That was the moral of Office Space, right?
I'm now without anybody I'm supervising. I find myself slipping back into old graduate school habits. Like reading books about World War I when I'm supposed to be reading about other stuff.
I didn't chime in on that thread but I feel very much in the same boat. It's a shitty boat.
And I've remembered that urgency vs importance post ever since and I've even quoted it in conversation as a bit of wisdom I once read on an eclectic web magazine somewhere.
I can't over stress how much it helps to have and a junior person. You can give them the little trivial stuff and they spit it back to you as a series of urgent questions. Unless you get a lazy one.
Here's the type of shit I loathe: running the Special Student's program for four years (I'm now done, thank god) and running the math department's high school math competition. I procrastinate and hate it and feel lots of anxiety. I even am allowed to delegate stuff to our admin person but I don't know how to. How do you assign stuff to another person? Which stuff? Having to delegate is having to figure out exactly the same stuff that I'm stuck on.
"Special" referring to intellectual disabilities seems to be losing ground to "exceptional" these days.
So when the news anchor says, "We're following this developing story," she's calling the people in it mentally retarded? The news makes so much more sense that way.
Related to 8: if you join the British Army as a recruit and you get back-squadded - i.e. the instructors decide that you can't go on training with the rest of your intake for some reason - you go into a holding company called Sword Company until you're able to rejoin normal training. There are two bits of Sword Company. If you're there because you injured yourself, you go into Gold Platoon until you're fully healed. If you're there because you need remedial fitness training (normally due to being overweight) then you go into the other platoon.
I get that they have named them all after D-Day invasion beaches, and I think that was a good idea, but I still reckon a little more thought could have been a good idea, because then you wouldn't have the situation of all the recruits who are too heavy to train being put into a group called Juno Platoon.
I just got home after speaking to my boss about the fact that, basically, I have been an unproductive mess of anxiety for the past month. I just missed the last thread, but yeah - I think this is probably very close to my quitting point, and I have no idea what to do afterwards. Therapy isn't helping as much as I hoped it would. My consoling fantasy these last few months has been that maybe if I quit and don't take another job in the tech industry, the financial pressure will force me to cobble together some writing jobs, and hopefully I'll do better with that (though my jerkbrain keeps asking "but will you? Will you really?").
Of course, my regular brain just asks "what writing gigs? Will that really pay the rent?".
Well the other two were all American, and our fine NATO allies might not appreciate the implication that they tend towards obesity.
True. Also, Omaha looks comparatively fit for a U.S. city.
4: unless your junior person is highly competent handling all the little urgent things and leaves you with only the big-picture tasks to work on. Causing more time on unfogged.
12: I don't know what your past history is like, but in my own life, I've learned I should stop trusting myself once I start making non-specific plans to write something.
I'm sort of hoping that (a) I get the job I just interviewed for and (b) I manage to leverage the change in environment into a whole new set of more functional work habits.
The greatest mystery in my life is that at my current level of functioning, which is really, really, screwy and vague, that the people I work for are happy with my output.
It's not that great of a mystery, is it? I assume you've just overestimated everybody else.
The greatest mystery in my life is that at my current level of functioning, which is really, really, screwy and vague, that the people I work for are happy with my output.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
Looking it up, yes, I'd remembered right -- the Allied invasion of Sicily was codenamed Operation Husky.* So they could have gone with Husky Platoon for the British army chub club.
*because of the pasta amirite or what
23: So, you're saying I shouldn't read the Necronomicon?
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The greatest mystery in my life is that at my current level of functioning, which is really, really, screwy and vague, that the people I work for are happy with my output."
The opening paragraph for a short story about a lawyer who slowly realizes that she's actually working for the Great Old Ones.
Xtrapnel (and anyone who's interested) I know a guy who's very good at helping people break out of the spiral you describe in the other thread. Will post there too. Email me if you want his address.
The opening paragraph for a short story about a lawyer who slowly realizes that she's actually working for the Great Old Ones.
Aren't they all?
19.2 - I'm pretty sure [i]that[/i] was the moral of Office Space.
It is nice to hear there are others with varying degrees of the same pathology. Yes, terrifying if there are too many of us, but I assume it's over-represented on Unfogged.
Along the lines of the OP, important but sporadic, arbitrary, and often moveable deadlines are killer. I want to draw an analogy to swift, certain, but minor penalties for drug addicts and habitual drunk drivers being much more effective. Often, the only way I will start a task is if someone is standing over my shoulder asking me to explain how I will do it.
I have imaginary colleagues that I explain stuff to in order to start myself rolling when I need to write something. This works fine as long as you have an office with a door.
I also, when under stress, find myself walking down the sidewalk muttering to myself in an audible manner.
swift, certain, but minor penalties for drug addicts and habitual drunk drivers being much more effective.
Teaching is like this! SHIT, I have to go ad-lib math instead of being prepared to lib. Right on schedule.
32: I do that all the time, regardless of my level of stress.
NickS from the other thread:
It helps me avoid getting stuck to have direct contact with the end-users and to have a clear sense of, "here's what they will be doing, here's how my part will be valuable, and here's what they're willing to pay for it." It makes it easier to have a sense of accomplishment and closure to projects -- even if they aren't perfect I can tell if (and how well) they do what they need to do.
I wish this helped. Even when I actually accomplish something the difficulty I had doing it and the invariably rushed, half-assed finished product make any sense of accomplishment fleeting and empty. And knowing a task will help others just adds to my dread that I will fail them and my shame when I do.
I also read and didn't comment on the other thread, but I feel very similar. Advanced grad school has zero structure, except for teaching, but now I'm a thesis adviser, it's little structure and lots of opportunity to procrastinate. I'm supposed to have thesis grades in today, and I've been putting it off for a week. Since I've read all the drafts 3-4 times before and I've already put in honors nominations it should be a relatively easy (although tedious task), and I've simply been procrastinating on it.
My anxiety has shot up to 100%, to the point even opening certain files on my computer makes me stressed so I end up completely avoiding all work, which in turn ratchets up the anxiety even more. Little things I fuck up I just sort of sit on until they become a bigger problem (e.g., I was supposed to go to a workshop Thurs which I completely forgot. (It was RSVP in advance, and I'd said yes, and people saying they'd show up and then not going has already been a problem.) I then meant to apologize and email comments to the presenter, but felt so bad about spacing on attending that I haven't yet, which makes me feel worse about the whole episode.) Then I feel angry that a little problem that had I dealt with like a normal adult would have gone away just piles up. I'm on anti-depressants, but I'm worried I need different ones and I really don't want to deal with it.
Yeah, the primary school is going to be switching from having me as PTA president to no longer having a PTA president, which should be an improvement. I am really good at doing certain things and really, really good at putting other things off. Ugh.
(Footnote that this week is probably going to be one of the more emotionally stressful breakup-related ones and even though I'm doing all the things I need to do to make that work and not even particularly dreading it, I may be a total nightmare here on the blog.)
4: I've never had a subordinate, but wonder if it would help. I'm certainly infinitely better at diagnosing other people's problems than solving my own.
Mine all moved away. One to Florida, one to D.C., and one to Japan. You could try to find them there, but two of those places are basically unlivable and the third requires learning a language with a very non-standard alphabet.
The greatest mystery in my life is that at my current level of functioning, which is really, really, screwy and vague, that the people I work for are happy with my output.
My experience in graduate school has let me to believe that most fairly responsible and genuinely competent people end up wildly misjudging the extent to which people who seem nice enough around them are also those kinds of people. My very helpful adviser was routinely shocked and appalled by stories of (some of the) the other professors in the department acting in questionably professional ways* that from the perspective of the graduate students seemed entirely within the normal range of unhelpful behaviors.
I got the impression that it was a common phenomenon when I learned that the nomination form for an 'excellence in advising' award given by the graduate student assembly each year specified that the person had to give examples of how the professor had performed more than just the basic duties of being an adviser. Because they needed to include that bit.
*And not even in the (very) standard malicious kiss-up-kick-down way. From a professor (theoretically) supervising my summer research one year, in the late Fall:
"I know it's been a while, but could you email something from you on the topic** that you worked on over the summer to me? I need to get something from you about it."
"I emailed you a twenty page paper on that topic two months ago."
"Ohhh... I was wondering why you had sent me an email."
**Note also the topic not necessarily specified here.
Spanish is easy, Mobes. You just have to remember the squiggly line on the n.
35, 36: Me. I wish that I got to be happier for getting stuff done. I feel like I'm always scrabbling at the last minute and then I never get to bask in the achievement but instead spend time kicking myself for not doing a better job, not starting earlier, etc.
Also I had a (for me) shitty health week last week and I got so mad about my job situation where I can't take personal time. I do have more flexibility than people not in academia but work just seeps into everything. I can barely take a normal weekend without feeling guilty (I take it but I feel guilty which cuts down on my enjoyment). People comment on my not working on weekends or late into the evening and I know it means that I can't be a proper academic so I'm just slowly failing, hoping to get a job doing something else. (Other academics (women or not) may like the recent paper by Alison Mountz. 2016. Women on the edge: Workplace stress at universities in North America. The Canadian Geographer)
I for sure need a nice manual job like organizing library shelves or making maps.
(Also now I feel bad about not commenting with sympathy on everyone's post (alameda - so sorry for you guys; LB - wow, that is a lot of stress to get through, best of luck; E. Messily - hope you're feeling better) which I didn't do before because I didn't want to be 'random lurker giving sympathy' and now I have a bit of the spiral Buttercup mentions).
43.1 is me. In all my zigzagging years in academia (and school even) I can remember being genuinely happy with a mark exactly once.
I'm on anti-depressants, but I'm worried I need different ones
I don't know if I'm more productive on Wellbutrin/bupropion than I was on the SSRI, but the difference between Wellbutrin and no Wellbutrin is mindboggling. I'm on a relatively low dose, too. I've also heard a whole lot of Adderall-changed-my-life testimonials but was never able to score any.
At some point in maybe the last year, the idea that I wasn't living up to my potential and had only one life stopped being scary and punitive and started to be a motivator.
We'll be thinking of you, Thorn! I would take the threat to "be a nightmare" as a genuine challenge and try to render your anecdotes from the day in the most Lovecraftian terms you can muster.
The greatest mystery in my life is that at my current level of functioning, which is really, really, screwy and vague, that the people I work for are happy with my output.
I refer you back to this.
These recent threads make it sound like unfogged is collectively approaching some sort of mental health crisis. Maybe we should all swap anti-depressants, just to see what happens. Couldn't hurt, right?
I've also heard a whole lot of Adderall-changed-my-life testimonials but was never able to score any.
I had a student come to office hours after Spring Break and say, "I got off adderall after high school, and just got back on last week. Can you help me pass this class?" and it was like a whole 'nother person. Shocking transformation. He could...hang in there for the entire explanation and then have a conversation about the explanation. He did in fact pass the class, and up to Spring Break he'd been failing.
Have you ever thought about being a cop?
Patrol really is amazing for this type of pathology. You get sent to your calls and all reports have to be in before you leave. You go home at the end of every day with nothing hanging over your head and start every shift with a clean slate. It's fucking great.
52 was true even when I was working in call center hell. The best part of my current job, too.
I don't know whether to believe you about that or what I learned watching Bullitt.
52 is true of my job too, but I can knit at my desk and don't have to be a cop. I'm still better at my job when I'm also managing other people, though.
(Thorn, nightmare away. - you've earned it)
I asked my doctor if I should be worried I could tell when I didn't take B vitamins (depression, hopelessness, anxiety all ramp up). But she seemed unconcerned.
Here, this was lourdes' Adderall success story about his friend (former business partner) in an earlier thread on this subject.
Some of all of this I think is related to this article on self-compassion that's making the rounds, the idea that self-esteem is pathological (which I'm partial to now because of Someone Awful who thinks she's fantastic!) but you need to figure out how to be kind to yourself. I'm not great at that because I'm an adequate regular person who does most of the things you'd expect anybody to do and does a lot of them to minimally acceptable levels eventually, but believing that is at least a step or two up from what I might have said in the past. Not being in an abusive relationship helps with progress on that front, if anyone needs that advice....
I relate to #36 to an alarming extent. I now have a low stress lifestyle, but before that I had those problems.
Lately I've been surprised by how much my prayer practice helps with these symptoms. I'm Muslim, but I think any form of mindfulness meditation that kept you in the moment would be helpful.
The opening paragraph for a short story about a lawyer who slowly realizes that she's actually working for the Great Old Ones.
Who would be perfectly happy with an in-house counsel who simply produced pages of insane gibberish.
59.2: For me, the Muslim prayer schedule (which I've never followed because even though it's probably the only religion I could manage if I could make myself believe I still can't) is particularly helpful in structuring a day. It helped a lot to briefly live where the call to prayer kept me grounded and kept things divided.
I pray daily and find it helps. Spread the blame around, if nothing else. I'm not sure what "mindfulness" means.
These kind of threads give me the comforting notion that my stupid pointless job, may actually be perfect for me.
||
I have just spent what seems like all afternoon though was in fact maybe two hours dealing with the most unbelievably stupid and ill-informed nitpicks from a libel lawyer who is attempting to cover her arse and/or has problems with reading comprehension. I am beyond pretending to equanimity in my emails.
|>
I don't want to hijack the thread with sympathy comments, so no need, but I'm sitting in the home office unable to do most work because I stupidly put off changing my master password before it expired. My mom emailed me to say that my grandmother (her MIL) is about to die, quite possibly today, and although my uncle flew in last night to say good-bye no one told me and it's presumably, I take it from the email, too late now. It never really occurred to me that it might end this way. SFO/OAK - MSN is a day's travel and it's past the point where she'd know I was there, but this is an extremely shitty feeling, sitting here, giving up hope again and again.
52: News journalism is a bit like patrol work in that sense, or it was, before the internet. You wrote your stories and after the deadline, that was it. The trouble was that you needed a peculiar sort of shallow mind to forget that today's story was the same as the one three months ago, which was the same as -- only the names changed. I just ran out of hysteria.
The positive thinking is good too.
61- Yeah when I started doing them on schedule I was surprised by how much better my day was organized.
62- When I was into Yoga they used that term a lot. I now think that what it means is to inhabit your body right here right now. To not be thinking about the past or future or other worlds of the imagination, where I'd bet most of us spend most of our time.
I think I'm opposed to mindfulness then. I like the other worlds of imagination.
I am sympathetic, lurkey,and sorry you're dealing with that. I'm currently needlessly worrying that my grandmother won't make it to her 90th birthday party in a few weeks. The other is older but can't really handle visitors and so will never meet the girls, which is fine but just weird, all of it weird. I'm sorry you're stuck in a weird holding pattern and I hope you're okay with the resolution when it comes.
You can get Modafinil from Indian pharmacies pretty easy. I did it for a while and was more productive. I did it every day for like 3 weeks which I would not recommend. It is best when you first use it which leads to all those "I tried modafinil and it is awesome articles".
I would like to try microdosing LSD but I don't think you can get that from Indian pharmacies.
Has anyone read "The Slow Professor"? Is it worth reading?
I think the answer to that depends on what you have to put off doing.
68- I generally prefer them myself, but I think it is good every once in a while to pull your head out of your ass for a look around. A few minutes a day won't kill anyone.
I found the cure for my issues, which were as many of the above, was just to get really really insanely busy at work. I have a ton of deadlines, and always got more work than I can handle, but I just grind along being productive. I realised a year or more ago, that my self-image of myself as basically lazy and procrastinating isn't actually true. I work really hard, and I get a lot done.
Graduate school was more like 36, but even then, I was doing a full-time job, and studying, so I'm more inclined to give myself a break than I was then.
I do still get crippled like 36 by financial stresses, or bad situations in personal relationships. So I'm not immune in all cases. But at work, I'm over it.
70: I have a friend who did the same thing (though not every single day) but eventually had to quit because the comedown was too hard on him. I was never able to convince him to use it for what it is obviously intended for which is to stay up for three days in a row watching movies and drinking scotch.
I've tried adderall and after the first week or two when the buzzy/amphetamine side effects wore off it really can feel absolutely magical. The basic stuff is still odd because it affects you differently as you continue to metabolize the various parts of it (hours one and two feel like this; hours three and four feel like this; hours...etc.). The extended release just feels like being a better person.
I have something I need to ask advice about and unfogged is my go to place because you're 1/1 in suggesting I make a good career move, but right now I'm too busy at work to explain the situation, how ironic.
74.1: I've found myself in similar situations. I think for me what I learned is that there is a certain amount of stuff I need to fail to do. I can get lots done, but I have to have a certain amount of stuff that I'm punting on.
47
I'm on Wellbutrin too! When I first got on it it was magical, I went from being mostly non-functionally depressed to feeling normal. After a few years it sort of wore off a bit, and then I was in China and couldn't get enough in advance to stay on it the whole time (because of shitty asshole insurance companies), so I weaned myself off. I didn't go back to non-functionally depressed, but more sort of functionally depressed, though sort of borderline. Now I'm back on, and it's better, but I also keep forgetting to take it (I am absent minded in general, but stress makes it worse.)
59
Yeah, something like meditation/prayer should really help. I did yoga for two years in China, which in retrospect is probably why I was ok not on Wellbutrin. I started doing it here for a few weeks, and it was probably helpful, but I kept having conflicts with the class and now I've fallen off the wagon. I am missing yoga as we speak to finish grading these theses.* The other time I've been non-depressed as an adult was when I was running (D3) x-country & track in college. I never got a runner's high while running, but afterwards I would feel great, and it cured my insomnia. I know that would help now, but I really am having a hard time getting motivated. Also, I don't know if the gains of serious training would be met with light jogging, and I know I don't have the discipline to train like I did in college.
*The grade is BA seminar + drafts + final thesis. The seminar syllabus was given to me by the program and the assignment structure was counter-productive and sucked (like, asking students to write drafts of their data analysis third week in, at a point when most of them barely had thesis topics). My students asked if I would be willing to reorganize the syllabus, so I did on the fly, but my reorganization in retrospect didn't work super well either, and now if I go strictly by my gradebook I'm going to have to give people way lower grades than they deserve. I'm probably going to end up just giving students the grade I think they deserve based on general level of work, but it's annoying.
I am thinking of trying to get some provigil from the sleep doc. Not nearly as expensive as it used to be. Some people on the internet seem to be trying it for ADD too.
I need to start yoga because I'm a total mess in much the same way as people have discussed here, which means that absent major changes I won't get tenure. Also, I'm really tired of being miserable all the time.
65
Sorry about your grandmother. Also sorry about the password, that's the sort of thing I would do (i.e. procrastinate/be absentminded so that something that should have been a non-issue is a problem.)
74
Working too much and taking deadlines seriously is how I made it through the first 4 years of grad school. The last quarter of fourth year I took it over the top (taught a course, organized a conference, and took above a full course load). I then realized that deadlines for grad school are sort of optional, so I fell off the wagon and took an incomplete in 3 of my four classes that quarter. I eventually finished one, ended up getting a grade in the other without doing the seminar paper, and still have an incomplete in the third that gives me stress dreams. Now I'm off the wagon it's hard to get motivated to get back on. I can still make important hard deadlines, but the sense of urgency is gone for most everything else.
I for sure need a nice manual job like organizing library shelves or making maps.
Heh. This is too close to home. And no less stressful.
Also I have good Muslim prayer/Sufi dhikr stories and good Adderall stories but I'm too fried from work shit today to get into them now.
Becoming a self-employed single parent and having to deal with a constant stream of short deadlines in order to pay the rent has proved to be an extremely effective cure for chronic procrastination.
Shit, maybe I need to try Adderal. I'm on Wellbutrin for depression, which I've known about for 20 years and managed medically with a variety of drugs over the past 15. Wellbutrin seems to be the best, but that may be in part part because a doc about 1.5 years ago identified that I have an anxiety disorder as well, which is now being treated with Klonopin.
Do I have ADHD too? I can focus on books, usually. I can generally focus on a task if I find it interesting, but usually that's because the tasks I find most interesting are the ones that cause me to have to take breaks to go off and research a solution to a step along the way before coming back to the main task and integrating the research into the overarching problem. I find it very hard to focus on tasks that are simple and deadline driven (filling out the forms for an upcoming conference that my company is exhibiting at) or require doing the same thing over and over again, or, sometimes, just writing. Anybody with ADHD out there care to chime in?
Reactions to this thread:
1. You know, being a cop here would actually be pretty neat. Hmm, let me check ... damnit, only citizens can be cops in Austria. Sadness.
2. Adderall sounds amazing. Luckily I did get myself an appointment with a neurologist awhile back, and that's coming up in two weeks. Maybe I can get me some of that sweet stuff.
3. Modafinil also sounds good. Lemmy Caution, do you recommend any particular Indian pharmacy?
4. Re: the idea that I wasn't living up to my potential and had only one life stopped being scary and punitive and started to be a motivator. -- Oh man, I wish. Actually, I've started feeling a shift, too. But for me, it was a change from being paralysed by the fear that I wasn't living up to my potential, and wasting my youth and talents, to the enervating despair of knowing that I've already wasted said talents and youth, and it's now too late for anything but contemptible mediocrity. (My marriage aside, importantly.)
5. Re: Penny @ 27: thanks, emailing.
6. I'd like to break out of this spiral and at the very least manage to leave with dignity (and minimal hard feelings). But I think it will help if I start thinking about what I'd want to do next. I think I'd like to try doing something like this guy's "journeyman tour"--offer to visit and pair-program for a couple weeks at a time at a bunch of companies in the area.
I can still make important hard deadlines, but the sense of urgency is gone for most everything else.
Oh my god this. Except I'm not even sure about the first clause, either. It's been a long time.
Juno Platoon is a great pseud.
62: I pray daily and find it helps. Spread the blame around, if nothing else. I'm not sure what "mindfulness" means.
I am envious of those who believe in a singular creator deity, because in that conception of reality there's even a bigger fuckup than I am. "Best of all possible worlds" my ass.
On the main topic, I understand nothing about productivity and stress all the time. Stuff gets done, I guess, but unhappily and at irregular starts and stops, with copious procrastination. Glad there are so many kindred souls here.
Immanentize the eschaton is the other thread.
I had a political theory professor who used to use "Is this the best of all possible worlds?" the way some people use "So, anyhow."
These guys are a little more expensive than others (which I can not find now):
https://www.modafinilcat.com/modafinil-modalert-200?a=bpt
If you do it, buy a pill slicer and start with 1/4 or 1/2 a 200mg dose. Also, don't do it every day. It is a powerful drug which isn't crazy addictive but studies have found some people get addicted.
Robert Palmer (1986) found that some people get addicted to love.
I am in denial about love addiction.
the enervating despair of knowing that I've already wasted said talents and youth, and it's now too late for anything but contemptible mediocrity. (My marriage aside, importantly.)
It became apparent a long, long time ago that I wouldn't be doing anything very noteworthy with my life/career, and I was fine with that, because I was generally happy with my life as a whole, and have continued to be. But I've had a more recent sense that even the modest professional success I thought I was on track for may be slipping away. "Enervating despair" isn't right, but perhaps "unnerving realization".
Honestly, a chunk of it is simply that nobody is paying me* for the work I've done for them, which is kind of the ultimate impostor syndrome.
*almost literally true. As of ~4 weeks ago, I was owed something like $15k by various clients; I don't think a dime of that has come in. I've gotten about $750 from invoices sent out since then.
Can you withhold telling them what the roof is supposed to be like until they pay you?
I used to have the same issues with nebulous deadlines that many commenters have mentioned. One thing that helped me and several people in my grad program (and academia more generally) was the Pomodoro Method:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique
The reason it works for me is that 25 mins is short enough that it's something I think I can accomplish even when I'm most down, and once you've done one pomodoro, it becomes easier to do more. Also, having to start over if you get interrupted is a strong incentive to stick it out for at least 25 mins. Finally, instead of tracking my progress my how much progress I've made on my research, which is hard to measure and often depressing, I track it by # of pomodoros done. I have a daily target of pomodoros to do, and I stop feeling guilty once I've hit my target.
Can lawyers and consultants bill by the pomodoro?
87
the enervating despair of knowing that I've already wasted said talents and youth, and it's now too late for anything but contemptible mediocrity.
I also identify very strongly with this. I remember when I was in high school, the now-governor of my home state once told me that she was in awe of how successful I was at such a young age and she was going to keep tabs on me because I was clearly going places. 16 years later, she's a governor and I'm borderline functional PhD student.
I tell myself these thoughts are whiny and self-indulgent and counterproductive, but they're hard not to think about some times.
You live in Illinois, right? Somebody you'll be a borderline functional Ph.D. holder and she'll be in prison.
100: Moby beat me to it. You're odds of being taken down in a highly public drugs/sex/financial scandal are considerably lower than the now-governor's.
Apparently, the governor of Illinois is a dude.
101-102
It's my home state not IL, and she's very unlikely to get taken down in a scandal. Although she got into office because the previous governor resigned in a scandal, so who knows.
In IL, I had a weird experience about 6 years back of running into Rod Blagojevich right outside my apartment. This was after he'd been indicted but before his conviction. He shook my hand while I just kind of stood there, surprised.
A guy in my high school class was a U.S. Senator at the age of 40. By now he's a has-been. A has-been making a ton of money as a lobbyist, but still a has-been.
JRoth, that must be so fucking infuriating, but clearly your clients are the impostors.
See, I'm definitely below the point of contemptible mediocrity. That's what I'm aiming for. It will take a lot of hard work! Maybe if I try I'll have a few strokes of genius along the way. Life seems very, very long and absurd, and I think the glorious and utopian dream of being Belacqua is finally colliding with cold reality.
I booked a flight back to the homestate (or nearbystate) for the next few days. I think it's the right call.
104: Was he just roaming around looking for random people who would still consent to shake his hand?
A trip home does sound like a good call. My sympathies.
107: Testing the person-to-person communicability of a new flu strain.
107
He was hanging out shooting the shit with a shopkeeper in front of a local store. He also grabbed my hand before I had the chance to consent or even really process that he actually was Blagojevich. When I didn't act appropriately impressed, the shopkeeper said, "he's your governor, you know."
19-22: Moby, as is so often the case, is channeling in spirit the great author. Here is the actual Mark Twain quote:
Let us be thankful for the fools; but for them the rest of us could not succeed.
Have I yet explained how I finished my dissertation? My school allows a one-time Graduation Quarter registration at $100 tuition, but if you don't file at the end of that quarter, you're on the hook for full (dissertation-stage) tuition next time you try. So I made the $3000-or-so bet and wrote like a fiend, explained the "bet" part to my committee, and got it all signed and delivered a day in advance. Somehow, Buttercup, I feel you might be similarly motivated by the $3000 stakes, but you may also have better access to endlessly renewable funding than I did....
96 is singing my song. I've never really had much in the way of professional ambition -- I like to have good stories to tell, and so being a professional storyteller, without having to actually make up the stories, is the right job for me.
It's also why I liked one of my favorite jobs -- garbageman for a small resort. My time divided between accumulating story material and flirting.
My sole ambition is to hunt down and murder the surviving members of the Lovin' Spoonful to finish my cycle of blank-verse ballads inspired by my experiences waiting for restaurants to honor my goddamned reservations.
You at the hostess station,
I know you can see me!
We checked in half an hour ago!
Don't look at Charlie Rose,
He's working on dessert!
Look at me! Do I look like a tourist?
113
Yeah, something like that might work for me, though we don't have the same sort of tuition system. I do respond well to external deadlines and I hate wasting money. I wrote two dissertation chapters in 1 week for write-up grant deadlines, and I have a second chapter due in 2 weeks for a workshop, which will probably involve writing like a fiend, since of now I have none of it written. If I get write-up $$, I'll have an 18 month deadline imposed before I'm cut off from all university funding, but I want to be done before then.
I shouldn't talk about much of this until it's done and it wasn't procrastination that made it work out today, but about 11 months post-breakup, today the legal piece of being done and settled starts coming together. It'll still be a long time until that all happens and probably a short time until she finds out and explodes, but I feel fantastic for the moment.
118: yay!
I'm actually feeling fairly positive about things right now, myself. Reading blog posts about coding is reminding me I used to be excited about it.
85: You may or may not have ADD (supposedly there is some kind of day-dreamy inattentive version that isn't the hyperactive one). But whether or not you do doesn't really matter to how Adderall will affect you, only how easy you will find it to convince someone to write a prescription if they aren't in the "hey drugs can make things better here try out whatever" camp.
Just like ritalin there was a campaign to educate people about ADHD/etc. and to show how these drugs can make up the difference for people who do have those problems in the way that antidepressants can help people with depression (but not really help people without it, was the mostly implied part). But the truth is that they're all just stimulants: they make everyone more motivated/focused/energized/cheery/less hungry/whatever. Adderall is literally a mixture of different amphetamine salts. It was only even remotely patentable because they figured out a way to balance the stereoisomers of different salts (sulfate/aspartate/saccharate) in a way that made it last longer or something.
lurid, I found it was a huge relief when my granny died as her suffering in the final process was great and no purpose served by prolonging it. And the methodists still sing in harmony plus all her favorite hymns were quite nice old ones so the funeral was good stuff musically! Woman loved to sing. My dad only said 5-6 horrendously inappropriate things during his "remarks," and the lady at the Armenian cafe sat and chatted with me while I ate my lunch so despite amtrak whiffing the return schedule it was all a good rounding out of the experience. Go and the way to making it meaningful will unfold.
118: Great!
But, and maybe I'm forgetting something, what does "she finds out and explodes" mean? I thought all that's happening was pretty transparent to both parties.
(Also, just curiosity, am I right in thinking you were never actually married - the stuff you're unwinding is all the other formal arrangements you had when that was impossible?)
Lee has felt pretty strongly that there doesn't need to be a judge involved or formal guidance on money exchanged or anything like that, which is really not an option if we're putting the kids' best interests first, which is certainly my plan. So now she'll be served papers saying I disagree and that we should check in with the judge in 6-8 weeks and see what his take on that proposition is, which is where the exploding will probably come into things.
85: when I was diagnosed it was via some 20-question survey. It seemed a little ridiculous in a "doesn't everyone have these issues" kind of way, but the doctor I was seeing at the time assured me that everyone did not actually answer yes to everything.
ADHD medication had a shocking large effect on my life; I went from struggling to get anything done at work at all to being extremely productive, and also stopped picking up the phone when my bad-news on-and-off ex-girlfriend called. On the other hand it made me a bit less fun (maybe that's age?) and I have to take about half what the doctor recommends because otherwise I get jittery and/or drive 100mph on the way home. Also there are some situations where a record of being treated for a psychiatric disorder is inconvenient; e.g. no third-class medical.
Oh Christ. Lee's an asshole (I mean, you knew that, but jeez). Maybe KY has an online child support calculator and you could mutually agree to just follow the calculator's ruling (I may wind up making the case for this with my ex if I land a short-term W2 consulting gig rather than something permanent, since my income will still be in such flux that it doesn't make sense to codify something for hundreds of dollars that will just change again in 6 months.)
But Lee has a steady gig (I thought) and engages in magical thinking (as I recall). The two together seem to dictate a formal, legal, enforceable decision where garnishing, etc., can take place as needed.
120/125: Thanks!
125 specifically: I have a long history of being diagnosed with depression and a shorter one with anxiety. What's one more?
123: Yeah, we broke up just as marriage was becoming legal, so we have a joint custody agreement where we each agree to be equally responsible for the children regardless of which of us is the legal adoptive parent, since our state didn't allow second-parent adoption at the time. That had guidelines on what would happen in the case of breakup, which I knew would never happen but I agreed to because they all said "or work things out in mediation or in court if mediation fails" and so I got the judge to approve that a year go, broke up with her, tried for mediation but failed to come to agreement, had a bunch of other ungood stuff happen that has slowed everything down but made my case stronger, and now I need the judge to look at all the evidence and come up with something and/or send us back to mediation with someone who's not a nice well-meaning lesbian who thinks all lesbians are good parents who will eventually get along beautifully. Either way, there will be full legal clarity eventually.
someone who's not a nice well-meaning lesbian who thinks all lesbians are good parents who will eventually get along beautifully
Lesbians have changed a lot from those '50s paperback covers, haven't they?
Nobody said progress would be without costs for somebody.
I said that! I say that all the time, along with "Yes, I would like a cookie," which I think is not the answer that Internet feminists tend to be looking for.
Huh. I just took the screener linked here.. Except for the sitting still stuff and things like it, it's basically me. Guess I should have that looked at when I have decent insurance. Weird.
113 was my plan but I never even got close to it making sense to place the bet.
131: Sorry. I hate it when somebody quotes me at me.
127: I don't think you have to worry as much about the pilot's license in the US: there are psychiatric exclusions but they look more like psychosis/bipolar/severe-personality-disorder stuff, and I'm not sure depression anxiety or adhd will get you to any of those. (Depression if it's bipolar-linked, maybe? Those two have a big ambiguous middle ground going on, but I suspect that they don't care as much about that middle ground as they do about manic states.)
And, hey, think of it this way: it's just another drug that they can't test you for at work anymore! (I don't think there's anything that reliably causes false positives for standard pot tests, sadly, but once you have a prescription for adderall you can smoke as much meth on the job as you like!)
126 knows what's up. She did once offer to pay about 10% of what the calculator suggests, but that hasn't actually happened. And I probably shouldn't bitch about this online before it's resolved, but this is close enough to metabitching that I'm sure it's fine.
136: 10%? What a champ!
Do you know if the decision will be retroactively enforceable? That is, will she owe for the time prior to any decision being put into effect?
121: Thanks, dq. I just heard that she died, shortly after I bought the tickets, so it seems providential: if I had waited to buy them I might have decided it wasn't worth it to go. And I think it will be. Not even sure there will be a funeral as such; there is very little surviving family and no church involved.
Thorn, crossing my fingers that this goes well. If not, we will all be available for a virtual screaming party. (This is at least in the top 3 ornithological terms. Sorry teo.)
135: Sweet, I've been looking for a quick and easy way to brown up my teeth!
137: My lawyer thinks only to the date of filing, so today. Shrug. Some money will show up at some point and I will be happy about that, but it's not anything I can rely on or have expected to rely on or anything like that. Just having things settled will be the best part.
Lurkey, I'm sorry to hear that you won't get to see her alive, but I'm glad you'll be there to get your own closure of a sort.
I looked at the screener in 132 and I have a sneaking suspicion that it's one of those "everyone has it!" ones that's designed to start a conversation with a physician* about severity/whatever rather than a very reliable one, though the stuff in part B of it looks more rigorous. Or, at any rate, the one person I know who absolutely unambiguously has ADHD wouldn't score much differently than me on the diagnostic bits if at all and if I have it then whatever she has had better be something entirely different. (I don't have a buzzer in my head that goes off every three to five seconds and makes me change whatever I was thinking about to something else, which, when unmedicated she absolutely did. You could sit there counting down the seconds while she talked. Also she had better grades than me in college anyway which is intimidating because she didn't take her meds very often.)
I tried to look up something on the various subtypes of ADHD that are supposed to be out there, but it's very hard to avoid the suspicion that everything but the hyperactive one is just something falling under the umbrella of depression. Also there's a remarkable amount of eye-rolling level trash out there even compared to a lot of mental health things.
*Charitable interpretation!
138.3 'Don't Scream,' and Other Advice for Appellate Lawyers and Law Students
That just popped up in my email notification as I was reading about "screaming party".
If you don't go into appellate practice, you can scream all you want once you get that J.D.
142: Yeah, I'm not committed to that being the diagnosis. It does seem worth having the conversation, though. And it sure would be nice to be able to focus on doing stuff that isn't the most interesting thing at any given moment.
Along the lines of the OP, important but sporadic, arbitrary, and often moveable deadlines are killer. I want to draw an analogy to swift, certain, but minor penalties for drug addicts and habitual drunk drivers being much more effective
Dance class is so much like this. You need to get it right. It doesn't matter if you get it wrong, but it will be noted and called out. On the other hand, reward is very much uncertain and random. o hai I volunteered for this skinner bocks!
re: 146
What kind of dancing are you doing?
If you don't go into appellate practice, you can scream all you want once you get that J.D.
If you play it very carefully you can, professionally, both scream and be screamed at about television programs for toddlers, thus achieving a different kind of balance for the coveted work/life balance.
I know it's a long shot, but I got to ask. Can you get a message to Nina?
148: Modern - Cunningham style (we had this conversation a while ago!)
I think I asked and then forgot which thread it was and missed your answer.
140- I know nothing really, but I kinda have a sense that your ex is the type to move to another state and change her name rather than pay child support. I guess it is probably harder to disappear now than it used to be, but do you think you could track Lee down if necessary?
153: Her preference would be overseas, which would complicate things. So far I'm doing fine without her and I'm working on downsizing to make that easier. I'd rather she just disappear than leave me in a situation where I'm going after her for money. We'll be fine and I'm not worried about the long-term, just the part where she's once again mad at me and not in control of herself.
||
Are there any lawyers here (in this thread, I mean) who practice in NY or who don't practice there but do understand the court system there? I know that "Supreme Court" there is basically the first court of general jurisdiction, but I'm trying to understand how the different appeals courts work. The reason I'm asking is that I just found out that my great-great grandfather was a judge in NY, and I'm a little confused by his biographical profile.
|>
156: who had legal custody initially? You or Lee?
135/142: That form looks vaguely similar to what I took, and I had the same reaction of "surely everyone says yes to all of this." She swore that no, most people say "no" to most of them. YMMV.
And realistically speaking, how strongly correlated do you think "spends a lot of time commenting on Unfogged" and "has a three-sigma-low attention span" are? p > 0.05?
The alligator mouth should go the other way, but I know that won't display unless you go something funky.
157: The basic stucture is three levels. Supreme Court is the trial courts, and they're broken up by county. Appeals from decisions of the Supreme Court go the intermediate level of appeals, the Appellate Division, which is divided geographically into four departments -- i.e., the Appellate Division, First Department hears appeals from Supreme Court, New York County and Bronx County; the Second Department covers Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and I think the rest of Long Island, but don't quote me; and the Third and Fourth Departments split the remainder of the state. And then the Court of Appeals is the highest appellate court, and hears appeals from rulings of the Appellate Division.
There are other courts of limited jurisdiction, but that's the basics.
159: Legally we have joint custody but unequal parenting time. The theoretical custody agreement was that we'd split time 50-50, which turned out not to be feasible, or else that we'd make a different plan through mediation or via the courts. We started out with her having the girls every other weekend and doing one-on-one time with them during the week, but things have scaled back some from there. I now have at least one child with me at all times, which gets a bit exhausting but is what they need.
Thanks, LB. I knew that the ourt of Appeal was the highest court. I'm still a bit confused about the Appellate Division What would it mean to bethe Presiding Justice of the Appellate Division?
Here's his profile.
This line is so great.:
"To the well-earned reputation of Justice Patterson for purity, learning, sound and penetrating judgment, and that good sense which does not always go with the highest mental qualities...
In the criminal justice system, the people are represented in three separate and hierarchically ranked courts: the Supreme Courts who hold trials for people who are accused of crime, the Appellate Division who hear appeals from the trial court, and the Court of Appeals whose name confuses people from states with normal names for their highest state court. These are their stories.
165: And apparently the Appeals division can also review questions of fact. So, even more confusing!
Like being the Chief Justice of the United States SC -- Presiding Justice means being the head of the other judges of the App.Div. I am admittedly kind of unclear of the details of the additional responsibilities this entails. (Also, now each Deparment has its own presiding justice. The linked bio doesn't mention which department he was in... I don't know offhand, but possibly the division into four departments happened later.)
165: Mostly they don't -- the trial courts get a lot of deference on factfinding. But they can, where appropriate.
But not Appeals Division. Appellate Division, and then Court of Appeals.
94-95 made me laugh out loud. Back to catching up!
I looked at the quiz in 132 - I definitely don't have ADHD. I fidget a lot and get distracted by background noise. That's about it.
You have four small children. How would you ever know if you had an attention span problem?
I'm really good at blocking them out?
We just got back from a poster session at Hawaii's elementary school. From the poster on Andrew Jackson:
HOW ANDREW JACKSON CHANGED THE WORLD
- in 1835, Jackson managed to reduce the federal debt to only $33,733, the lowest it has been since the first fiscal year of 1791.
- But the severe depression from 1837 to 1844 caused the national debt to increase again.
I guess that's about it!
A stranger just asked me to watch his cigarettes. So, how much do loosies go for?
Selling loose cigarettes!? Do you want to get murdered by the police?
Except the guy with the cigarettes.
Now I'm picturing when you walk in, everyone in the bar saying "Moby!" like "Norm!"
There is that guy, but his name is Mark.
The guy on the other side of me managed to find a vape machine that makes more and worse fumes that a fifty cent cigar.
You should try selling him a cigarette.
Dude, don't blow your pseudonymity.
(I commented on a science blog today, using my same pseud, about some piece of technology I'm quite familiar with. The inventor of the technology, whom I know well, showed up to comment and said, "SP is exactly right!" and I wanted to pull off the mask and say I damn well better be.)
The post will no doubt be deleted in time, but it can currently be seen here.
The best part is that that's not true. For now he's going with "Yeah, it is there. Now about my candidacy for..." That may actually be a good strategy, though I'm not sure because he doesn't seem entirely stable.
If you run for office, shouldn't you have a specific porn computer that you don't use for other things?
Wow, the original facebook post is still up.
I tried to look up something on the various subtypes of ADHD that are supposed to be out there, but it's very hard to avoid the suspicion that everything but the hyperactive one is just something falling under the umbrella of depression.
Much of the current research on ADHD is focused (heh... ) on executive function issues. I'm also knee-jerk cranky about the impulse to write everything off as depression.
187: Probably a good practice even if you don't run for office.
My partner had/has really bad ADHD which caused her to drop out of uni the first time through etc etc, (and which I think was misdiagnosed as depression). The drugs are pretty much the best thing that's happened to her in terms of productivity both for work and for life in general.
I'm still amazed she made it so far without a doctor picking up on it, but I think they tend to be very chary of diagnosing adults. And yeah, she said "but doesn't everyone do this" when we went through the diagnostic tests.
My fear in taking adderall or equivalent would be that I'd get really really focused on something but it would be totally the wrong thing in terms of productivity. Like, I'd go back and actually RTFA, all of them. I'm excessively distractable when on the computer, like if I'm waiting for a program to load and it takes more than 15 seconds I wander off to a webpage. However once I can get myself focused on something I'm obsessed with doing it, which my wife hates and she'll try to ask me something when I'm cleaning or doing something for work and I can't pull my self away to pay attention to her.
I'm thinking whippets are going to be my wonder drug.
Like, I'd go back and actually RTFA, all of them.
IME that can happen.
Maybe try cutting the dose in that case.
This thread and the earlier one got me working more intensely on some stuff that I'd been dragging my feet on (although I stayed later than I intended at work today because I spent some time around lunch reading this thread). It's something that, with a firm deadline or a sign it would be put into use immediately, I'd have done long ago.
Like many here, working has helped me a lot to get around the stagnation I hit when all that was left to do in grad school was individual work that no one else depended on. I never took incompletes as an undergrad but I also did the bare minimum of units and selected a few classes because they didn't require papers and dropped some others because I didn't want to deal with the assignments to write papers at home instead of take tests.
Unfortunately, I still have real problems with any long form writing, even if it's work-related. I have a few more things to write before the end of the fiscal year so they can go on my evaluation as "goals" achieved. I'm so glad I'm not in an academic style position where I'm required to publish.
As far as general work goes, I'm much better at keeping on tasks that are farily set in their ways, or on weird deep dive research projects that require intensive investigation and sometimes get me trapped deep in the weeds when other things should be higher priorities. It doesn't help that some things I'd like to be priorities don't seem like they'll ever be institutional priorities where I am.
I've found myself a lot more productive in the last three weeks or so than in the previous six weeks or so, due largely to high-powered people saying things like "I need this tomorrow." Great for my productivity, but very stressful. Hopefully a lot of this will be over this week.
As for 184, to be honest it's a bit of a relief to see a Republican doing anything as normal as watching Internet porn. Especially as going by the titles he's not getting off on donkeys or children or just huge piles of cash.
Eh, Republicans are all about Internet porn provided the presumptive audience is straight white men (as it usually is).
184. It's down now (but the screengrab on Kos is for the ages).
This thread made me send the email I mentioned in 36 and rescheduled a psychiatry appointment I'd cancelled a few months ago and never rescheduled.
Late to the thread, as always - I procrastinate on Unfogged - but I felt it would be good for me to comment because it's relevant for me.
19 definitely describes me except I've been waiting for good word about a certain new job a lot longer, but I shouldn't discuss details right now. As for 19.2 and imposter syndrome in general, that might be part of it but I'm pretty sure it's not the whole story, for empirical reasons. My co-workers and I fill in for each other in meetings relatively often. I've described us as fungible, but for some reason no one likes that. I can see how quickly I respond to project managers with meeting minutes and I can see how quickly my co-workers do when they're filling in for me, and without doing a comprehensive review of my Inbox for the past few months, I'm as confident as I can be that my co-workers are reliably quicker than I am. Maybe they're good about pointless stuff that is measurable but doesn't actually matter? Maybe!
I've thought about Adderall and stuff like that before and maybe I should look into it, but I've managed to muddle through so far with no drugs stronger than caffeine occasionally. 10 years ago I was probably even worse than today, but I'm not sure how much of that is a matter of growing up, how much is changing life circumstances, and how much of that is my memory coloring things.
Over the past couple days I actually have been unusually productive. I'd attribute that to having a bunch of tasks ahead of me on short-to-medium deadlines, and they're mostly the kind of tasks that I can jump into easily, or do just one discrete step and then just one more and before I know it I've done 20. I'm procrastinating on calling the insurance company by doing an easy-but-boring assignment at work, that kind of thing.
Much of the current research on ADHD is focused (heh... ) on executive function issues.
Depression is also (very, very) linked to executive function function issues. And 'linked' might even be understating things. The psychomotor retardation/fatigue/cognitive problems cluster that tends to show up in some cases looks exactly like the sort of thing that you'd also see in inattentive (but not hyperactive) ADD - just with some additional stuff tossed in. And the treatments overlap, both in that depression can be treated with amphetamines and ADD with Wellbutrin and (more rarely) some of the other antidepressants. So it's hard for me to see the objection there.
But what I was referring to had a lot more to do with the immediately following sentence, "Also there's a remarkable amount of eye-rolling level trash out there even compared to a lot of mental health things." Daniel Amen's nonsense covers the internet, especially when you're looking up (supposed) subtypes, and most of those are blatantly anxiety/bipolar spectrum/depression presentations.
NMM to Guy Clark.
That's awful. I'd been worried about his health a while ago, but I thought he was okay.
If you run for office, shouldn't you have a specific porn computer
This is going to be the shocking revelation that eventually emerges from the Clinton server scandal.
204: My objection is, I think, almost entirely to the word "just" in your speculation that all these subtypes are "just" things that fall under the diagnosis of depression. Depression can interfere with attention and attention issues can be depressing and both can be symptoms of undiagnosed underlying physical problems. I get twitchy about the phrase "just depression" because it often gets used in the sense of "so here are some SSRIs, now go away."
Brains are fucked up things. I got an email asking me to apply for a job back in psychiatry. I think I'm going to let it pass. Not because brains are hard but because I now have more experience with this stuff and because in a few weeks I reach ten years and get four weeks of vacation a year. Plus ten holidays. Plus two personal days. Plus 12 sick days. Plus nobody who supervises me in the same building.
Couldn't you just reply with "My current employer does not require me to do any work" and ask them about their policies regarding that kind of thing?
I'm actually getting more done that I have at any time in my life, but that feels out of place for this thread.
205: I was thinking of you -- I got interested in Guy Clark from the cover by Lyle Lovett on your country mixtape.
It's been news for a while, but I honestly can't stop loving this.
"Oh man, I had way too much America last night. I feel really sick."
"In 2008 America was bought by a Belgian corporation."
"This election makes me want to shotgun America over and over."
"Hey guys! America is on sale!"
I hope they change their minds and decide not to go back to Budweiser in the fall.
209: Just slip the word 'sinecure' into the objective statement of your resumé. Surround it with industry buzzwords to be on the safe side. Viz.
Objective: To leverage existing synergies within the organization into a stable sinecure with long-term growth trends.
113: Heh, sounds like my dissertation story, which I'm kind of simultaneously ashamed and proud of. I spent around a year and a half writing the first third of my dissertation, give or take a bit. Then my advisor pulled my funding and told me that either I filed this semester or I should forget it. I went on filing fee status for that semester (pretty much the same deal as yours), wrote like a maniac for a month and a half of 18-20 hour days, got through with only minor revisions requested by the rest of the committee (who my advisor had gotten on board with the plan), and filed with a whole three hours to go before the deadline.
It wasn't the cleanest way to finish a dissertation, but damn, I got it done in the end. The problem with that kind of grabbing-victory-from-the-jaws-of-defeat procrastination story is that it does kind of tend to reinforce the behavior in question.
205: I was thinking of you
Thanks.
I was thinking a couple of months ago that Guy Clark was probably my favorite living singer-songwriter. He took a while to grow on my because he doesn't have a signature era (in the way that Bowie or Prince did, for example), but what an impressive body of work. Hard to think of anyone better.
I looked at the screening test, and don't have ADHD either. Although I have realised in the last couple of years that I'm a fidget. So hopefully I'll never get a DVT on a long haul flight. It sort of annoys me sometimes now - I'll be sitting in a classroom or a cinema, and everyone else is sitting still, and my foot's gong round in circles.
Kid A (19 and a fricking half) has been pondering the possibility that she might have ADHD and isn't sure whether to blame me for not taking her to a doctor when she was young. I honestly think not going to school might have been what meant I didn't - most days it didn't matter that her constant distractedness meant it took half an hour to get her ready to leave the house (because she would e.g. try to wander off whilst I was kneeling on in front of her putting her shoes on), but if we'd been trying to get to school on time every day, I might have cracked up. We've discussed modafinil, but I would worry that she would fixate on something completely stupid instead of whatever she was supposed to be doing.
Wow, I have never heard of Guy Clark before. Or ever heard of any of the songs he wrote that are mentioned on his Wikipedia page. Parallel universe alert!
It's bad enough when you obsessively read the archives, imagine what it would be like to have your kid do it.
I think Modafinil is less "I must organize all these spices by name! No! By color! No! By intensity of flavor! No! By...(etc.)" than adderall or ritalin. It's a weird one - I'm not sure if it even counts as a stimulant in the normal sense. They often say 'wakefulness promoting drug' or something. I've never taken it but I have taken Adrafinil which is its completely unscheduled (in the US, other places actually did sell it as a real drug at one point called, I think, Olmifon) precursor and pro-drug. So if you're really curious about it and don't want to go to the effort of dealing with doctors/whatever you could just order up some of that and try it out - it isn't as clean a feeling, I'm told, but it's basically the same stuff.
It didn't make me more alert/whatever in the sense that coffee or amphetamines does: I just wasn't sleepy. I mean - I did get the physical tiredness that you get from an all nighter because you're moving around doing things when you usually are lying mostly still and relaxing in bed. But that's it. I mostly just felt like it was ten AM or something even though it was four in the morning and I'd been up all night. It's interesting enough just for that sensation. Also when I did go to bed the next evening I woke up after a completely normal night's sleep without any kind of sleep deficit at all which was bizarre.
These guys are a little cheaper than others (which I can not find now):
https://www.nztmoda.com/modafinil-modalert/
Not sure where everyone else is ordering from but my order from them arrived very quickly.