Better living through chemistry

So much to say and so little time. I've got about 10 mins here, I'll just spew out some stuff.

My main shrink (psychologist) can't prescribe, so I've now got 2 shrinks. Shrink #1 said that some of the things I say sounded kind of like ADD. So we did some tests, and it sure seemed to me that at the very least it's a useful metaphor for some of the things that happen in my head. Jumping around from thought to thought, can't focus on anything non-fun for more than a few minutes, write 2 sentences and then go check my mail, get a snack, browse the web. Forgetful, anxious, etc etc. Symptoms or missing skills? Problem or metaphor? How do you tell?

I firmly believe that our weaknesses are mirror images of our strengths. I'm a really smart guy. Trying not to brag here, but that's been my internal defining characteristic for a long ol' time. I'm smart as hell. One thing I can do is think about a lot of things at once. Time slice, mostly, but some realtime multi-tracking. I remember once trying to imagine how Beethoven composed however-many lines of music at once, the bass going ba-bum, ba-bum, and the first violins going deedle-deedle-deedle and the second violins going doodle-doodle-doodle. How did he keep that all in his mind at once? Did he have a 16 track brain? Mine is 4 or 5, tops. Finally I realized that he probably approaches it more like a painter, add a dab of blue here, some yellow over there. But I wondered about that for a long time.

So: thoughts bouncing around - strength or weakness? Or both?

One of my all time favorite quotes from Tom Waits: If I exorcise my devils, well my angels may leave too. And when they leave, they're so hard to find.

This all came up several months ago, and I went on the waiting list for shrink #2 to see if she thought I should try new drugs. I finally got in to see her Friday, and as with prescribing shrinks (psychiatrists) everywhere, the answer to questions like these is always the same. Let's try some drugs and see if they change things for the better. If so, then whatever the drugs help is your problem. If not, not.

So now I'm on an updated version of ritalin.

I like it.

I like it a lot.

It really seems to tune down the static. I get a much better signal-to-noise ratio. I can willfully follow a thought for more than a few seconds.

This weekend, while experimenting with new drugs, I took my 2 oldest daughters to this event in San Mateo, CA. It's like a home-built trade show for inventors, hackers, builders, dreamers. I was hoping the girls would get inspired to explore technologies and be creative in new and exciting ways. I was also hoping to have a lot of fun. Both goals were met. The PC maintenance folks "Geek Squad" were sponsors and had a booth there, my daughters got gimme teeshirts with the Geek Squad logo that I think they may actually wear! They soldered circuits, played with breadboards, were amazed by robots, and the ideas started to take hold - hey, I could do that!

At the same time, it was a grand and wonderful place to be experimenting with new drugs. So much stimulation!! I really felt more relaxed with people, had some great conversations and met some great people and learned a lot of stuff. Everyone was so enthusiastic to share their pet project, however geeky or outrageous. It's like Burning Man - we're all geeks here, let's party!

Am I better with drugs or not? Can't tell yet. It's definitely fun. For instance, I think I'm kind of overdriving this morning. This blog post has been fun to write and I've been totally focussed in on it, but I fear it might be a bit of a bumpy ride for you, the gentle reader. Was I more relaxed with people because the static was turned down this weekend or was it just a particularly congenial bunch of folks.

WHoo, the rush is settling down, don't quite feel so hyper now. My 10 minute note is now pushing 30 mins. Somewhat edited.

I'll try to keep a running log of this experiment here.

Swampdog, out.

Huevos

Ok, I guess I've got time today to post my first self-improvement note.

Everyone remembers the movie Annie Hall, right? Do you remember at the end, where Woody Allen turns to the camera and talks about how his life has been ruled by two old jokes? One of the jokes is this chestnut:

Guy goes into a shrink and says, "Doc, you gotta help me, it's my brother. He thinks he's a chicken."

Doc says, "Oh my, that sounds serious, how long has this been going on?"

Guy says, "It's been three years, doc, we gotta do something."

Doc says, "Three years!? Why are you just coming to me now?"

and the guy says, "Well, doc, we needed the eggs"

Ba-dum-bump

What I think Woody meant, what I've always got from this is, whatever behavior pattern you have in your life, at some level you do it on purpose because you think you need the eggs. Whatever you do, however destructive it may be, somehow, somewhere, you're getting eggs from it.

An implication is, you can't change your behavior unless you understand what eggs you're getting from it. If you steel up your resolve to stop your overeating without understanding that you're getting emotional satisfaction from eating, you're doomed to fail. If you hate your job but stay with it anyway, the eggs (immediate paycheck, some security) outweigh the costs (from annoyance to soul-destroying) or the costs of changing (fear of interviewing). When you realistically analyze the eggs and the cost, you may change your mind. If you can get a decent paycheck elsewhere without destroying your soul, it might be better. If the security of your job is illusory, you might be better off without it. If you're really just afraid to confront the fear of interviewing, you can consider whether you need to figure out how to do that and just face it. Or not. But until you know what eggs you're getting and what you're paying for them, you're not going anywhere but in circles.

But, like I said, I've believed in this principle for a long long time. Not quite since the movie first came out (I was pretty young then) but say at least the last 20 years. So why now is this suddenly having such an impact on me?

I recently put two and two together and started applying this idea to a particular destructive thought pattern that had previously been immutable. It's the whole original basis of this blog - "I'm an idiot". Trust me, inside my head "idiot" is one of the kinder things I call myself. And calling myself names is (was) one of the kinder things I did, it was more of an internal mental smack upside the head. It almost hurts to write, my mind is travelling those ruts as I write about it, and I've been mostly free of it for several weeks now. The effect was to derail my thinking, to force it onto this negative track instead of letting it run free.

So I asked myself: What is so important that hurting myself is a better answer than facing it?

And here's where it gets a little fuzzy. I didn't get a clear answer that I can easily relate here. Part of it has to do with a very ugly experience I had about 23 years ago, out of which I decided to just be whoever and whatever I needed to be to get by. I'm not going to tell you that story now, probably not ever. Part of it is ideas I got at this blog - stevepavlina.com A lot of what he says is kind of mystic woo-woo, but much of his approach is very similar to mine. I'll go into specifics in later entries, but two things stand out for brief mention: You've got to be integrated, goals, beliefs, values, actions. You can't change anything all at once, it's like going to the gym. I'd like to be able to bench press my weight, but I can't go down and try to do that every day until my muscles get stronger. I'd quit pretty darned fast. I've got to start where I am, bench what I can, and expand that over time.

So there's no one-to-one correspondence. I didn't answer my question. Or I guess I did, and the answer was simply, nothing in my life is worth hurting myself that way. I wasn't getting enough eggs for it.

Sea change

I apologize to all my thousands of fans for not posting in such a long time (yes that's a joke, but I've actually got some comments from strangers! I love you Tiffy!). My attitudes are undergoing a sea change for the better, I hope to write soon about what's working for me this time around, but it's big and constantly changing. Don't know if I'll be able to generate the level of spleen that I've been using for entertainment but while I work on it here's a few quick hits.

This is an oldie but goody for me, and I just saw an example around town so I can write about it today. Remember the bumper stickers "If you can't trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with a child?" I'm vehemently pro-choice and I HATE those bumper stickers. Fortunately they seem to have mostly disappeared. What I hate about them is the total ignorance of the opposite side's position.

Let me translate that into how I imagine an anti-choice person sees it: "If you can't trust me not to murder my child now, how can you trust me to raise it well?" They see a fetus as the moral equivalent of a 5 (or 50) year old. So let's try it like that: "If you can't trust me not to murder my 5 year old, how can you trust me to raise a 6 year old?" What's the expected response to that? "Oh, ok then, go ahead and murder your 5 year old instead of ruining its life later." Or, "you're right, you're morally reprehensible and it would be better to take any child (read: fetus) you're trusted with as soon as humanly possible and raise it by the state rather than let you raise it."

People, you can't win arguments that way. You've got to understand your enemy.

----------
We bought a new car yesterday, and I'm having slight moral qualms today. You can't screw a car dealer, can you? It's just not possible is it?

We traded in our old van which the mechanic says is on its last legs. It leaks oil, it burns oil, and once in a while when you start off in the morning it spews out a huge embarassing cloud of oil smoke. The mechanic says it's not worth fixing. It's also got a fair share of minor problems that we don't even notice anymore, like a cracked windshield. Tires are not new. We got a decent price out of the dealer, who didn't look that closely at it. He didn't even notice the cracked windshield until after he offered us an amount for the car. He didn't look under the hood to see the oil scum caked in a few places, or the oil cap that got left off one day and fell down and welded itself to the exhaust manifold. I figure it's going to cost them $1000 to get it into sellable condition, and that's if they don't notice the oil problems. If they notice that, they've either got to try to cover it up and offload it on some sucker or take a bath on the car in the auction market (where someone else will buy it to try to offload on some sucker).

To add insult to injury as I was driving the car to the dealer to trade it in and pick up the new one I noticed that the gas tank was empty, the indicator light came on. There's another $50. I didn't plan it that way, but it's $50 out of their pocket.

I do feel a little bad about it - not for the dealer, I could have bargained harder for the new car and squeezed another $1000 out of them that way - but for the poor sucker they foist this thing on. They'll probably still make money on it, and somewhere there's going to be an angry customer fighting with a dealer to get their money's worth.

We ended up spending about $2k below MSRP, about $1k above dealer invoice on the new car, which seems like decent bargaining. When dealers like Saturn talk about "one fixed price" I figure I'd be losing out compared to the average schmo. I'm not a great bargainer, but I think I beat the average, so if I get just average from Saturn I'm probably paying more than I would when I can bargain. Here I think we beat the average and then we got a good price for our soon-to-be-junk old car. So I'm feeling pretty good about it.

And, you can't screw a dealer, can you? It's just not possible.