles just have what we put into them, though. They don't have every circumstance. They are just a set of automatic thoughts and behaviours. It feels to me like this way information is lost. I know we need to build into those abstractions but we also need to test the foundation stones, to wiggle each one frequently, to see if anything no longer fits and needs to be updated.
Sometimes updating something brings the whole castle down.
I'm going cross-eyed at this tangle of metaphors. I don't fit anywhere because I don't bundle right. I don't shear off what's supposed to be irrelevant information; I don't structuralize the core of the bundle correctly. Any group is composed of people inside and people outside based on a handful of characteristics. I can't squint hard enough to only see those characteristics. Any idea is composed of generalities. I don't like using the idea unless I test the generalities for the specific circumstance. It works so well with ecosystems. People hate it.
I'm tired and I've lost my point. Perhaps I'll revisit this later.
It's a way we get things wrong.
Today on the poly group I frequent someone talked about how he and his partner had decided to see each other less frequently, how they didn't like the feeling of routine and so they decided to only meet up when they really wanted each other. His way of gauging that was through her messages; did they seem like they really wanted him? Then they'd have a date. The comments slammed him for manipulation and he took down the post. The moderators said, how could you blame people for being triggered by withholding sex as a relationship tactic?
Autistic groups talk about "female autism" constantly. Sometimes they say "FemaleAndNonbinary autism". Every once in a blue moon someone mentions men who have something more like female autism.
People who advocate for shorter work weeks and lots of vacation time to build a more humane and even productive system slam the leader of the province for taking a vacation to travel and see his family during an official wildfire emergency, after 18 months of covid emergency, going into more covid emergency, and the wildfire folks have had their prioritization in place for years.
I think about the concept of autism a lot. I think about what about that concept overlaps with me and what doesn't. In the last days I've been thinking about how I abstract differently than other folks. Stepping out a little, I *bundle* differently than other folks.
When we learn anything from ideas to actions we learn in tiny pieces that, through use, disappear into a larger coalesced whole. In academia complex concepts get used until they're easy to compress into jargon: whole life-work ideas become one word in a sentence of many words. Physically many tiny motions and corrections and attention-directions are practiced until they come together into one fluid action and then become an automatic response. Abstraction is part of bundling this way. Driving is part of bundling this way.
The more we use our bigger bundles the more we see those bundles as a real entity and not a collection of smaller parts. We forget the reality and the precision of the foundations because our minds cannot hold each foundation stone at once and still build atop them. If "land tenure" or "species" needs to be unpacked in a statement the statement will fall under its own weight, much as driving skill vanishes when each calf muscle and each eyeflick needs to be consciously controlled.
I'm shit at bundles. It takes me a long time to put them together. I ask too many questions and can't easily exclude variations or incongruities so jargon or even language feels imprecise. I can't squint properly and blur the edges of a category with enough conviction. It takes years for me to link the perception of a particular kind of shape and colour to the tension in that calf which sets it on the other pedal with exactly the right amount of pressure without a stop in my conscious awareness and a check-- is this the right bundle for this circumstance? Is this what people do? Social behaviour is just a bundle, just like driving, just like assuming "men" or "species" means something similar in anything other than a very rough non-overlapping statistical cloud. Social behaviour is the easiest of these: this topic, that facial movement.
I think when people care about something their bundles solidify. They tighten up. The contents compress into invisibility, and just the big abstraction is left. We lose the ability to create new bundles and double-down on what we have. We hit the gas or the brakes without thinking; we double down hard on categorizations; we say words louder and with less nuance.
The bundles just have what we put into them, though. They don't have every circumstance. They are just a set of automatic thoughts and behaviours. It feels to me like this way information is lost. I know we need to build into those abstractions but we also need to test the foundation stones, to wiggle each one frequently, to see if anything no longer fits and needs to be updated.
Sometimes updating something brings the whole castle down.
I'm going cross-eyed at this tangle of metaphors. I don't fit anywhere because I don't bundle right. I don't shear off what's supposed to be irrelevant information; I don't structuralize the core of the bundle correctly. Any group is composed of people inside and people outside based on a handful of characteristics. I can't squint hard enough to only see those characteristics. Any idea is composed of generalities. I don't like using the idea unless I test the generalities for the specific circumstance. It works so well with ecosystems. People hate it.
I'm tired and I've lost my point. Perhaps I'll revisit this later.
It's a way we get things wrong.