Edge Cases: They aren’t the extremes, but the givens
I remember when I started to enjoy reading.
There were always books in my life, but I wasn't interested in them until I was 9 years old. One of my sisters, always the bookworm, was reading the third Harry Potter book and actually laughing out loud. I wanted to know what happened. She told me I wouldn't understand it, not without having read the books. So to show her, I read them. Starting with book one, like you’re supposed to.
Like so many of my generation, I kept an eye out for my letter from Hogwarts after I finished reading about the changing staircases and chocolate frogs. I raced through the others and didn't stop there. The rest, as they say, is history. I've been in the middle of a book ever since.
I'm not biased. I enjoy all genres. Fantastical worlds, cutting-edge technology, the thrill of a crime spree, the swoon of a first kiss. But what I’m drawn to most is speculative. The what-ifs that feel far-fetched—until they don’t.
An edge case is a situation that's outside the normal flow. They get dismissed a lot. I mean, how many people will actually do that?
More than you think.
Edge cases are where the most interesting defects live — at the boundary of what the system thinks is possible. And I've been thinking about language as a system with an edge case problem. How easy it is to say it was “just a miscommunication” or “that's not what I meant.”
What if failing to understand each other isn't the exception? What if it's the default, and we've just been calling it an edge case to avoid fixing it?
That’s going to be the story I (try) to write, in my fiction side project.
I keep thinking about two societies split along a fault line. One nothing but logical — language as functional, nothing in excess, communication as a tool. The other overly emotional — metaphorical, relational, language as the thing itself, not just a vessel. Both sides convinced their way is correct. Both right about something. Neither willing to admit where they’re wrong.
Communication, real communication, requires both sides to humble themselves. To let go of their ego performance. It requires admitting their system has real gaps. That they can be wrong: what feels like clarity can read as coldness, what feels like meaning often reads as noise.
I've been writing two newsletters for a couple of months now. This one, that applies QA frameworks to life — systems, structure, how to catalog and organize things. The other uses crochet as a metaphor for the slower, harder questions, like why I do what I do, what I actually want, what I've been too afraid to say out loud.
I didn't plan it that way. If it wasn’t obvious, I didn’t really plan anything on the writing front. Yet, I've been writing in two languages. One optimized more for function. One optimized more towards feeling. And the thing I keep running into, in my writing and everywhere else, is that neither one is sufficient alone.
My sister assumed that whatever made her laugh out loud wouldn't translate. I did the work to get there anyway. That translation is possible; it just requires someone to be willing. She could have explained it. I got there without her.
And that's what I want to write about, in a different way. In a what-if way. About that person who is willing—and what it costs them.
Working title: Pineapple Gang Wars.
I don't have any of it figured out. But I love edge cases. I love the what-ifs.
I have the fault line, and I know which side I've been standing on while watching both and belonging fully to neither.
Which is enough to start testing.
Bug Reports Tuesdays | Essays Saturdays
Come test with me.