Digsite

Lists & Anger

2010-03-24T20:14:51Z

I think this change in meds has brought back the anger in me. I had a big anger problem before I started anti-d’s and now it’s coming back. Short temper with the kids, random things setting me off throughout the day at work and on the road. I don’t show it, but the anger is still there, steaming. It also has been interesting for me to note that anger and jealousy seem to feed off each other. Something that would normally not trigger jealousy in me is doing so now that my anger is a bit out of control. I don’t like myself when I’m angry. And neither do my kids, I’m sure. I am NOT a pleasant mom when I’m angry. When I’m short tempered with the kids, I usually feel guilty about it afterwards. Guilt begets depression and depression begets anger for me. Bad cycle. I hate to blame it all on the meds, tho, but it’s hard not to when you know that certain meds can ‘fix’ my anger easily.

There’s one area of my life that is the opposite tho. I feel very relaxed, and have a general sense “I-don’t-care” about it but I think that might just be a side effect of anger. Angry enough you just say “fuck it. It is what it is and I’ll be fine no matter what the jerk does.” Lol, I’m not really decided on that one, tho. Maybe officially becoming middle-aged has strengthened the ‘fuck it’ muscle within me. And I’m talking about the attitude, not any body part.

Anywho, onto lists… I’ve found something that works for me – so far. I sit down and figure out what I want to get done either on the day of, or the day before I want to get it done. I set it up all pretty on Things for the Iphone (or desktop). Then I let it be the boss and I just do as I’m told. Seems to work… unless I completely forget about Things, which has happened. Baby steps.

Struggling Today

2010-03-17T02:53:17Z

Man, today has been hard. After work I had the choice of either going shopping for much needed clothes or going straight home to do laundry. It was a toss up for me because I hate both equally as much. But I decided it would cut down on the amount of stress in the mornings if I got some of the laundry situation under control. We have baskets and baskets filled with clean clothes as well as closet fulls of dirty laundry . Unfortunately, tho, as soon as I got home I became exhausted. I had zero energy to draw upon to do what I had planned so I just sat on the couch constantly nodding off just waiting for it to be 9pm so I could put the kids to bed.

This whole situation felt pretty bad to me. I felt guilty the whole time I was nodding off on the couch. I kept fighting back the urge to call myself a failure. I kept having to take deep breaths to calm my chest. It was just not a pleasant time. I felt like the exhaustion had more to do with procrastination than it did a real physical state. I didn’t understand what the issue was. I kept wanting to blame Dennis for half this mess. I’m not a housewife, afterall. Rattling in my head was a lot of “why should I feel like it ALL rests on my shoulders?” The thought made me angry. There might be some truth in that which I may have to address at a later time, but I think the main reason I was even thinking it at that moment was avoidance.

And a more important question I had rattling around that I thought should be answered first is this; Why was I able to clean half the bathroom without choking but now I can’t even fold laundry at all? Why does laundry seem too overwhelming to cope with right now?! The first tangible difference is that I gave myself easy todo’s with the bathroom: “put towels in basket”, “grab cleaner and scrub sink”, “sweep floor”, etc. Easy. And there isn’t much thinking left to do when it came down to it. Tired or not, I knew exactly what I had to do and each task literally only took minutes or even seconds. With the laundry, on the other hand, I didn’t give myself any written todo’s. It was just one big fat mental todo that went “Do all the laundry”. “Do all the laundry” is a pretty big undertaking and it can be broken down into too many pieces spanning over days, so expecting myself to “Just tackle the monster” wasn’t fair on me at all. Why hadn’t I made a list when the bathroom list worked so well? Habit.

So I fired up Things and instantly identified my mental block. Monster obstacle #1 (aka todo #1) for me is where in the hell am I going to fold the laundry? The usual place is stacked with toys and clutter. The kitchen table has computers and mail on it, the couches are not at all a comfortable place to do it. So…. I choke. I dont’ know how to move forward! Any ‘normal’ person would just throw a clean bed sheet on the bed and do it there, but not me. It takes me hours to come up with that one. I have become a chronic procrastinator; a professional choker; a queen of inaction and it’s going to take a lot of sweat to break thru that existence. This is what I face.

My brain is battling and undermining itself at every turn. Throwing wrenches at its own gears as a form of self punishment. Not fun.

Not Sad, but Introspective

2010-03-13T19:27:06Z

I was asked today why I looked sad. The correct answer is that I was concentrating on something very intently at that moment. Maybe I look too serious when I’m concentrating and it can be mistaken for sadness, who knows. But “you look so serious” has followed me since I was a kid. My default expression has always been like that. I can’t help it.

But that question got me thinking.. was I more morose today than normal? Is there something eating at me that I’m not aware of? The correct answer is no and no. My life took a turn the day my drug doctor told me I have ADHD. I’m sure people are tired of hearing about this by now, but I’m not tired of talking about it …yet. Literally I feel like I have a new life to live now. One where I understand myself far better than I ever had before. Immediately following the visit with the doctor, I was happy – very happy. I knew that I had found what I needed – a reason and a method for changing certain things about myself I had been struggling with too long. Namely the procrastination, the lack of motivation, the beating myself up at every turn, the problems socializing and relating to others. I think now that I don’t have to blame myself for those things, I can finally put the bad feelings aside and do what’s necessary to get out of the rut. But all these feelings and thoughts are useless to me unless I put them into action. And last night I decided it was time.

My biggest handicap has always been my relentless quest towards organizational bliss. I want to get organized. I want my daily life to be seemless and easy. I want to know where everything is, and I want to know what comes next – all the time. Perfectionism at its worst. Crippling. So I decided to start small and push the rest out of my head. And pushing things out of my head has become so much easier to me these days. Maybe it’s the meds, who knows.

So I made a list with 4 things on it. Four to-dos for cleaning the bathroom Then at 2am, after much delay, I got my ass up and completed them. It was an exercise in self-regulation, and it hurt. It was so hard for me to follow my own list; to put one foot ahead of the other and do it. This is where Dr. Pychyl‘s voice pops into my head saying things like “The road to success is lined with perspiration, not inspiration” and “Just get started” and “don’t give in to feeling good”. So I completed those things on my list and made another short list for work. Doing IDS cases comes easy. You don’t have to think. Not much self regulation required there. So I made a list for things that I have become bad at. Keeping up with my email, reading the blog, checking the pulse of my projects.

I got to work and made myself follow those 4 tiny todo’s. It wasn’t hard at all. I felt motivated. The previous night’s success had shown me that altho the process can be painful, I could still control myself and do what I didn’t want to do – just because I say so! This felt good. But there was a pull in the opposite direction today that I was very aware of (hence the no and no answer, to not being aware of it). My old procrastination had manifested itself in a failure – one project dashed. Not having been able to complete it was the failure. Then I had to write down how many hours I spend on certain things. There were things on a list and I looked at them. I am not part of any of them. None. That also felt like a failure. The important thing to note here, tho, is that I didn’t think of myself as the failure. Instead, the behavior and what they led up to are the failure. That was the pull in the other direction. I had to keep putting the failures out of my head, tho. And that was hard because of the number of times I found myself having to do it while I had no do it.. Bad feelings begets nothing good.

I’m not defeated. I’m still moving forward. I will deal with negativity all my life. Everyone does. My own negativity towards myself had always been the biggest threat. Externalizing the failure and knowing the reason for my behavior is the success. Ooh-rah!

Oh Cool!

2010-03-11T22:09:43Z

This is years old, but I just discovered that another blogger gave me a mention in one of her entries.

Shout-outs to Some Damned Kewl Coder-Geeks!

It’s almost as cool as when my fatblog got a mention on blogher. Too bad I abandoned the fatblog tho. I think I’m going to import the entries to this blog and either make the fatblog a test blog (accessible only to me) or just delete it entirely. Maintaining the two blogs is a pain. I think I’d do better with just one.

I need to declutter my life and (perceived) responsibilities!!

Again, old, but still makes me wanna do a little dance around my laptop.

It’s My Birthday, and I can Ponder if I want to

2010-03-11T16:20:40Z

Welp, it’s my birthday today and I turned 38. Jesus, I have only 2 years left in this decade. 40 is going to be like the beginning of going downhill. After that I think the following decades are going to be as impacting on how I and the world sees me as 1 vs 10 was and 10 vs 20 was. It’ll growing up in reverse. Growing down.

But despite all that morbidity I just spewed out my finger tips, I have been feeling good lately and I have switched a little from identifying with the negative to identifying with the positive.

Ever since my drug doctor switched my meds, even thru the withdrawal and readjustment period, I have been feeling more alert and clear. I told her I feel as if I’m waking up from some semi-conscious state. “As if I’ve really been a walking zombie all this time”, I told her. And she nodded in a way that told me she has heard all of this before from other patients. For a couple years now I’ve been living without motivation of any kind. My only motivation or mission had been to try to get to a state where I could get motivation.

Now I feel as if something within me is waking up and stirring around. Whatever it is, it’s fragile. It’s so easy for me to start with the negative self-talk. But I keep shooting it down. It’s better if I don’t think at all and just relish in this feeling of alertness. I’m so scared I’m going to lose it that I’m leery of writing it in here. I still have issues thinking straight and remembering things from one moment to another. I keep forgetting what I was doing at work and words keep escaping me so I can’t express myself the way I intend to. For the longest time, I called this the ‘brain fog’. I believed I could have Candidiasis because of my tinnea issue on my feet and the brain fog everyone with Candidiasis complains of. But I lacked so many of the things they said they had to deal with.

But I digress…… feeling like I have the right diagnosis has given me such a boost of hope. Maybe that’s part of what I have stirring around in there. Hope and an urge to change what hasn’t changed in a long long time. Both personal and not.

All or Nothing Mentality

2010-03-09T10:25:28Z

Well, my weekend is over and I’ve spent it barefoot and in the same pair of pajama pants I put on Saturday night. There are important things I could have done like laundry, sweeping, shopped for clothes to wear at my sister’s wedding, or filling out Maya’s registration papers for school, but I didn’t. Instead, I spent the entire time working on LivePress and learning about http headers, learning how to formulate a good user-agent string, and editing & testing a 3rd party xmlrpc library D found on the net. This library is old (2005) so it still passed references to variables despite the warnings instituted in PHP 5.3.0,. I changed those and it seems to work, but of course now I’m worried about the security of said library. If it’s that old, I can’t say I can trust it.

Aside from the above, I got caught up with the emails and processed the 6 bug reports I hadn’t read yet on google code and answered a couple support forum posts.

Man, abandoning a responsibility like that weighs heavy on me. It isn’t until I work on it that I feel the heaviness lift and wonder why I waited so long. My problem is I do all or nothing. I either abandon it completely, or it’s all I do morning and night. I just don’t know what the next step is for me to change that. I think I have a better understanding of what makes me be this way and I didn’t think that the knowledge of it was helping me make different choices this weekend. But now that I’m sitting here reflecting, I know that it did help.

First, I didn’t get AS obsessed as I normally do. For example, I was able to watch the kids and interact with them without losing my temper – even when they were interrupting something important. I was able to take a few minutes break to give them a bath – minus the laptop – and make them dinner – minus the laptop. I didn’t feel AS bad about spending my time on one thing as I normally would. I kept telling myself that what I _was_ doing was just one of the many things I had been putting off for far too long and the fact that I was doing it was a positive thing. Soon I would be able to check it off the list and establish some daily or weekly schedule for keeping it maintained. I realize fixing the things I want to fix will take time so I will do one item at a time. I still have that urge to bang it all out yesterday, but good habits aren’t formed that way. I’ve had to remind myself at least once why LivePress became so abandoned again. <analogy ahead> I think I pressed the gas so incredibly hard that my engine blew out. And it took almost a full year for that engine to become repaired. And I reminded myself that I don’t want to blow out my engine. <insert sexual innuendo here>

So I’m not sure what the next step is, but I’m going to figure it out. (how’s that for positive thinking, eh?)

Banned Because of Live+Press’ Bad Behavior

2010-03-11T00:57:22Z

Oh boy. So I knew that LivePress had been broken for a long time; works for some, doesn’t work for others. Not exactly consistent. I get thank you’s as well as fuck you’s for my work on this plugin (well not really fu’s but…). I believe it broke sometime around the 2.8 release of WordPress but I can’t be sure. I was getting tired of the complaints (and the manufactured fu’s in my head), so I decided to start working on it last night. The goal was to find out why it was failing. I’m trying to stop thinking in grandiose terms and then ending up not doing anything. ( Like wanting to rewrite the entire plugin from scratch and then abandoning it for a year.)

Anyway, at first I thought IXR-class.php was the problem because it had caused issues in the past, and while trying an older version of this file the plugin started working for about 3.2 seconds. But then I couldn’t make it work again no matter what version of the file I tried. I was beginning to think I had been hallucinating. But no matter; I decided to abandon that lead, follow another and finally tracked it to the simplest thing ever.

The plugin was connecting to livejournal’s xmlrpc interface but not getting the response it was expecting – which is 200 OK. After that point, it would go kaput. That explains how it was breaking but what unexpected response was it getting, and why? I tried to connect manually from my VPS account and the answer slapped me in the face like a wet fish:

digsite: > telnet livejournal.com 80
Trying 208.93.0.128…
Connected to livejournal.com.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
POST /interface/xmlrpc HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.0 403 Denied
Date: Sun, 07 Mar 2010 10:13:13 GMT
Server: Apache
Set-Cookie: ljuniq=FZwSUdeXCkSXkh1:1267956793:pgstats0:m0; expires=Thursday, 06-May-2010 10:13:13 GMT; domain=.livejournal.com; path=/
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

<h1>Access Forbidden</h1>You’ve been temporarily banned from accessing LiveJournal, perhaps because you were hitting the site too quickly. Please make sure that you’re following our <a href=’http://www.livejournal.com/bots/’>Bot Policy</a>. If you have questions, contact us at webmaster@livejournal.com with the following information: FdeXCkZwSUSXkh1 @ —.—.—.—Connection closed by foreign host.
digsite@littledeath: >

Yep, banned. I knew the code connected to LJ far more often than it needed to, but I wasn’t sure why and figured since it was still working that I could ignore that fact for a while – that was a couple years ago. The code wasn’t my creation, afterall. I sortof adopted it and all its clunkinesses.

The limit is 5 connections per second. The site get scrawled by search engine bots all the time and with the plugin connecting to LJ with every single insignificant page load, I can see that exceding the limit 100-fold. I have already edited the code and it connects only when it absolutely needs to – like during a post or edit. I asked LJ to remove the ban on my IP early, explaining the situation. Now I wait to see if my own site gets un-banned by LJ in the near future so that I can verify it is fixed. Fingers crossed.

Digsite.net Feed Change

2010-03-08T03:31:01Z

This message is primarily for digsite.net feed subscribers.

I’ve been using feedburner for years, but after my most recent K2 theme update (which was not all that recent) the feed url function call in the header changed back to the built in wordpress version.

If you’re subscribed to http://digsite.net/feed/[rss|rss2|atom] , please update it or re-subscribe to the feedburner feed. You can just point most clients to http://digsite.net and just let it pick up the atom feed on its own. Otherwise, subscribe directly to http://feeds.feedburner.com/digsite. Feedburner is using my blog’s atom feed (which supports PuSH), not rss or rss2, btw.

If you notice anything broken with my feed, please let me know! At least from this end it all looks peachy.

iPhone Emoji: Not just for the Japanese

2010-03-07T11:20:17Z

My awesome as hell iPhone app find of the week – stolen from someone else, of course.

iPhone Emoticons; available since 3.0 release but unlocked only on Japanese iphones. Find out how to unlock it. Jail-breaking not necessary.

1. Go to App Store
2. Search for “emoji”
3. Download “Emoji Free!”
4. Run it.
5. Go to Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> International Keyboards -> Japanese
6. Turn on “Emoji”
7. Exit

The emoji option won’t be visible until after the app is run.

8. delete the “Emoji Free” app. It’s done its job.

This will work with any other iphone (unlocked emoji or not), but doesn’t seem to work with other non-iphone phones in general.

Exploring ADHD: Do I really have it? (4)

2010-03-05T00:15:36Z

I think this is the last of the “Exploring ADHD” series I ended up doing here. I didn’t intend for it to become a ‘series’ but I had too much to think about, so it took several posts. I think I’ve made enough sense of this stuff to be satisfied for now. The big black obelisk in my head has morphed into an organized row of labeled boxes (or drives, har). Each box now needs to get organized further one by one. So basically the big obelisk has been divided into smaller, more manageable obelisks-ettes in boxes. There is still a mass of debris lurking in the shadows, however. I think that’s probably biochemical fog. (Every once in a while I look up from the keyboard and think; “Wow, that’s a weird way of describing it” But that’s literally how I see it in my mind’s eye.) So, moving on with the rest of my musings….

So far I’ve listened to an audiobook (my first), watched countless researchers’ presentations on their findings (there’s a lot out there), and read articles up the wazoo on this subject. But the place where I’ve found the most intriguing information is a message board filled to the brim with people who have ADHD – or as they call themselves, “Adders”. One person will post some crack-smoking lunacy about themselves and describe it in detail and ask “Does anyone else have this problem?” or “Am I the only one?”. And then the flock of Adders will swoop down on the thread to agree; “Yes me too!” or “Thank you for posting this! I had no idea anyone else had this problem!”, and so on.

I found two such threads that really hit home with me. These touched on things that I never bothered trying to share with anyone because #1, there would be no benefit to doing so and #2, people generally don’t give a shit anyway.

ADHD and Hypersensitivities

First, a definition. Hypersensitivity: Excessive sensitivity to sensations or stimuli.

After a thread erupted on the topic of hypersensitivities, someone posted the above link to an article. I read it and it is almost as if they’re talking about me. But let me personalize it a little.. here’s a short list of things that generate the kind of sensory input I equate to fingernails against a chalk board (no exaggeration).

Straight out of the article; spot on for me..

- Walking on a sticky floor
- Florescent lights (any light in my face,actually.)
- Light touch to my skin (bleaaarrgghh!)
- Tags in my shirts (I’ve had many shirts with holes where the tag used to be because I tore them out by force)
- Getting caught in the rain (I’ve learned to cope, but it’s a nasty, sticky, dirty feeling)

But wait, there’s more!

- The sound of my kids running around the house and then launching themselves and belly flopping onto the couches
- Any repetitive sounds like foot banging under the kitchen table.
- Loud TV
- Yelling (unless it’s my own voice).
- Any offensive odors in the house.
- Deliberately being touched on my arm, back, knee or thighs.

Some days my tolerance is better than others. But I generally just can’t stand this stuff.

The above vices have been with me for as long as I can remember. The one that has been with me the longest I think is being touched. If you let it linger, it makes me want to give you the finger. This doesn’t apply to kids or husband tho. And now in old age, the touch doesn’t bother me as much if it’s brief. If it isn’t brief, I can “deal with it”. I will rather be uncomfortable for a moment, than risk someone else’s feelings.

Echolalia

Now this second one probably has nothing at all to do with ADHD. At least, I’ve never read it in any official publication and I can’t think of a way that it could be connected to ADHD. But when you see 50 people on a message board say they all do it too, you gotta wonder. Obviously I’m mentioning it because I do it too.

What many peeps with ADHD claim to do is repeat what they’ve just heard. I don’t think I do this when I’m around other people, I HOPE!, but I’ve done this since I was a kid. If I hear something on TV or on the radio that I find interesting (the words and intonations, not so much the meaning) then I’ll repeat it many times. I’ll do it until I’m satisfied I’ve assimilated it. Repeating something as a way of mocking it doesn’t count. Some other folks admit to repeating what they’ve just said under their breath – like an echo. That, I don’t do.

Other blog topics that I could have written about myself:

- trouble making friends since childhood.
- trouble keeping friends since childhood.
- getting bored easily of pretty much everything.
- always looking for something new and different to occupy my interests.

The fact that I’m not the only one that does this stuff feels great to me. It’s like finally finding other members of your alien race and knowing that it’s OK to be different or weird. Same goes with my problems focusing, just not getting things completed no matter my best intentions, getting obsessed with new things every other week and running with it like some raging obsessive compulsive headcase, and then finally dropping it like a steaming lump of shit, never to look back again.

I’m not a fan of labels, especially since my daughter has a problem that affects her behavior and already gave her a reputation in school. I feel very protective of her and I don’t want her to be labeled as the “ADD child” if it’s going to put her down and aggravate the problem, but when the label lets you know you’re not alone it feels wonderful to have the label assigned. At her age, my daughter can’t appreciate it – she doesn’t even notice she has a problem – but I’ve told her she’s got a “race car” brain and needs to eat her veggies and take her vitamins to help it put on the breaks better. I’ve gotten her to eat tomato and lettuce using this tactic. Next I’ll be trying a daily Omega-3 supplement that tastes like ass. Wish me luck.

So am I convinced now that this label fits me? Let’s see… I’ve read in more than one publication that to diagnose ADHD, it’s best to speak to those close to the person who know them. Apparently the person with the ADHD is the least reliable to notice their own behaviors.

I told three people at work about what my doctor said – face to face, not via-blog. Here were their responses.

Person #1 said “I think so too” when I told her “my doctor thinks I have ADHD”.
Person #2 proceeded to tell me of his own struggles with it and mentioned he stared out of windows as a kid and wasn’t able to learn while in class, etc. Just like me!
Person #3 said “Yea, I see it.” ” …it’s hard for you to focus on anything for long, and you runaway with things too.. like that time 2 years ago when you wouldn’t stop working – even from home – even at 4 am.”

I still want to hear everything the doctor can tell me, but yes, I think I believe it. And if she changes her mind and retracts her diagnosis, I would be understandably disappointed because the removal of the label doesn’t mean there’s a removal of the problems. And without a “label” I can’t reliably look up proven ways to improve the situation with my name on them.