Did the Therapy Thursday thing today.

One of the things discussed was my concern about my recent revelation about giving myself permission to change how I look at things fading from my mind before it can lead to any real change, and how I don’t know how to prevent that.

I think I must have given Doc Costin the wrong impression because he thought it sounded like I my have ADD/ADHD. ^[1]

Um. no. I have considered that in the past and I have even joked about having a form of ADHD which is purely mental, but no.

I do have an extremely active and restless mind but only at a distinctly subclinical level.

I have never had trouble paying attention to conversations, or staying focused on something I am watching, or sitting still.

Trust me, when it comes to sitting still, I am a dragon level master.

I’ve had trouble remaining focused during lectures, but who hasn’t? Being an interesting and dynamic speaker has never been a prerequisite for being a teacher or professor and if it was, the entire system would fall apart.

And I am always paying attention. I absorb the information presented.

Given my lack of studying, I kind of have to.

But it is rare that this takes up enough of my mental bandwidth to prevent boredom.

Hmmm. “The first price of genius is boredom.” Gotta use that somewhere.

Also hmmm…. is having trouble sticking to a topic a sign of ADHD?

Anyhow, my point is that I have far too few of the symptoms of ADHD for it to be considered worth the time to go take an online test for it.

Heck, I could make a better case for my being some flavour of autistic, and an online test DID rule out that diagnosis,

The truth is, modern science still doesn’t know what the fuck is wrong with me, a fact I find to be almost tragically unsurprising.

I could be wrong. There might be a diagnosis out there somewhere for me and one day I will stumble across it and suddenly it will all make sense,

I doubt it, though. I am pretty sure that I am a bizarre one-off creation that cannot be defined let alone diagnosed.

What else. Well I still haven’t beaten that boss in Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous, But luckily, I thought to check my save games to see if I had one that could keep me from having to start the whole freaking game over, and I do!

It’s a save I made right before I made my 6th and final character. So now I only have to go back that far. I made very different choices regarding said character this time, and hopefully that will let me beat that damned boss when I make it back to him.

If not, what the hell, I will do the whole thing again! Remake my sixth character yet again and go at’r.

And I am glad it worked out this way because I tried lowering the difficulty level and I still couldn’t beat that boss because I still couldn’t hit him!

This fucker is irrationally difficult.

More after the break.

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Fighting my way upstream

The stream, in this case, being SLEEP .

Man am I sleepy. Dunno why, I got my usual amount of nap time today. And I don’t have any sort of infection that I know about, knock quite firmly on wood.

And yet around 8:45 pm, the sleepiness came upon me like a flash flood. One moment I had cheerfully sat down to play my game (Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous), feeling chipper and looking forward to digging in to the task of getting back to where I was, when a wave of tiredness hit me and it was all I could do to finish the fight I was in at the time before laying down for a while.

And the timing is crappy because I normally have my supper at around 9 pm these days and needed a nap at that time kinda throws off my schedule.

And boy was it hard to get out of bed when my tablet’s alarm rang. My body did not want to be away and upright. Hoo boy.

But eventually I managed it. Got up, got my sleepy self to the kitchen, made myself a PB&J, grabbed some fruit and a can of pop, and returned.

Now, I am running on adrenaline. I know that if I stop typing for too long, the sleepiness will return, so I am doing my best to keep this stream of consciousness flowing.

Hmm. Another stream. This one, I have to fight to keep going instead of fighting to make progress against the flow.

Man, it always comes back to water with me, doesn’t it?

Speaking of upstream, I wonder if there’s salmon that make it part way back to their spawning grounds then say “fuck it”, deposit their milt or eggs wherever, then bugger off back to the ocean.

If so, I wonder if they live longer than their more conventional compatriots because they didn’t expend every ounce of energy they had in a marathon upstream swim.

Those would be the salmon I identify with. The ones who look around at the desperate race to spawn, with people dying from exertion or getting eaten by bears all over the place, and say, “This sucks!” and give up.

They know enough to say, “Let’s lose the game”.

That song has enormous spiritual meaning for me. It represents the idea of freeing yourself from the competitive mindset and leaving it all behind in order to escape the traps and pitfalls that rely on our aversion to loss.

Go ahead. Lose the game. Be a quitter. Let them think they won. Who cares what they think? They’re idiots anyhow. And you got what you wanted : freedom.

Fuck your competition. Fuck your god damned rat race. Fuck your putting a shiny trinket on the top of a dung heap expecting us to claw each other’s eyes out to get it.

Fuck your materialistic treadmill. Fuck your vapid careerism. Fuck your ladders, corporate or otherwise. And fuck your fucking hierarchy too.

Keep the ball. We’re going home.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.