Author: k

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errative compendium – july 7

it would seem that summer’s when i roll back around to wanting to publicly write.

read

for this month’s book club selection, i’m in the middle of Four Treasures of the Sky by Jenny Tinghui Zhang. the audiobook is well done — Chinese words have proper intonation, that sort of detail. since i’ve been mostly reading-while-driving, i haven’t been able to follow my curiosity around on the mix of history and fiction to try to sort out what’s what, but i look forward to taking some time to do that.

meanwhile, i’m poking along through The Tenth Island by Diana Marcrum. i realized i had the ebook through Amazon’s PrimeFirst program after i’d bought tickets for the Azores. i got to the part about bullfighting in Terceira on the plane before i -encountered- bullfighting in Terceira. even now that i’m home, i’m enjoying her voice and her experiences in a place that’s become suddenly special to me.

listen

podcasts that rattled around my brain some this week:

watch

i’ve finally been watching Ted Lasso. all i can say is that the people who told me that i should were right.

seen

i’m still struggling with the backing up and organizing of photos i took on vacation in Madeira and the Azores. but here’s one from those. taken here on June 17.
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adhd — i live in a world where shoes magically move

after i told the doc how the alarm i’d set to take the second dose of ritalin tended to help me make sure to eat lunch and refill my water bottle but didn’t always translate ALL THE WAY to actually taking the pill even though it said to, he switched me to the generic for Concerta. it’s basically time-released ritalin.

at first, it was giving me a bit of a rush late in the afternoon, cheeks flushed and a bit tingly and a bit euphoric. so i guess that’s when its dosage maxes out. now, i’m not getting much effect that i can feel.

it’s been a complicated time to try to evaluate things. primary side effects i was told to watch for are blood pressure and anxiety increases. but i EXPECT my anxiety to be high right now. ex-to-be moved out two days after i switched the medication. i suddenly have a house that GLARINGLY needs rearranging. it’s start of the new fiscal year at work, so we have lots of just the kinds of tasks that cause me issues — boring, glorified data entry, where waiting on a webpage to load tends to lead to pinging off-task.

and… i still can’t tell if the drugs are making much of a difference or not.

to the extent there’s an effect, it’s more like being able to -see- my tracks than being able to intervene and keep myself on task yet. the Family Circus comics where Billy makes a giant circuit of the neighborhood between the school bus stop and home — i feel like i live in that now. i’m still not aware as i do it, but i can answer the “what happened to the time?” question after the fact more often now. the laundry basket abandoned with wet clothes isn’t a mystery. “oh, i remember: i was taking the clothes out and started musing about whether the door screening the washer/dryer serves any purpose, and before i knew it i was off looking to see if i still owned a screwdriver.” i don’t know yet if the -noticing- is sufficient to start retraining my brain, or if a higher dose will transform it into being able to Just Say No to the intruding urge to multitask inappropriately. but it’s frustrating.

somehow this heightened awareness of how i meander from point A to point B led to a fit of empathy for all the people who have to deal with me on a regular basis. for my parents, who i assume at some point were faced with this seeming mix of high ability in a lot of areas and total incompetence in some that are kind of key to maintaining everyday life. they gave me a lot of tools, and figuring out which ones actually serve purposes and which ones are just camouflage is a new task i’ve given myself. (example: notes! i always take notes, that’s what “good” students do! turns out, when i think about it, i rarely to never look at or study notes later, but note-taking keeps me awake when my brain is at risk of passing out from boredom. understanding MY real purpose for them is freeing — now there’s really not much need to ponder whether they’re legible or not or if they give a good record of what’s going on unless i’m actually expected to write up details of a meeting for others’ consumption.)

and realization: i’ve traditionally lived in a world where stuff… just moves. unmedicated, i DON’T generally have the ability to retrace and figure out how my shoes went from a designated spot that they belong to someplace else. is it any wonder that i’m a little extra-aware of the amount of cognitive smoothing i do? that i probably put up with more dissonance than most people? I LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE SHOES MAGICALLY MOVE, and where i assume that i did it but don’t have the time to worry too much about when or why. (i fixate on shoes now, since the recounting of how painful it is to watch me take off shoes and tell a story by ex-to-be was a major spur to SEE this lens pre-medication and finally seek treatment.)

so tldr: i’m a bit frustrated with the state of my brain right now, i think things might actually be harder than they were when i could just live in a world where time mysteriously disappeared sometimes and objects moved seemingly of their own accord, but it’s opening all kinds of new insights. and even if this is the best we get, it’s certainly worth the journey.

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errative compendium – june 28

i spent this weekend on a beach day with friends and a day of running around working on first steps toward getting the house back in order since ex-to-be moved out Friday, so not so much writing or media-ing.

read

i finished reading Etaf Rum’s A Woman Is No Man and wow. it’s unabashedly looking at how cultural norms are transmitted across generations and ultimately manages to be both empathetic and damning toward those who are complicit in abusive, misogynistic ones. all without losing track of some of the root causes in systemic violence and the trauma of uprootedness. again, i’m looking forward to seeing what my book club has to say.

new audiobook of the week: Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. i’m not sure how, but pronouncing “patriarchy” as “patriarchyugh” has consistently managed to make me chuckle even though it’s used enough to be potentially really annoying. the whole book seems to be an uptempo, feminist take on the best we know about how to process stress AND an exploration of the underlying causes for women having an extra-big dose. the chapter i just finished was a giant rant against the “bikini industrial complex” and its actual health effects… immediately followed by the author (Emily, who’s mostly a sex educator) admitting that she spent three hours writing about it and went upstairs to weigh herself because she knows she’ll be taken more seriously professionally if she comes closer to conforming. and framing that as part of the mess to accept — that the feelings and actions while fighting the patriarchy WILL be contradictory sometimes. anyway, ultimately charmed even if it’s in many cases information and research that i’d heard about before, and i won’t be surprised if i wind up gifting it to a few people. (i mentioned it to my therapist, and she had not read it yet… but was given a copy for xmas by her boss. i let her in on the fact that they have a tldr at the end of each section, since we have already laughed over reading habits and ADHD and how much less fun the self-help section is when you’re a professional helper. side note: i love how much laughter there is in my therapy sessions.)

seen

i’ve been carrying the camera that i bought as mourning-the-DSLR-passing-from-the-household/anticipation-of-travel-someday-soon. a lot. vowing to learn how to use it before i can actually travel. i discovered that zoo membership is not nearly as expensive as i always assumed. i live about a mile from the zoo. i’m trying to post a photo a day on my personal instagram and a photo a day on the one that i set up for this blog, but there are still some extras that make me happy.

i’ve threatened to start taking ENDLESS photos of the giraffes so i can get them out as “my pets” for proper conversational fodder when the dogs and cats photos come out. but really. i love watching them.
finding myself chasing around birds and butterflies a lot. not necessarily exotic ones. just things that move.
according to wikipedia, these aren’t really mimosas. still pretty.
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ADHD musings

i had an appointment with the psychiatrist this morning, so i’ve been trying to self-evaluate a bit. i haven’t caught as many “executive function” errors on the Ritalin, but compared to the Strattera, i feel like there are more zone-out days where i get to late in the day and have no idea what i did. strong sugar cravings in the evening on it and trouble remembering to take the afternoon dose got me switched to the time-release version, the generic of concerta.

in more dots that connected this week… when i went to see In the Heights with a group, several people commented that they’d had a little trouble sitting through it. one friend actually brought knitting, which very minorly annoyed me — i LOVE movies at the cinema, and i especially loved seeing movies in France where the respect for the art is such that i vividly remember hearing the gentle pop of opening a can of soda because no one was talking and their snacks tend to be quieter. that ability to sit doesn’t seem compatible with the ADHD stereotype, right? but i started looking around on the internet… and saw lots of reports of “yeah, movies are fine AS LONG AS I’M INTERESTED.” and it clicked — when i’m at the cinema, something’s compelled me to pay. what happens when i’m NOT interested? i used to inform the spouse when i was feeling a bit tired that it was a good time for an action film so i could “sleep a movie.”

this — understanding hit that my brain’s reaction to boredom ISN’T to get up and rove like the hyperactive variant. i’ve slept through A LOT of class in my lifetime, and even struggle in meetings sometimes. in undergrad, it was so easy to blame bad sleep hygiene… and it WAS a lot worse. but i wasn’t up late at night socializing, i was doing my homework! but… losing so much time during the days doing who knows what. but now that i think about it, even when i was in junior high and high school, i uncontrollably fell asleep in classes.

which led here:

“We all have seen “theta wave intrusion,” in the student in the back of the classroom who suddenly crashes to the floor, having “fallen asleep.” This was probably someone with ADHD who was losing consciousness due to boredom rather than falling asleep. This syndrome is life-threatening if it occurs while driving, and it is often induced by long-distance driving on straight, monotonous roads. Often this condition is misdiagnosed as “EEG negative narcolepsy.” The extent of incidence of intrusive “sleep” is not known, because it occurs only under certain conditions that are hard to reproduce in a laboratory.”

https://www.additudemag.com/adhd-sleep-disturbances-symptoms/

as an adult, i’ve generally avoided the embarrassment of falling over by hyper-engaging… i was the administrative assistant sitting in the meeting to take notes, and i’d start asking questions and interacting when it wasn’t terribly appropriate. this approach was PERFECT for phD classes, but answering every rhetorical question and acting like class was supposed to be a conversation really stuck out when i had to take one class that was a mix of undergrads and economics master’s students. since COVID, with virtual meetings, i’ve gotten in the habit of doing my “boring” work during meetings and telling myself i’m more productive that way.

how much time have i wasted, half-believing that i honestly COULDN’T function once i lost long-scale interest in physics and half-believing that if i’d just tried harder it would’ve been fine? or with the dissertation? i don’t expect medications to fix it all, and if i’m honest i don’t regret too hard that i didn’t ever tie up loose ends and get the degrees even after the feeling of vocation leaked away, but knowing that there’s something in my brain chemistry that has major explanatory power and whose patterns can be better understood feels big. like maybe it’s not so necessary to carefully limit ambitions and convince myself that i never wanted things anyway when they start to seem out of reach.

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errative compendium – june 20

pretty minimal list of things i’ve bothered to copy-paste/embed this week, but i’ll go ahead and hit post and start afresh.

read

why Americans don’t use bidets – i have to admit, despite a year as an exchange student, me neither. but it’s one of the fun little house upgrades i’ve been contemplating.

Girl Scouts have too many cookies – today in problems where i feel i can be of service.

A Woman Is No Man – i’m not done with it yet, and i may publicly engage with it more later, but this is my audiobook of the moment. contemplation of immigrant life through the lens of three generations in a Palestinian-American family seems highly timely. i’m hoping my book group can have some spirited discussion around this one. multi-generational trauma and it’s certainly not a cheerful beach read, but i’m appreciating the space for thought.

listen

Dear Therapist podcast – a friend recently linked a column from Lori Gottlieb. i loved her book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone — it was one of the inspirations for getting myself into therapy despite no real personal crisis about a year ago. the column included an ad for her new podcast with another advice columnist. i’ve only listened to one episode, but i got a lot from it… does it make me a junkie if i don’t just want my own weekly therapy, i want other people’s too?

watch

i went to see In the Heights with some friends friday night. a movie in a theater! …i think i was more into it than the rest of the crew, but i loved John Chu’s directorial style in Crazy Rich Asians and i love it here. i can’t resist the combination of whirling color, dancing, and a fascination with cultural specificity — specific products in the mini-market, the clothes on extras and dancers that look like a slightly overheated version of what you might see on the streets, the general joy at shots of people going about their everyday lives. i know the movie’s gotten significant flack for not including enough Afro-Latinx people, but it got enough of the feel of a Latin family party enough to put me in tears a few times over the “barbecues” i’m not invited to anymore. i have had problems with adjusting to some cultural differences within my marriage over the last several years, but i loved the incorporation of music and dancing in nearly every celebration.

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happy half-divorce to me?

i’ve had enough friends go through the process that i knew going into the marriage that it was long. i laughed over the very cynical part of my brain that saw marriage as partly “claiming rights to legal help to untangle if things go awry.” i loved him enough and was optimistic enough to want to step forward with the entangling but wanted to have that resource. hell, that’s all still true. but anyway. here’s to three months down since we separated according to our paperwork, which means three months to go until it’s legal assuming all goes smoothly. we have a date friday to get the separation agreement notarized. i started crying when my brain classified it as “date” and gave me a sudden flashback to that first date.

his school year’s wrapping up this week, so i’m eagerly awaiting and dreading the reality of an empty house instead of just the stuck, silent one.

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the ritalin adjustments

i FINALLY got a local psychiatrist. only, what, five years after a campus psychiatrist suggested that if the university setting let him prescribe controlled drugs, he might try treating me for ADHD when i came in complaining of focus issues. during pandemic, i got generic strattera via an online portal which i was really sallying up to more in expectation of a possible anxiety prescription. anxiety levels honestly haven’t been that bad (or at least with the pandemic going, anxiety feels like it has solid CAUSE and appropriate response), but a comprehensive psych eval had said to try treating anxiety for a year first before looking too hard at ADHD… but both psychiatrists now have looked vexed and moved along to discussing ADHD treatment options.

i’ve spent the last two weeks transitioning from strattera to ritalin. the doc expects ritalin to not be my final drug — my blood pressure is too borderline high, and he likes options that time release better… but it’s apparently the order in which we must try things for insurance purposes.

after getting the strattera back to a minimal dose, i started 5 mg of ritalin. and went up to 10 mg after about a week. today i’m adding in an extra 5 mg at lunchtime to try until next appointment with my doctor.

i hadn’t thought the strattera was doing much. the 5 mg ritalin and none of it made it clear that it HAD been. afternoon meetings were painful, with all the fidgeting and begging to be released so i could go get my laptop and DO something. on 10 mg, i feel like i’m more or less back where i was.

i’m becoming more aware of how much i really DO interrupt people… as i was initially reading up on ADHD, i brushed that one to the side as a “nah.” my habit of hyper-participating in classes and meetings now looks like a coping strategy — if i’m JUST taking notes, i risk much more mind wandering. it’s honestly pretty startling how much the picture starts to fit together.

this feels so slow. i’m at a year of therapy, four months of trying psychiatric treatment. but compared to decades never seeking assistance… six months is really nothing, i suppose.

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PUFF

i rarely walk by a bird without stopping to talk… or stalk. i was not previously aware, though, that if you startle this fine gentleman here (a mockingbird, i do believe), he will FLOOF UP. like so.

i laughed, which i suppose is not the comforting, accepting response i want when friends put me on ridiculous-looking defensive behavior…

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errative compendium – june 11

how about i keep a post in drafts to see what all caught my eye or ear this week?

listen

i loved the regina spektor original. now i’m enjoying kishi bashi’s cover so very much. here he talks about reclaiming the fiddle and featuring powerful songs written by women.
i think i first listened to olivia rodrigo’s sour after running across one of the articles on how millennial olds “stanning” for the gen z queen are so so funny. i guess i’m a geriatric millennial now (even if gen oregon trail’s still my favorite designation for us in-betweeners), AND THIS IS MY FAVORITE SONG OF THE MOMENT TO BLAST IN MY CAR. yup yup.

read

hot divorcée summer – as someone with an ex-to-be, i declare this essay superior to the vanity fair piece on the topic that it links.

look

https://what3words.com/ – i’m way too enthusiastic about this. like wanting to announce location words enthusiastic, and seems dangerous to do on social media and such. but telling people a three-word code for the back patio’s precise location seems neat.

CovidActNow is still one of my go-to sites for COVID stats. today it strikes me that the vaccination rate in my typically 80+% democrat-voting metro area is almost on par with the rate in my parents’ super-conservative rural county. it’s NOT just a politicized thing; i suspect general trust in government is playing a major role. but thank goodness the rates are down enough EVERYWHERE in the US that i’m no longer compulsively checking on a daily basis.

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election musings

yesterday was the virginia primary election. i honestly wasn’t very well-prepared; after friends messaged to peer pressure, i read up a bit and stopped to vote before my book club’s meeting.

however, talking with a close friend of opposed political persuasion about the election was one of my better conversations of the day. we always dance and tell stories back and forth and find patches of overlap that reflect our common values. as much as i’m working on learning to confront and argue (I WANT TO BE BRAVER IN DEFENDING MY TRUTHS), i love this form of engagement, it’s a piece of why she’s one of my favorites. i asked if she was voting, she let me know that there wasn’t a republican primary, and she wasn’t going to start voting in the democratic ones unless virginia turns so blue that it’s her only genuine venue of political participation. i mused a little bit on MY candidates.

our point of agreement for the day was this: we both want very different things from our legislators than we do from our executives. a legislator, a tiny piece of a big governing body, CAN be a big voice for the more extreme points of view, bring attention to things that the rest of the group might not otherwise see. we’ll vote for them there. executive branch, one-issue folks aren’t going to cut it for either of us. we both *want* more wisdom, more experience, more ability to build coalitions and work across lines to get things done. that hasn’t necessarily been a popular viewpoint across years and years of people running for government by campaigning -against- government — the businesspeople who count it as a point of pride that they don’t have insider experience. yet the amount of information that government has to process now is so giant! are our institutions up to modern complexity even when we’re hiring by matching resume to job? one of my favorite soapboxes is ranting about virginia having a part-time legislature covered by a fragile press system that’s frequently too hollowed out to have a state bureau… i love my local paper, but even with good richmond coverage and a relatively lively interest and knowledge of what governmental powers lie at which levels, *i* often lose track of the horse race. i have to work and live in addition to reading news!

which leads to… campaigning by channeling frustration with government has been popular for a long time now. how COULD we start moving the narrative back toward treating elections like a serious hiring process? how do we make it worth staying informed enough to make choices that lead to a government that We The People *do* like?