December Days 02025 #23: Chaos
Dec. 23rd, 2025 11:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptIt's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.
23: Chaos
Someone decided that she hadn't been properly honored yet during this sequence, and so, on this, her appointed day, she reminded me in several ways that I am still one of her chosen, a Chewtoy of Chaos. I usually express this to the aneristic as "the universe takes any opportunity it has to make me look foolish." Most of the time, what that means is that after I speak something aloud, something will arrive to either confirm or refute what I am saying, as if it we a television program designed to do just such a thing. This leads to both "…As I was saying," and "…Or not." in relatively equal measures, and a lot of laughter, as I have come to accept that this will be a regular part of my life. On some occasions, it has even been a blessing to me to have such comedic and coincidental timing.
More pointedly, however, was that a Secret Santa gift appeared for me this morning, and among the lovely goodies inside the bag was a nameplate that read "Magister [Walletname]". I had mentioned at an earlier meeting where the Santa game was decided an entry much like yesterdays, and a lamentation that I did not have all that many people using the title that had earned it. And, of course, since that was the subject of yesterday's entry, it's pretty well both a sign (literal) and a sign (figurative) that I have once again assumed the mantle, at least for now, of Chaos's Chewtoy.
I would then go on to prove that I was still wearing the cape later on today, when we landed on a subject also covered earlier in this sequence: troubleshooting. Someone had left a request in our reference inbox saying they wanted to install the blinking Christmas tree app, and left a telephone number to call to achieve this.
The first time I called, the person was driving, and asked me to call back in fifteen minutes.
The second time I called, they had stopped driving, and we set to work in earnest. I'd done a little research beforehand and pulled up a few apps from the appropriate app store that might be what they were looking for. (It wasn't.) As they described it to me, they had seen pictures where it was a decorated Christmas tree with the lights blinking, or Santa with the sleigh, and the snow was falling, and they wanted to use that to make holiday greetings for their friends. So my first thought was that they wanted some app to build a nice little greeting card and send that away digitally, but there weren't all that many of them in the app store, and it was definitely not any of the apps where someone might upload their face to a JibJab or frame a picture of themselves in holiday festivities. They wanted an animated thing to send. Strike one: It's not an app they're looking for.
As I was perusing the store offerings, the live wallpapers stood out to me as the kind of thing that met what was being asked, although they are, after all, wallpapers, and not things that you send to other people, but I suggested this as a possibility, and the response I got back told me this, also, was not the thing sought, because they definitely wanted to send the thing to other people. Strike two: it's still not an app they're looking for, no matter what kind you suggest.
And then, after ten or fifteen minutes of listening and thinking and suggesting and trying to figure out what was being sought, I subconsciously remembered the first (unofficial) rule of any reference interaction: What the person is asking for is almost never completely right. (If it were, they would have found what they were looking for without asking you.) Discarding "app" and focusing on "sending animated pictures to others" and the answer dawned on me that what was being sought here were animated GIFs. And now I need to describe, over the telephone, how to have someone get to the GIFs that their messaging app or their keyboard will provide for them. Thus went the second fifteen minutes as I finally explained myself and what I was looking for on their phone in such a way that they found it, and figured out the procedure for getting what they wanted. Open the messenger app, find the recipient, tap the smiling face next to the text box, and then, find the box with GIF inside of it. Once that happened, and the terms and conditions of the chosen GIF vault were accepted, the "animated christmas tree app" that had been sought was found, and the procedure for finding such written down so that it could be replicated.
It's deep, and I don't think it's playable. I didn't quite get teh standing ovation for managing it, but plenty of coworkers did ask, and I explained what had been requested and what was actually wanted. It probably says something about me that I was able to do this over the telephone. I ended up as the "number two" pretty smart person on their list, behind another of my colleagues who is their go-to about these kinds of things.
As I said, heading out to the desk (since this call had spilled over into the time where I was supposed to be working with the public), "A perfect example of 'Chalk Mark: $1. Knowing where to put it: $4,999.' " Once I had finally established the thing being sought, from the description that I had been given and an awful lot of questions and trial-and-error, I was able to provide it within a few minutes, although it probably took longer than it should have, given that it took me describing the GIF option button a few times before the person on the other end of the line found it. That could have gone all kinds of ways, and it had gone all kinds of ways with other library workers, who couldn't necessarily piece together what was being asked for based on the description that the person was giving to them. But, in the end, we managed to communicate well enough to get the information across, and the person found what they were looking for on their phone, and they'll probably be merrily sending all kinds of GIFs to their contacts all the time. So I may have traded one problem for another later on. Still, that's probably something that leveled up my prestige class, or some other marker of "I did this thing because I have the more obscure skill set and the patience for it," rather than any kind of main class level XP. I'll take it, all the same. After all, I'm the kind of person that tends to run after sidequests and try to make sure all the optional content is finished before returning myself to the main quest. That way I can be horrendously over-leveled when it comes time to getting back to that main quest content.
There are other signs of the favor of chaos upon me. The neurodivergence is one of the marks, if I choose to see it that way, and that by itself contributes to so much of the chaos around me and through me. Because forgetting things or thinking about things and therefore thinking they have been done, since I thought about them, has contributed to some last-minute panics for assignments, or getting halfway to a destination before realizing that I intended to bring along a guest gift and either I need to go back or to find somewhere to procure another. It means lists (and sometimes losing the lists) and an awful lot of written communication as reminders for me, because I cannot trust that my memory will pull out the thing I'm supposed to do at an appropriate time. It usually happens when some related trigger fires and I go "Oh, no, I meant to do that, didn't I?"
It's also meant having to impose certain limits on myself about when I can go dopamine-seeking (by playing games), because sometimes there are more important things to be doing than that, and even though I would really enjoy making progress on those games and otherwise feeling good about myself, I can't, because it'll be hard for me to tear away my focus from dopamine stuff. "Just one more level" is the kind of thing that can keep me up at night. Most days, I don't have that luxury. The discipline I have to impose upon myself to get things with later due dates done first, or at least keep making progress on them while we move toward the due date, is not fun. It is how I've managed to work my way all the way through everything up to this point without it exploding in my face. And I also use computers to help me with things, so that bills and such get automatically paid and the amount of manual work I have to do is reduced greatly. It is an imposition of structure and order and asceticism on myself, because the world around me is not structured in a way that my brain can naturally work with, and there are not all that many professional positions where having a brain such as mine is encouraged and the workflows and workplaces are set up to make things optimal for me. This is why it's "Chewtoy," not "Chosen," because I don't have it as bad as others do in terms of mental difference, and because most of the time, when I am working on my own natural pathways, the results are not what I want them to be, unless I've set it up very specifically so that I have this time block to myself to do whatever I would like to do with it. I can't waste time that's truly free time, and I generate truly free time for myself by making sure that my obligations are already taken care of, at least for the day, if not for longer periods of time.
While a lot of the coincidences and synchronicity are funny in the moment, and often even more hilarious in hindsight, it's very hard for me to not see my brain state as it is as a deficiency, compared to the people around me. (Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.) I like Variable Attention Stimulus Trait as a non-pathologizing way of describing the situation, but one of the things that's profoundly true in the States (and several other places the world over, I'm sure) is that the world is aggressively designed for a specific perception of normal, and the farther outside that perception of normal you are, the harder you find the world to interact with. This is true for physical, mental, behavioral, and social norms. Perception is important here because statistically speaking, a lot of "normal" isn't, but the specific group of people who have declared themselves to be "normal" are the ones who have hoarded enough power and wealth to themselves that they can continue to pretend they are normal and force the rest of us to pretend they're normal, too, since our livelihoods depend on it. The "learns things well" abnormality was both helpful for cruising through a lot of coursework and completely unhelpful in building social status. (I never perceived myself as being socially accepted, but that's a tangle that may get explored more in a later entry, or not.) The "long being" abnormality means my head hurts a lot more than other people's. And the one that makes my memory scattershot at best and produces hyperfocus on other things really gets to me by making me feel like I'm untrustworthy and should not be relied upon for anything at all.
At least, not without the tools that I can use to make things work better. Like writing things down when the opportunity presents itself. And setting reminders in a calendar to do things that happen occasionally. Or daily. And trying to find a way of hitting a stopping point so I can give full attention to what is being asked of me. And asking people to send me written reminders of things I've agreed to do, knowing that there will be many distractions taking up space. And occasionally asking people to repeat themselves because some distraction managed to capture my attention long enough that I couldn't focus on what I needed to. The kinds of things that a manager who doesn't understand what they're seeing would see as personal faults, and that feel like personal faults in the moment, or when taking the consequences of those kinds of actions.
I know that one of the things that happens is that we all need to work with the limitations that we have, but the society around me is very much uninterested in limitations, except as something to be "overcome" rather than accommodated. The stories promoted are mostly cripspiration and the kind of thing that fits with the general narrative of "we promote the exceptions to the rule to make it seem like the rule isn't there, or that you, with sufficient willpower alone, pay no attention to the vast amount of resources that have been poured into this situation, can also not have the rules apply to you! If you think that you're limited by something, that's just defeatist attitudes, and thus it's your fault that you haven't become normal. And thus, we don't have to invest any resources in helping you get accommodation or assistance to function and thrive in society." There are some things that you cannot will your way out of, and to be expected to do so anyway is a condemnation of a society that has so many people in it who profess to follow the teachings of a man who strongly advocated for community bonds, for not excluding, for not saying that only some people are deserving and worthy of help, and the rest can be hurt. This comes from a long tradition where the people chosen by the Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton have to be repeatedly reminded of the fact that everyone is part of the community, not just a select few. And yet we still seem to be in a place that believes we are separated from each other, instead of together.
For the most part, though, I've managed to make the chaos stay at a manageable level, and indulged it when it seems acceptable to do so, because austerity doesn't particularly work well for society or for individuals, and because I do actually like dopamine when I can get it. (Or to get my systems up and running with enough of whatever stimulation is needed to make them run acceptably, because sometimes store-bought is what you need.) That I have systems in place and have managed to do as much as I have done, both diagnosed and undiagnosed, says something about me, adaptability, flexibility, and thinking on one's feet when confronted with the reality that your brain has not been running optimally. And it's good to have people around who are willing to acknowledge the limitation and work with it, without it being a source of judgment and shaming for needing it. The chaos is, and while I can try to reduce it, I won't ever be able to get rid of it. (Despite this, I still believe in the perfection of myself, because it would be easier to exist in the world without the things that cause negative experiences and emotions for myself. And I realize this is normal to want and possible to achieve.)
23: Chaos
Someone decided that she hadn't been properly honored yet during this sequence, and so, on this, her appointed day, she reminded me in several ways that I am still one of her chosen, a Chewtoy of Chaos. I usually express this to the aneristic as "the universe takes any opportunity it has to make me look foolish." Most of the time, what that means is that after I speak something aloud, something will arrive to either confirm or refute what I am saying, as if it we a television program designed to do just such a thing. This leads to both "…As I was saying," and "…Or not." in relatively equal measures, and a lot of laughter, as I have come to accept that this will be a regular part of my life. On some occasions, it has even been a blessing to me to have such comedic and coincidental timing.
More pointedly, however, was that a Secret Santa gift appeared for me this morning, and among the lovely goodies inside the bag was a nameplate that read "Magister [Walletname]". I had mentioned at an earlier meeting where the Santa game was decided an entry much like yesterdays, and a lamentation that I did not have all that many people using the title that had earned it. And, of course, since that was the subject of yesterday's entry, it's pretty well both a sign (literal) and a sign (figurative) that I have once again assumed the mantle, at least for now, of Chaos's Chewtoy.
I would then go on to prove that I was still wearing the cape later on today, when we landed on a subject also covered earlier in this sequence: troubleshooting. Someone had left a request in our reference inbox saying they wanted to install the blinking Christmas tree app, and left a telephone number to call to achieve this.
The first time I called, the person was driving, and asked me to call back in fifteen minutes.
The second time I called, they had stopped driving, and we set to work in earnest. I'd done a little research beforehand and pulled up a few apps from the appropriate app store that might be what they were looking for. (It wasn't.) As they described it to me, they had seen pictures where it was a decorated Christmas tree with the lights blinking, or Santa with the sleigh, and the snow was falling, and they wanted to use that to make holiday greetings for their friends. So my first thought was that they wanted some app to build a nice little greeting card and send that away digitally, but there weren't all that many of them in the app store, and it was definitely not any of the apps where someone might upload their face to a JibJab or frame a picture of themselves in holiday festivities. They wanted an animated thing to send. Strike one: It's not an app they're looking for.
As I was perusing the store offerings, the live wallpapers stood out to me as the kind of thing that met what was being asked, although they are, after all, wallpapers, and not things that you send to other people, but I suggested this as a possibility, and the response I got back told me this, also, was not the thing sought, because they definitely wanted to send the thing to other people. Strike two: it's still not an app they're looking for, no matter what kind you suggest.
And then, after ten or fifteen minutes of listening and thinking and suggesting and trying to figure out what was being sought, I subconsciously remembered the first (unofficial) rule of any reference interaction: What the person is asking for is almost never completely right. (If it were, they would have found what they were looking for without asking you.) Discarding "app" and focusing on "sending animated pictures to others" and the answer dawned on me that what was being sought here were animated GIFs. And now I need to describe, over the telephone, how to have someone get to the GIFs that their messaging app or their keyboard will provide for them. Thus went the second fifteen minutes as I finally explained myself and what I was looking for on their phone in such a way that they found it, and figured out the procedure for getting what they wanted. Open the messenger app, find the recipient, tap the smiling face next to the text box, and then, find the box with GIF inside of it. Once that happened, and the terms and conditions of the chosen GIF vault were accepted, the "animated christmas tree app" that had been sought was found, and the procedure for finding such written down so that it could be replicated.
It's deep, and I don't think it's playable. I didn't quite get teh standing ovation for managing it, but plenty of coworkers did ask, and I explained what had been requested and what was actually wanted. It probably says something about me that I was able to do this over the telephone. I ended up as the "number two" pretty smart person on their list, behind another of my colleagues who is their go-to about these kinds of things.
As I said, heading out to the desk (since this call had spilled over into the time where I was supposed to be working with the public), "A perfect example of 'Chalk Mark: $1. Knowing where to put it: $4,999.' " Once I had finally established the thing being sought, from the description that I had been given and an awful lot of questions and trial-and-error, I was able to provide it within a few minutes, although it probably took longer than it should have, given that it took me describing the GIF option button a few times before the person on the other end of the line found it. That could have gone all kinds of ways, and it had gone all kinds of ways with other library workers, who couldn't necessarily piece together what was being asked for based on the description that the person was giving to them. But, in the end, we managed to communicate well enough to get the information across, and the person found what they were looking for on their phone, and they'll probably be merrily sending all kinds of GIFs to their contacts all the time. So I may have traded one problem for another later on. Still, that's probably something that leveled up my prestige class, or some other marker of "I did this thing because I have the more obscure skill set and the patience for it," rather than any kind of main class level XP. I'll take it, all the same. After all, I'm the kind of person that tends to run after sidequests and try to make sure all the optional content is finished before returning myself to the main quest. That way I can be horrendously over-leveled when it comes time to getting back to that main quest content.
There are other signs of the favor of chaos upon me. The neurodivergence is one of the marks, if I choose to see it that way, and that by itself contributes to so much of the chaos around me and through me. Because forgetting things or thinking about things and therefore thinking they have been done, since I thought about them, has contributed to some last-minute panics for assignments, or getting halfway to a destination before realizing that I intended to bring along a guest gift and either I need to go back or to find somewhere to procure another. It means lists (and sometimes losing the lists) and an awful lot of written communication as reminders for me, because I cannot trust that my memory will pull out the thing I'm supposed to do at an appropriate time. It usually happens when some related trigger fires and I go "Oh, no, I meant to do that, didn't I?"
It's also meant having to impose certain limits on myself about when I can go dopamine-seeking (by playing games), because sometimes there are more important things to be doing than that, and even though I would really enjoy making progress on those games and otherwise feeling good about myself, I can't, because it'll be hard for me to tear away my focus from dopamine stuff. "Just one more level" is the kind of thing that can keep me up at night. Most days, I don't have that luxury. The discipline I have to impose upon myself to get things with later due dates done first, or at least keep making progress on them while we move toward the due date, is not fun. It is how I've managed to work my way all the way through everything up to this point without it exploding in my face. And I also use computers to help me with things, so that bills and such get automatically paid and the amount of manual work I have to do is reduced greatly. It is an imposition of structure and order and asceticism on myself, because the world around me is not structured in a way that my brain can naturally work with, and there are not all that many professional positions where having a brain such as mine is encouraged and the workflows and workplaces are set up to make things optimal for me. This is why it's "Chewtoy," not "Chosen," because I don't have it as bad as others do in terms of mental difference, and because most of the time, when I am working on my own natural pathways, the results are not what I want them to be, unless I've set it up very specifically so that I have this time block to myself to do whatever I would like to do with it. I can't waste time that's truly free time, and I generate truly free time for myself by making sure that my obligations are already taken care of, at least for the day, if not for longer periods of time.
While a lot of the coincidences and synchronicity are funny in the moment, and often even more hilarious in hindsight, it's very hard for me to not see my brain state as it is as a deficiency, compared to the people around me. (Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.) I like Variable Attention Stimulus Trait as a non-pathologizing way of describing the situation, but one of the things that's profoundly true in the States (and several other places the world over, I'm sure) is that the world is aggressively designed for a specific perception of normal, and the farther outside that perception of normal you are, the harder you find the world to interact with. This is true for physical, mental, behavioral, and social norms. Perception is important here because statistically speaking, a lot of "normal" isn't, but the specific group of people who have declared themselves to be "normal" are the ones who have hoarded enough power and wealth to themselves that they can continue to pretend they are normal and force the rest of us to pretend they're normal, too, since our livelihoods depend on it. The "learns things well" abnormality was both helpful for cruising through a lot of coursework and completely unhelpful in building social status. (I never perceived myself as being socially accepted, but that's a tangle that may get explored more in a later entry, or not.) The "long being" abnormality means my head hurts a lot more than other people's. And the one that makes my memory scattershot at best and produces hyperfocus on other things really gets to me by making me feel like I'm untrustworthy and should not be relied upon for anything at all.
At least, not without the tools that I can use to make things work better. Like writing things down when the opportunity presents itself. And setting reminders in a calendar to do things that happen occasionally. Or daily. And trying to find a way of hitting a stopping point so I can give full attention to what is being asked of me. And asking people to send me written reminders of things I've agreed to do, knowing that there will be many distractions taking up space. And occasionally asking people to repeat themselves because some distraction managed to capture my attention long enough that I couldn't focus on what I needed to. The kinds of things that a manager who doesn't understand what they're seeing would see as personal faults, and that feel like personal faults in the moment, or when taking the consequences of those kinds of actions.
I know that one of the things that happens is that we all need to work with the limitations that we have, but the society around me is very much uninterested in limitations, except as something to be "overcome" rather than accommodated. The stories promoted are mostly cripspiration and the kind of thing that fits with the general narrative of "we promote the exceptions to the rule to make it seem like the rule isn't there, or that you, with sufficient willpower alone, pay no attention to the vast amount of resources that have been poured into this situation, can also not have the rules apply to you! If you think that you're limited by something, that's just defeatist attitudes, and thus it's your fault that you haven't become normal. And thus, we don't have to invest any resources in helping you get accommodation or assistance to function and thrive in society." There are some things that you cannot will your way out of, and to be expected to do so anyway is a condemnation of a society that has so many people in it who profess to follow the teachings of a man who strongly advocated for community bonds, for not excluding, for not saying that only some people are deserving and worthy of help, and the rest can be hurt. This comes from a long tradition where the people chosen by the Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton have to be repeatedly reminded of the fact that everyone is part of the community, not just a select few. And yet we still seem to be in a place that believes we are separated from each other, instead of together.
For the most part, though, I've managed to make the chaos stay at a manageable level, and indulged it when it seems acceptable to do so, because austerity doesn't particularly work well for society or for individuals, and because I do actually like dopamine when I can get it. (Or to get my systems up and running with enough of whatever stimulation is needed to make them run acceptably, because sometimes store-bought is what you need.) That I have systems in place and have managed to do as much as I have done, both diagnosed and undiagnosed, says something about me, adaptability, flexibility, and thinking on one's feet when confronted with the reality that your brain has not been running optimally. And it's good to have people around who are willing to acknowledge the limitation and work with it, without it being a source of judgment and shaming for needing it. The chaos is, and while I can try to reduce it, I won't ever be able to get rid of it. (Despite this, I still believe in the perfection of myself, because it would be easier to exist in the world without the things that cause negative experiences and emotions for myself. And I realize this is normal to want and possible to achieve.)
no subject
Date: 2025-12-24 11:04 am (UTC)It's always fun to read a story about troubleshooting. I think I'd have had the same trouble figuring out just what was being asked (especially since I'm really not familiar with animated GIFs, and such an app doesn't sound implausible to me), so good to hear that you figured it out so quickly!
As for the strategy to make yourself concentrate, that's something I've come to use for myself, too, as I like having as much genuinely free time as possible, and the sooner I get done what I need to do, the better I succeed at that goal.
I've luckily not encountered all too much of the mindset that accommodation is not necessary, which might or might not reflect an actual difference between countries. (Incidentally, my country has more people not affiliated with a religion than those who are, which probably also makes for a difference in experience.)
no subject
Date: 2025-12-24 05:02 pm (UTC)Having genuinely free time is really neat. And I can do a better job when I'm not actively trying to remember to do other things.
The States believes very firmly that individuals are responsible for everything in their lives, and many of the people at the top of the pile refuse to acknowledge how they got there or that they have any kind of responsibility to anyone else, even though many of them supposedly follow a religion that is very explicit about all the obligations they have to other people. If they started believing they had those obligations, they might have to act on them, and that would be incompatible with the hoarding of resources that counts as the score of how well they're doing at capitalism.
I'm glad to hear that we haven't managed to export that particular lunacy to other places yet.