A Splintered Mind

A month has passed since I last updated my journal. I'm afraid progress has been in short supply, but understanding my obstacles and deciding how to surmount them has made this writing process invaluable. Reach out to me on Facebook or Twitter if you've got something to say about what I've written. (Mobile browsers only display the first page. Please view the text entry after the embedded PDF if you don’t wish to download it.)   25 OCTOBER 2022 BOOKWORK 10: It’s been a month since I last checked in. How have I been doing? The website project has come to a stop. I need to fiddle with some settings with my ISP, something I haven’t done to this extent before, so instead of charging in, I sit down and read a book. More on that later. WaiMin has been stuck in revisions, but that isn’t a bad thing. Co-writing has been challenging, and story problems I would have worked out on my own before have become obstacles. It doesn’t help that Post-COVID has ...

Let’s celebrate my one year anniversary since getting COVID–19! 🎉 I know people who felt that COVID was a pernicious plot by politicians to put down the populace. I know others who believed that nobody would ever get the virus if they were vaccinated, and anybody not getting vaccinated was trying to kill them. Because of this polarization, I have a hard time talking to people about my experience with Long COVID, or Post-COVID Syndrome as I prefer to call it. Although I have found sympathetic ears out there, they aren’t the norm. The anti-vaccine folks look down on me for masking up and getting vaccinated, or they shun me for admitting that COVID–19 was far worse than a mild cold. If I acknowledge the dangers of COVID–19 in anyway, I’m a compliant sheep to them. On the other side, the pro-vaccine cheer team pretentiously lecture me on the importance of being vaccinated when I tell them I got COVID. I suppose their reasoning is that I couldn...

Come explore with me the strange intersection of pants and ADHD. Last July, I lost three pairs of pants. As usual, I posted to social media to make light of it, but just between you and me, I stayed up fairly late searching the house like a ninja in search of those pants. Hiding my presence, I moved into almost every room in my home, making no sound as I lifted things, rearranged them, and rifled through them hoping those pants would turn up. I didn’t search the fridge—because that would have been silly—but I searched everywhere else except my roommates’ rooms. It was possible that somebody absconded with my pants, but it was more likely I put them somewhere stupid, right? Besides, I could just imagine the conversation when I accidentally woke my roommates up as I searched under their pillows and bedsheets. “Douglas, why are you dressed like a ninja?” “Go back to sleep. You’re dreaming,” I’d say while making ninja-like hypnosis...