Attention Deficit HEY LOOK A SQUIRREL

Amidst the many-faced train wreck of the past few weeks, it emerged that I have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). This came up because I had an adrenaline-filled day at the end of December, and once I started digging into the problem, I found the adrenaline was granting me a state of hyper-focus that I haven't experienced in a long while. If your thinking is scattered, and a stimulant un-scatters you, well. We don't quite know why that works, but there it is.

This explains many long-running mysteries of my life: Why were my grades erratic when they could have been perfect? Why do I fidget? Why do tasks like taxes or bills go un-done, even when I know exactly what to do?

How and why do I read books the way I do? In the days of paper books, I would be in the middle of six or more books at a time, switching between them in a single sitting. E-books have taught me how many books I can actually be in the middle of and still remember the context when I pick one up: 20-30. I read some pages, flip to a different book, read some pages, change book, etc.

Why did I take a semester of Mandarin Chinese in college? I needed the stimulation of learning something difficult. Why didn't I continue with it? Because memorizing is hard for me––because it's boring––and learning Chinese is an endless vast quantity of memorizing arbitrary pieces of information. (I cannot recommend highly enough the self-descriptive essay Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard.)

ADHD shows up a little differently in super-smart people, in ways that are still being refined for the next DSM. One challenge is that the diagnostic criteria up to this point have included "If it makes living a fairly standard life impossible," so they're adding refinements to include "Can hold down a job, but causes a lot of suffering." And it's masked by being super-smart, which has let me lurch through a college education (albeit finishing with a 3.2? 3.4? GPA) and out into a successful career. If I weren't super-smart, I would probably be living in a van down by the river. Most likely an unregistered van, having failed to file the paperwork.

The difficulty of task initiation explains another life oddity: I'm terrible at mathematical proofs. Learning how the math works, using it to solve problems, I'm fine with; but if I sit down to try even the most basic proof (proving that √2 is irrational is the usual introductory example), I just can't get started. It's not math anxiety, as usually thought of; I just have trouble getting started. But I can, even now, explain the basics of differential and integral calculus, and I promise I've had only basic use for differential, and zero use for integral, since I graduated. Would I have learned them on my own? No. Is it fun to know them? Well, yes. I like learning and knowing stuff, and I'm really good at it. I have a long list of hobbies and random stuff I've learned, to prove it.

(While I was in Chile, Anna was driving J someplace, and he asked a question about the moon. She said, "I don't know, but I bet Chris would." To which J replied, "Yeah! Chris is like a Google, but one you can Skype!", which I think says a lot of true and wonderful things about our relationship.)

Anyway, yeah. ADHD. Possibly the easiest thing I've dealt with this month.  I do love a good theory that fits the facts.

March 307th.

While 2020 can indeed fuck right off, I'll call it done when I feel safe hanging out inside a coffee shop for an hour, or if I ever see my violin teacher in person again (he's doing Zoom lessons from Puerto Vallarta).

We had a mellow Christmas here, as always. On Christmas Eve I was wondering why it didn't feel particularly Christmasy, and I realized that the distinguishing feature of my Christmasy feeling is of gathering around and spending quiet time...at home. Not exactly an unusual feeling for 2020. Next year, perhaps we'll spend Christmas someplace else.

I finished a paltry 52 books in 2020, even if 10 of them were the 3.2 million words of The Malazan Book of the Fallen. Compare to 59 in 2019, and 97 in 2018. 2020 was a year for watching TV, of course, and I spent a lot of time playing my flotilla of musical instruments. I bought myself a lovely 5-string violin, which is sort of oriented towards folk music, but it humors me as I learned a piece by Couperin to start learning ornamentation, and a concerto by Vivaldi to start playing in the higher hand positions instead of just up by the head of the violin. I had never heard of Couperin, but I wanted to play this first Québecois tune with all the ornaments to make it sound right, and since Couperin wrote Baroque music you could describe frankly as "frilly" or "froofy," it's got ornaments every few notes (of which the grace-note is only the easiest and most familiar) and good for learning.

(Voices of Music is local here to the Bay Area, actually, and has dozens and dozens of these amazing videos, though I've yet to make it to a concert. They're doing "historically-informed performance," which is why the cello has 5 strings and no endpin, the violins have decorations on the fingerboards, and the whole ensemble is tuned a half-step down from the American standard A=440 Hz, which would be [looks it up] A=413.5 Hz.)

The dog groomer noticed a funky growth bleeding in between a couple of her two front toes, so somedog got to go to the vet. There turned out to be two of them, and the first had a bigger base than expected, so instead of just "skin glue" (medical-grade Superglue) she got a few sutures, and 10 days in a cone. It's her first cone since she was spayed maybe 5 years ago, and the pathos levels have been high.

She's not in pain, but in this time of trial, she gains even more succor from her true god, the heater vent. With a truly doggy grasp of cause and effect, she will sit in that spot multiple times per day until May or so, trying to get the heat to come on.

One thing that's been really striking is that without her customary cat-like grooming, she really does have a lot of crusty oozing around the eyes, that she takes care of herself; and without licking herself with her unstoppably disgusting breath, she smells better.

Except for one week over the summer when businesses boarded up their windows–the gun shop up the road decided to just leave theirs boarded–we've been free of the civil unrest of the larger cities nearby. You never know, though, and as I'm big on self-defense, I did some digging into projectile weapons.

(I have knives, and I know how to use them, but knife fighting is dangerous, and your only reasonable goal is to kill the other guy, and win or lose, you should expect to get cut up a bit. I definitely don't want to get cut up, and I definitely don't want to kill anybody, so I looked for other options.)

I don't really want a firearm in the house, even though less-lethal shotgun rounds are myriad: among other things, you need to practice with whatever device you get, which is a pain in the ass in normal times, and more so now.

From watching this veterinarian firearms aficionado testing less-lethal options with/on a friend, I learned about PepperBall, which is a paintball "marker" (the paintball industry wisely and studiously avoids saying "gun") where the balls are filled with OC (oleocapsaicin–pepper spray) instead of paint. In one of those unreasonable intersections of regulation that liberal states like California stumble through in the process of trying to do the right thing, chemical irritant projectiles are illegal outside of law enforcement. So guns are legal, but OC projectiles, which you might use to avoid killing people, are not.

(As an aside, California did a clever thing and instituted background checks for ammunition, mostly identical to the background checks required for guns. This means mail-order ammunition has to be sent to a licensed dealer, just like guns, instead of to your house. And many mail-order businesses around the country have just decided it's not worth the hassle, and don't ship to California any more. They also made it a felony to circumvent the system by shopping in our libertarian neighbor Nevada and bringing it back here. I assume catching people doing this is like shooting fish in a barrel for cops, just looking for California plates at gun shops and following them over the border. 

It's incredibly obnoxious if you're just a normal human who wants to buy ammunition, since this exacerbates the long-running ammunition shortage; but I appreciate the creativity, because the Second Amendment says nothing about a right to buy and own bullets...among other things, when the Second Amendment was written, people were still making their own musket balls at home.)

Given all those constraints, I finally found these guys, who take a paintball marker which is the platform for the Pepperball™ "launcher" (Pepperball™ also avoids "gun"), and work them up into something that is no doubt considerably more painful: the video shows a different model shooting through a cookie sheet. They're in Maine, with delightful accents to match. And I can practice in the Terrible Garage, for as long as it stands.

That's not even everything that happened this year. I don't know when March 2020 ends, but we all hope it's soon.