tiger_spot

Some months ago, I found myself having the same conversation over and over with different friends: Why are we all so busy? I had kind of mentally chalked it up to having a small child, but it’s not just my friends with kids who feel overwhelmed. Another friend pointed out that this level of activity isn’t inherent to small children, either. Our parents weren’t this busy, when we were small children. I had to think hard about that, when she pointed it out -- the perspective from knee-height is pretty different -- but I sure don’t remember multiple events on a weekend day being a regular thing when I was a kid.

So what’s changed? My theory: mostly the internet, especially the rise of social media. I bet there's been research about this, and I haven't looked into any of it. Totally unsourced speculation ahead!

( Whoa, kind of a lot of unsourced speculation. )

There are two situations in which I ask for help:

1. It would obviously be quick and easy for the other person to do the thing, and would be significantly easier for them than for me at this time. Examples: While you're up, could you get me a glass of water? Since you're taking the car to visit a friend who lives near the pet store, can you pick up dog food on your way home?

2. I am incapable of doing the thing, and the results if the thing does not happen would be awful. Examples: I am really, really sick and just cannot manage walking the dog. I have an important meeting at work but someone needs to be home to meet the repairman.

So there is this enormous missing range in the middle, where it is hard for me to do a thing (but not completely impossible), and the results if it doesn't happen would be bad (but not necessarily catastrophic), and the thing would not be trivial for someone else to do (but might still be easier than it would for me). If there is no time pressure on these, I can usually work around to asking for help if I need/want it, but when I am sick or otherwise partially incapacitated it is extremely difficult for me to ask for help with daily or already-scheduled things, especially when the people I could ask are also sick or busy or otherwise dealing with whatever it is that's got me functioning at less than full capacity.

Partly this is because explaining the task, in enough detail for the other person to do it, can be more effort for me than just doing it, because of how my brain works (my introversion, let me show you it). Partly this is because I do not have a simple way to compare how difficult it is for me to do a thing with how difficult it is for the other person to do the thing, and I only want to ask if it will be easier for them than for me. I think this second part is probably broken. I mean, (1) it is not actually a moral imperative to create maximum total easiness at all times, (2) even if it were, I am not the only person who can do the comparing-relative-ease work, (3) "no" is a possible answer, if the other person would rather not do the thing.

On the other hand, if the other person says "no", then I have just wasted all this valuable energy I could have spent doing the thing on finding the person, explaining the thing, asking for the thing, maybe discussing relative energy levels for a while... which is all clearly suboptimal. So minimizing "no"s seems like a reasonable strategy to conserve energy, except that then I am missing out on some "yes"es that would save me more energy. But the task of calculating the probability of "yes" times the amount of energy saved, with consideration for the amount of energy spent on asking and careful examination of the amount of energy I actually have, is really a lot of work. I don't have a simple bright line other than the near-certainty of getting a "yes" in the situations outlined above, so when I don't have the time to sit down and work out the calculations, I default to not asking.

What heuristics do you use to decide when to ask people for help with things?

I changed jobs a short time ago.


At my old job, I changed words in questions about numbers and how they work to make sure that all the parts of the questions were true. I also made sure that the words were not too long or too hard, and that the questions used the smallest number of words that said what they were supposed to. I made sure that the right answer to each question was there and that the wrong answers were wrong because of not understanding how numbers work (instead of wrong because of not understanding the words).

I did the same thing for questions about how the world works. I also put these questions in order to make groups of questions taken all at once. I made sure that each group had questions about all the different parts of how the world works that each age of student was supposed to know, and that each group had easy, less easy, and hard questions about each part of how the world works.

Before I had the job of changing the words in the questions, my job was to check that other people's changes to the words in the questions happened the way they were supposed to, and that the changes did not make new problems in the questions. I still did that sometimes when my biggest job was changing the words.


Right now my job is to play with my baby. I give her food from my body to help her grow. I keep her safe and help her learn how to feel safe. I show her fun things to play with and take her to new places. I help her to sleep when she is tired and change her clothes when they are wet. I read books to her, I make songs for her (and play songs other people have made), and I talk to her a lot. I wave her around in the air and pretend to eat her head, which she thinks is very fun.

She is learning how to move around in a room by herself and how to eat food that I didn't make in my body. I think she might be learning what some words mean, but it is hard to tell what she knows about words since she can't say them yet.


Soon, I would like to have a job where I help people learn about how the world works. I would most like to help people learn about the places where animals live and the ways that different living things change each other and the world they live in. But I like helping people learn about other parts of how the world works, too. I like helping people learn by talking to them sometimes but not all the time. I would most like to help people learn by writing and making things for people to look at and play with. In a month or so, I will start looking for a job like that. I plan to start with jobs that don't pay money, because there aren't very many jobs like that that do pay money, and I want to make sure I have the right kind of job for me.


I used the Up-Goer Five word checker to make sure all the words I used here were in the ten hundred most used words. I was surprised that these words weren't used enough: math, science, milk, plants, common, affect, interact, cannot, sing, teaching.

Recently, chinders and I visited some new friends[1] and raided their bookshelf. One book I flipped through there, then put back on the shelf because I clearly needed my own copy, which I have now got.

It is called Becoming The Parent You Want To Be: A Sourcebook of Strategies for the First Five Years, by Laura Davis and Janis Keyser. The first few chapters are an overview of the general principles they think are useful for basically everyone, followed by chapters on specific issues such as sleep and toilet training learning. It is about the right level of hippie-granola for me; parts of it are more hippie-granola than I tend towards, and parts are less, so overall it balances out about right. It's also remarkably non-prescriptive for a parenting book, which I appreciate. It recognizes that different parents, different families, and different children will require somewhat different approaches to similar underlying issues, and provides a range of tools for dealing with upsets and changes. It contains lots of illuminating little stories and quotes from the authors' parenting classes, and does a good job balancing those between mothers, fathers, and other caregivers.

Wow, I sound like I should be selling the thing. Anyway, I am slowly working my way through this book, taking it in bits because it inspires lots of thought, especially the early chapters, which include interesting questions about your parenting values and experiences. I shall now record some of said thought, mostly so I have it later and can refer people specifically to it if needed. But if you find it interesting and would like to share your own thoughts, feel free.

My primary parenting goal is to raise functional, self-reliant adults. Therefore I should encourage the acquisition of life skills both specific (cooking, doing laundry, using public transport, coping with finances) and general (navigating to locations both familiar and new, making independent decisions, resolving conflicts, researching new ideas). This is more complicated than "protect my child from everything that could possibly go wrong" or "have a well-behaved, obedient child", but I think it'll work out better long-term.

Values or traits I particularly wish to encourage are:
* Kindness. My benchmark here is my sibling, age 8 or so, giving half zir sandwich to a panhandler.
* Interest in the world. That could be science or exploring or whatever; curiosity is good.
* Appreciation for nature.

My parents were overall quite good at these things (along with a bunch of other stuff that is so basic I don't even think to mention it, like gender-neutrality[2]), so for the most part my basic instincts and first responses should be about right. However, there are a few things I want to do differently:
* Less mocking. I did all right, but statistically speaking it's hard on most kids. This will take work from all of us, because it's a difficult habit to break. For instance, we make fun of the dog all the time for being a drama queen. He's a dog, so he neither understands nor cares, but if he were a small child we wouldn't want to do that. The frustrations he experiences -- his walk was short and is over now, everybody is eating dinner and not playing with him, his favorite toy is broken and up on a shelf where he can't get at it -- are in fact frustrating things that it is reasonable to be sad about, and his means of dealing with those frustrations -- sighing and looking sad -- are the best possible way he could express those feelings. So go, Emo-Dog! He's doing a great job. But it doesn't make him not funny, and I'm going to need to work on keeping my giggling and snorting out of audible kid-range, when it is Emo-Kid instead.
* Emotion coaching. This is a technique for helping children develop a variety of strategies for coping with strong emotions. I wound up with basically one: going to my room until I calmed down. It's effective, but it's not always possible, so making more strategies available to my kids sounds like an excellent idea.
* Managing the transition to independence. During college, the set of things my parents covered costs for and the set of things they didn't cover or didn't plan to cover in the future meant that, while I didn't have immediate monetary needs, I did make most of my decisions about part-time and summer jobs based on whether they paid. They didn't have to pay much, but they did have to pay. That turned out not to be the best set of choices, in the long term. I don't know what I want to do differently -- what my parents did would have worked excellently had I been graduating into the same circumstances they graduated into, and those circumstances will have changed again by the time I get to that transition from the other side -- but I want to remember to carefully investigate the actual economic factors on the ground at the time, and be prepared to adjust my launching speed as necessary.

Things I am particularly looking forward to doing with my kids include:
* Working together with them. Cooking, particularly, sounds like fun; also things like volunteer projects.
* Museums and zoos and hiking and whatnot.


[1] I hope. It may be slightly perverse to meet someone new and react, "Hey! You're a cranky introvert too! Will you be my friend?" but hey. We cranky introverts have the reactions we have.

[2] Speaking of which, does anybody have a recommendation for parenting forums or community blogs that are actually by-god parenting forums, instead of mothering forums? Offbeat Mama is adorable, but it's right there in the name! I want to be able to refer male coparents or caregivers or parenting friends to things that don't implicitly exclude them. Also, I myself get twitchy in single-gender spaces because I don't actually belong there.

I don't really do New Year's resolutions, mostly because I don't typically experience time in a way that chunks neatly into years. But this year, we've been in the house a little over a year and we've had the dog almost exactly a year, so there are some natural boundaries to 2010 encouraging me to think of it as a more coherent whole than usual.

There are a few things I want to do a bit differently this year:

1. Take more photos. I wrote Christmas cards for my grandparents, and thought it would be nice to print out a few photos of interesting things we've done this year to include. But when I looked, I didn't have any photos of interesting things we've done this year -- I had a few good shots of the chickens, and the coop-building process, and a few one-person stills here and there, but not really any adventures.

2. Use my vacation time for more three-day weekends. They're very relaxing, and having them spread regularly through the year helps keep me from burning out quite so badly as I sometimes do.

3. Go camping. We didn't go camping at all this year! Must fix that for 2011. (Must introduce dog to tent first.)

And some fuzzier, less time-bounded intentions:

4. Get back into the piano habit. I have been playing the piano a bit in the second half of this year, but after the Evil Hand Fungus kept me from playing at all for six months, it never really got back into being a habit the way it had been.

5. Relatedly, work through that how-to-compose book. Possibly learn the recorder to go with (it recommends doing the simple exercises for a woodwind, and while I do not have any proper woodwinds, I do have this plasticwind I used to play in elementary school...).

6. Travel more, locally. Particularly, I'd like to do more hiking, visit the Wave Organ, head out to the coast a few times, and have brooksmoses show me around Carmel like he keeps meaning to.

7. As usual, I would like to spend more one-on-one or small-group time with friends, so if you want to plan a trip to one of those above-mentioned interesting places, or do something on a semi-random three-day weekend, let me know!

Ever so often, we get fliers in the mailbox addressed to "Future Mountain View Homeowner". Having run the numbers, we may not actually be in this category -- 30 years of our current rent is less than the price of homes we'd be interested in, never mind interest and property taxes and so forth. (30 years of more typical rent is closer; our rent is in something under the 5th percentile for comparable apartments.) But the fliers make me wistful.

One particularly wist-inducing flier was for a bit of land down near the library which has, upon close inspection, three separate buildings -- one three-bedroom house, one two-bedroom house, and one thoroughly finished ex-garage. I have got some folks I would love to move in next door, so I know exactly what I'd do with an extra house if I had my druthers. (And entirely separate units are nicely flexible, too, in the event that drutherless reality interferes; much more pleasant to rent out a separate space than a couple of rooms.) But what to do with the ex-garage, I wondered, while carrying the flyer around from room to room with me to sigh at the nice pen-and-ink drawings of the bigger buildings. And then it came to me: it can be my Fortress of Solitude.

I do not, like Superman, have such good hearing that I need to be continents away from other people to not hear them holding up banks or falling into chasms or cussing at video games. But something with a little more insulating power than a typical interior wall is helpful. A couple of exterior walls and a dozen or two feet of intervening air would make an excellent sound baffle for me.

The next question, then, would be what to put in there. I shouldn't put my computer in a Fortress of Solitude -- it's better for me to have people around now and then when I'm working and so forth, and computer lazing time is mostly not very good introverting time. Games are all right, but internet stuff is all interacting with people really, so it doesn't work too well as recovery from Too Many People Disorder. So the Fortress of Solitude shouldn't be my office. It should be just for things that I'd rather do without anybody around at all.

So that means the furnishings go like this:

1. My piano.
2. A comfy chair.
3. Good task lighting.
4. A nice window or skylight.
5. A small cabinet for art supplies; some shelves for sheet music and a few particularly rereadable books.
6. A desk or table (ideally some kind of fold-out desk so it doesn't take up too much space most of the time but can be deployed as necessary for crafting).
7. A chair for the desk.

And nobody else will ever ever go in. If I wind up living with anybody who likes listening to my piano playing, I can open the window and they can sit on the lawn. Art is nicely transportable, so if I feel like working with other people around, I can just carry it in to the kitchen table like I do now.


I don't know that I'm ever going to wind up with a Fortress of Solitude -- we've got more important things to look for in a dwelling, and better things to do with most possible rooms. But it's a very nice place to have all tricked out in my imagination.

By request! I hope this is helpful, or at least interesting. Questions are welcome.

The basics:

DO invite me to stuff.

DON'T think my turning down an invitation means I don't like you.

That pretty much covers it, really. Everything else is my issue, and other people shouldn't have to think about it. But if you want to think about it, here is some background information, with additional suggestions for application.

( Kind of a lot of background information, actually )

I am an introvert with high social needs. That means that social interaction, like exercise, takes energy in the short term, but if I'm regularly getting an appropriate amount I have more energy and feel better overall. More is better pretty much up to the point where it's too much, so my ideal range of social interaction is very small.

Andrés, for reference, is an extrovert with low social needs. He's happy with a level of social interaction low enough to distress me and also happy with a level high enough to entirely overwhelm me.

Fig. 1:

A: . . : : :::|||||||||||||::: : : . .
T:    . . : : :::||||
   social interaction --->

(Higher density is better; note the abrupt drop-off at "too much".)

Interacting with people takes a varying amount of energy. The most important factor is how well I know someone or how comfortable I am with them (those aren't quite the same thing, but they're closely correlated). Interacting with someone I don't know well takes a lot more energy than interacting with someone I do know well. Interacting with several people I don't know is lots more effort than interacting with one person I don't know, but interacting with several people I do know is only a little more effort than interacting with one person I know. This makes hosting parties a very efficient source of social interaction -- it takes only slightly more effort than having one or two people over and results in a whole lot of social interaction, giving it a very high return on investment. (Going to parties is less efficient, because other people's parties usually include people I don't know, sometimes in large numbers.)

I have been skating on the edge of cranky-introvert-needs-alone-time-now for the last two weeks. I was all proud of my introversion management at apc16 -- "I'm not overwhelmed at all!" -- but I neglected to figure that unusual social energy expenditure into my plans for the next while, plus I got a number of exciting social situations dropped in my lap all at once (a small number, but they interact in interesting ways). Also I owe a bunch of people e-mail (::waves at some of the people -- most of them, come to think of it::). Now I am feeling weirdly insecure about whether people like me and stuff, which I think is about equal parts (a) having overdone it socially this week[1] and (b) basically all that socializing having been with the same people (who are lovely people I like hanging out with, but who I don't know all that well and who are part of one of the exciting social situations, which makes hanging out with them a little stressier than it might otherwise be). And this isn't letting up anytime soon. Last week I was thinking "Gosh, I haven't seen [long list of specific people] in a while -- time for a party!" but it's going to be a while before previously-planned things let up enough that I'll have the social energy to plan a party.

This is annoying, because I'd like to see the various specific people (hi, people! ::waves at the half of the list who are probably reading this::), but I would also like to avoid messy brain explosions. I think I surface some time in March, which is not so very far away. I shall try to plan ahead enough that there is not too long a gap between previously-scheduled things and theoretical party (busy is good), but I have to leave enough of a gap for my brain to settle down enough to handle planning (not too busy). Must aim carefully!

      . . : : :::||||
                    ^
                    ^
                   you are here

[1] Somebody somewhere sometime between last month and last year explained that when they had a sudden burst of "These people hate me!" in the middle of a convention it meant it was time to go sit quietly in an empty room and coddle the introvert. Thank you, somebody -- it's a very useful signifier, and much less distressing when recognized as a temporary symptom.

My internal image of a "social circle" is a group of people who all know each other at least a little bit. Any given pair may not deliberately socialize, but they're around the same people enough that they recognize each other. Each person has a sense of where all the other people fit into the social landscape.

Opposed to this, there's the social spike model -- one person knows various people, but those people don't know each other. A diagram of the relationships would look like an asterisk.

I have been pondering the advantages and disadvantages of the two models. In middle school and high school, I pretty much had a circle. Various subgroups might be hanging out at any given time, but for the most part "my friends" were a discrete group within the larger school population, and the people I would identify as my friends would be the same people that those friends would identify as their friends. Then, during and after college, I had more of a spike thing going on, where I knew a few people here and there, but they mostly didn't know each other. Now I have an oddly mixed situation, with various separate groups attached to me, but a fair amount of cross-contact within those groups (and with parts of those groups that I don't know).

The advantage of a circle situation is that it makes party planning and information transfer much simpler. If someone wants to arrange a surprise birthday party, say, they know who to invite and how to get in touch with them, since they know the same people the birthday person knows. No-one has to put a lot of effort into planning compatible personality combinations for dinner parties or anything, since those combinations are already known to everyone involved. If someone has news they'd like everyone to get but don't have the energy or time to contact everyone individually about, like a death in the family, then they can easily deputize people to spread the news, and those deputies will know who to contact.

The disadvantage of a circle is that false information, rumors or slander, can travel just as easily as good information, and any individual falling-outs can have nasty ripple effects as people try to avoid each other, but don't have anywhere else to go for social contact.

Spikes avoid those disadvantages, and give you neutral people to vent to or get advice about interpersonal conflicts from, but don't have much to recommend them otherwise. It's hard to get an objective view about a conflict from someone who only has your version to go on, even if you're trying to describe things fairly.

I'm thinking spikes may be way more common these days than they used to be, as people move around and keep in touch with a few people here and a few people there, rather than growing up in a group.

It's been an interesting thing to ponder. I would like to keep pondering it, but I ran out of thoughts. Do you have any?

Today we went to see Tempest give a free concert in the park with tenacious_snail, tshuma, and... er... lots of other people with LiveJournals.

It was very cool. I have a CD now, but only one because that is how much cash I had. :(

The lots of other people know real dances, and did very spiffy actual dancing in circles and pairs and lines and trading partners and weaving in and out around each other and this odd one where three people would dance and one would kind of watch them (pretty much everything was based on groups of 4 or in some cases 8). Also they started one of those thingies where everyone holds hands and skips around in a long line, which andres_s_p_b and I got pulled into.[1] There was leaping involved. Clearly I need to incorporate leaping into my daily exercise routine, because my little legs were kinda wobbly after that song.

Then we went and got ice cream. Tasty, but not as good as Amy's. Nothing is.

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