If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ve undoubtedly noticed my passion for structure. I have certain regular features which appear on certain days of the week or parts of the month, I keep tags tied tightly together with links, and features like my news and links columns even follow a certain recognizable format. At home I follow self-made schedules regarding what time to perform chores such as feeding the animals, unloading the dishwasher, etc, and my kitchen is so well-organized I know exactly where to find anything unless someone uses it and fails to put it back properly, which will result in their becoming the target of a short but intense burst of opprobrium. Most of y’all have probably seen photos of my library, and those who own more than one of my books have noticed that they are all formatted in the same way, a format I decided on while putting Ladies of the Night together. Naturally, a lot of this is due to my OCD, but it goes far beyond that; I actually get considerable enjoyment out of the process of organization itself.
Take for example my escort rates. I don’t know how most people calculate the rate reductions for longer sessions, but I’ve always done it by looking for patterns in the numbers. My last hourly rate before retiring was $400, but a 3-4 hour dinner date was $1200 and my rate for dates longer than 4 hours was only $300/hour; after the flat 10-15 hour overnight rate the hourly dropped to $200/hour, and so on. Back when I had a regular D&D group, my friends used to tease me about the prodigious number of tables and charts I devised for calculating everything from training costs to damage incurred by falling to what a magic spell of any given level should be able to do (“Where do y’all want to get dinner from tonight?” “Don’t you have a CHART for that, Maggie?”) And I even devised monetary systems and tables of weights and measures for a dozen different alien races in my game universe despite the fact that nobody but me will ever see them. And these tables, charts, and systems aren’t arbitrary or slapdash, oh no; there are always patterns, sometimes even formulae, to determine what each entry in each little box on the enormous spreadsheet (or in the old days, double notebook page) will be, so once I settle on the formula I mostly just need to follow the arithmetic, geometric, or logarithmic progression to determine exactly what this particular monster’s magic resistance should be or that noble’s entourage should look like. I can actually sit in front of my computer for hours, surrounded by sheets of scratch paper covered with what to others probably looks like hieroglyphics, happily following patterns to create a unified and harmonious whole.
I’ve known I was like this since childhood, when I used to design elaborate family trees for my stuffed animals, prepare maps of the imaginary fantasy realms I envisioned in Maman’s backyard, and make tiny little passports for my and my sisters’ Barbie dolls. But it was the numeric patterns that really fascinated me, and I recently realized that the reward circuits which are stimulated by compiling my ubiquitous tables are at least some of the same ones which are fired when I enjoy music. Music is, of course, mathematical; the relationships between certain notes are harmonious and others not because of the mathematical relationships between those frequencies of sound. Of course, in most people this appreciation is instinctive, and even most musicians aren’t consciously aware that what they’re doing is a kind of applied mathematics. But the realization gave me a new understanding of that particular aspect of my neuroatypicality, one that may help me more often allow myself to spend time composing and performing a kind of music only I can hear.
