Renaissance Grrrl

Hi all, long time no post. A lot has been going on, but I’m finally starting to get on top of things again. I’ve been meaning to write in a bit more depth about some of this, but that want for perfection has been the enemy of the writing anything at all. So, here’s a quick synopsis of what’s been going on in my neck of the woods.

Both of L’s parents passed away. We’ve known this was coming, but it’s still hard of course. L was out there for a bit over a month taking care of her mom. They died very close together, so we ended up having a single combined service. I was out there for about a week helping to wrap things up before whisking L back home.

I finally got back the results of the genetics test. Turns out I don’t have Loeys–Dietz, or at least not the same genetic variant my mother did. But I definitely have something. So it’s back to the diagnostic swamp trying to figure out how to give it a name so that doctors’ll take it seriously. Current working hypothesis is hypermobility-type Ehlers–Danlos. Alas, “hypermobility-type” is medical jargon for “we have no idea what this is, but it kinda looks similar to the forms of Ehlers–Danlos we do know stuff about, so let’s call it that.” So, yeah, no medical tests to “prove” that’s what it is; just your usual game of convincing folks you have enough of the symptoms to match the syndrome.

I’ve been getting used to paying attention to my ADHD and working with it rather than trying to plow through it. It helps a lot to recognize that it’s not a failing on my part (e.g., that I can’t focus on boring things for as long as other people) but rather just part of how I’m wired. That makes it a lot easier to stop beating myself up over things, and instead figure out better ways to work with my brain rather than trying to force it into a shape it won’t take. As I’ve gotten better at this I’ve finally started getting caught up on a bunch of things that’ve fallen to the wayside over the past few years.

For example, I’m slowly getting caught up on the backlog of bug reports and feature requests for my various Haskell packages. Mostly been focusing on logfloat and unification-fd so far, but will make it around to the others in time. So, if you sent me an email about some bug or feature over the past few years and it seems to have fallen into the void, consider filing a ticket.

Still working on getting caught up to where I should be on my dissertation.

Work has also been going excellently. It’s all seekrit and nonsense, so I can’t say too much about it. But lately I’ve been doing a bunch of work on characterizing families of mathematical objects, and discovering their symmetries so we can exploit them to simplify and optimize things. So lots of mathy goodness going on. It’s a bit more geometric and combinatorial than my usual algebraic fare, but it’s the sort of stuff that arises from algebraic structures so it’s not too far from home base. (If that doesn’t make sense to you, maybe take a look at Brent Yorgey’s thesis to see an example of the connection between combinatorics and algebraic data types.) Plus, it helps that I’ve been getting to know some of the hella queer ladies who work in my building :)

In other health-y news, round about the time I got officially diagnosed with ADHD I had a bunch of friends going on about what the symptoms of allism (aka non-autism) are. Though I have a bunch of autistic friends, I’ve never really known much about what autism’s really like because all the literature is written by allistic folks, for allistic folks, so they’re all “patient has underdeveloped/insufficient blah” and I’m like “according to what baseline? How much blah does it take to count as having ‘sufficient’ blah? What are diagnostic details for measuring how much blah you really have?” So I finally got to hear some details from the autistic side of the fence, where people actually explain shit and elucidate the differences. And based on that: I’m hella not allistic. I can (and should! and have been meaning to!) write a whole separate post on this topic. I’m still not entirely sure I feel comfortable adopting “autistic” label (for reasons which are, themselves, further symptoms of autism), because my experiences don’t match up perfectly with some of the parts of what is traditionally called “autism”, but I’m absolutely non-allistic. I think the spectrum of non-allism is far larger and more diverse than allistic people currently believe, but —again— a post for another time.

This year's self-improvement goal was to get back into blogging regularly. Part of that goal was just to get back into writing regularly; the other part was specifically to publish more regularly.

I've done fairly well on the first half, actually. I'd hoped to do better, but then all year I've had to deal with spoon-draining circumstances, so I've probably done about as well as I can without sacrificing my health. One of my other self-improvement goals has been to take my health seriously, to listen to my body rather than pushing it beyond its limits. I'm on-track for improving at both of these, I just need to stop beating myself up over it.

For the second half, the publishing bit, that I've done poorly. I'd like to blame the spoon vortex here too, but really I think the biggest problem is my perfectionism. Perfectionism greatly amplifies the problem of lacking spoons: both the editing itself, as well as the emotional fallout of missing the mark or of having taken the entire day to hit it, both of these cost spoons. The real aim behind my goal to publish regularly wasn't to have more words to my name, but rather to “get out there” more, to be more productive in-and-of-itself rather than to have more products. So I've started thinking: the real target for this self-improvement goal should not be publishing regularly, but rather should be (working to) overcome perfectionism.

If perfectionism is a problem of fear, then the thing I must address is that fear. So how to do it? One of the suggestions in that article is to let yourself fail. Not to lower your unreasonable standards (the party-line for what to do), but rather to allow yourself to not meet those standards. One of my standards is to be thought provoking, and hence to focus overmuch on essays. To try and break free from this, I'm thinking to start posting summaries of my daily dissertation progress. A nanowrimo sort of thing, though without the focus on word-count per se. I've read a few articles suggesting one should start their day by summarizing the previous day's progress, but I've never tried it. So here goes nothing :)