I enjoyed many moments and experiences in my long autumn stretch with my Mom, like when Julia and Moss came over and talked about scary Boston cabdrivers, which led Mom to tell a tale about a ridiculous Tehran taxi experience. Or when I got to deploy Mom's Sanskrit expertise to help out someone on MetaFilter. Or finally getting to show her the Shakespeare Garden in Central Park, where Leonard and I got married.

And then there's the accumulation of small lessons and words and times of day, the tint and saturation that builds irregularly, organically. I gardened our lives. Gardening is strange because it feels so passive and therefore wrong; I'm partnering with time but time doesn't communicate clearly and I have to read its mind and sit on my hands a lot.

Now I have more time-freedom, which of course means I'm down and negative thoughts intrude. Also thoughts that aren't necessarily negative but have a feeling of disintegration to them, the intellectual frameworks I've habitually used as scaffolding and trellises decaying and slipping into the sea.

I tried to be attentive to my mom while hosting her, though not intrusive, and I've learned a bit about how to be a good host/daughter/caretaker for her. For example: sometimes, instead of asking her what she wants, it's better to tell her some options to get her mind oriented. (Multiple-choice questions can be easier than essay questions; isn't this why we give clients portfolios and mood boards and prototypes, so they don't have to start ab nihilo?) I appreciate better how she and my dad complemented each other when running the family and projects. They thought differently. I take after my dad.

And she so utterly does not want to be a burden, ever, at all. She'd rather put up with a little pain or trouble than make a fuss and inconvenience one of her daughters. Even though, right now, that iota of pain might end up ruining her day. So you can see another reason why I wanted to be extra-attentive. I needed to watch for the expression on her face, in case it told me that Mom's energy reserves were running down and I should figure out why, and fix it.

It was scary, the first day she was at my place. I basically thought, "WHAT THE HELL DO I DO NOW." But I've learned, through observation and trial and error (and advice!), and the slow drip of time. I've started to construct a list of things that she likes -- like a half-cup of tea with Equal and a splash of milk, and flowers and babies and musicals with good dancing -- to deploy appropriately when I caretake her next. Expertise reduces the effort and conscious thought it takes to get to a desired result, and makes room for fillips and grace notes.

I was talking with James about how I think a similar process has worked in my history of romantic relationships. I observe my partner's behavior, and listen to things he says, and talk to his friends to learn his preferences and plans. Then I devise a scheme or buy something or create something to improve his life, or pleasantly surprise him (say, by showing up at his place), or add beauty to his living space. This is a kind of thoughtfulness. And it dovetails with the bias that I have towards expensive, hard-to-fake signals. It is hard for someone to fake writing a sonnet about their partner, or homecooking a meal, or choosing a seemingly nondescript 99-cent-store photo album whose cover references an inside joke.

After all, when I look at a well-made bridge or website or novel, a particularly appealing quality is quiet, unshowy attention to detail. There's craftsmanship and effort. And part of what speaks to me there is thinking of the human hours that went into making that object precisely right.

(I'm reminded of a guy who came to offer his condolences after my dad's death, and told me something about my dad's scholarship. Dad had been tapped to update a Sanskrit reference text, and the publisher told Dad he only had to check sources for the entries he was adding or updating, the diff from the previous edition. Dad didn't think this was good enough, and meticulously checked or found original sources for every entry in the book. This fairly thankless task will help numberless future scholars. Most won't know. We joke about "citation needed" but my dad stepped up and did something about it. You can tell how proud I am, right?)

But an interaction between humans, or the institution that grows from and contains those interactions, is not a table or a poem or a piece of software or hardware. People and my relationships with them are not objects.

(I need to quote Julia again here: "I don't understand why we, as a society, always want to put intensely complex arrays of emotionally significant things into tight boxes. The world does not work that way.")

I like observing systems and figuring them out, but people only like being treated that way sometimes; sometimes it squicks them. For example, why do I like it when a new friend asks me about a connection he made by reading my old blog archive, but find it uncomfortable when someone (even Leonard) notices how I swish beverages in my mouth when I drink? Until this week, I was bizarrely unaware of how creepy I seem when a stranger can tell that I'm trying very hard to tell what book they're reading in public. (Nandini and Leonard got through to me; thanks, though it hurt.) I know I'm off from consensus reality but I don't know how off and everything is made of fog, all that is solid melts into air, the lenses I prized are revealed as mirrors.

(I am rambling! Big surprise.)

Should I prize someone else's attention to me as much as I do? How fair is it for me to hope/expect that a partner will moonlight as Magnum, P.I.? Life is not a scavenger hunt. I hate acting coy and find it distasteful to consider offering anyone a prize for logging hundreds of hours listening to me yammer, or megabytes of text read, or solving me-as-puzzle. There is something more here that I am trying to tease out, about enthusiasm and sincerity ("He loved Big Brother."), coveted because they are hard to fake and their absence portends so ill.

I guess what I am moseying around is that attentiveness can be a kind of love, but that it could be hard to distinguish from obsessive, neurotic observation. What is the infovore really hungry for? I'm not monomaniacally seeking to lossily reduce my mother to a mental model, but I have felt the impulse to control her -- I find myself wanting to burn all her bugs and fixes into my memory, to learn enough that I can fix all her problems so she can be permanently happy -- and helplessness when she seems like a black box not suitable to modeling.

And this is the scariest thing -- not just not understanding, but the impossibility of understanding, the utterly alien. My normal approach is useless here. The abyss of incomprehensibility. Not just "all models are wrong, some are useful," but every model and even the conceptual approach of modeling being wrong, useless. There are basic techniques, like storymaking, patternmatching, and modelling. What if none of them work?

The final frontier is in this room with the stranger.