A Splintered Mind

Photo by Blake Patterson In the last week of June the internet news sites were all buzzing about “Digital Dementia”. Oh noes! Your kids’ brains be shrivelin’. Watch out! It’s the cell phone’s fault! From what I’ve read, “Digital Dementia” was coined by a German author selling a book and made popular in tech savvy South Korea. Yet despite the rise of book reading in youth demographics due in part to the soaring popularity of ebooks, or the rise in communication & empathy skills because of—not despite of—all that abbreviated texting, it is time for another luddite march on technology. Horrors! Your kids don’t remember phone numbers anymore. Burn the iPhones! Unplug their Androids! Wait. Didn’t we grow up alright with speed dial? I seem to recall phone numbers still just fine. But here’s the trick: I don’t have to. My smartphone remembers all those numbers for me. I can use my mind now to learn Japanese, memorize tunes on my ocarina, or learn Markdown syntax. Important detail...

Wensday - Entry 33 ⚡ I have to admit I'm a bit discouraged today. I seem to be spirally downward this year. 92 days of flu…a random car accident that put me in physical therapy for the next three months…now the spiffy replacement minivan is breaking down. That's half a year wasted to infirmity and trauma. I have so much to do, and money that needs to be earned. I'm tired of the sob story. I want the success story. I keep moving forward to it, but days like today put my progress at a crawl. At least I can still crawl, though, right⸮  Enforced optimism is tough when life beats you up, but the alternative is to quit. Quitting ensures defeat. I think I far prefer the story of endless struggle over ignominious failure, so I'll keep fighting.  Sometimes people think I've got it easy because I try to be cheerful and cheeky, but all my accomplishments over Depression, ADHD & Chronic Motor Tic Disorder  come with a lot of fighting. This week I got KO'd, but the final...

I want to tell you a story about my hair. It's been on my mind a lot lately. Why am I so fixated with it? Why do I make such a big deal about it? Who really cares? Could it be that the story about my hair is really a story about ADHD? When I was 18–19 I loved long, tall hair. Hey, it was the 80s. I would dye it with mousse (metallic copper was my favorite) and then hang out at new wave nightclubs. I could easily spend 30 minutes on my hair. I didn't think much of it. If you wanted a certain look you had to put in the work is how I saw it. And boy, did I work at it. With an Aiwa portable tape player at my side, and headphones on my ears, my life was a late night MTV video. Then I discovered I had other things I liked to do. Things like illustration & writing began to capture my attention. Then there was school and freelance work. Short hair cuts with a little flair only took five minutes tops to get ready. Who had time for anything more? That attitude served me well through ...

My plans to participate in Sketchcrawl #40 were delayed due to the Brownie's severe seizure. I was a bit too preoccupied to think about drawing something in the hospital. The Leprechaun was too stressed to pose, and the Brownie lay on her bed, exhausted. So I drew the next day when things were back to normal.  This is the first time I have drawn in my Moleskine in a small ice age. Drawing straight with a pen is challenging, but for some reason I felt confident enough to do it. I need to this again and again. After years of struggling to draw despite my tic disorder, I gave up in 2005. Now I'm trying to draw again—starting from scratch. I did take time to snap a photo of my girl as she lay there recovering. There was just enough light cast from the oxygen monitor to illuminate her sweet face. At that point, we were through the hardest part and were awaiting the doctor's release. She's fine now, as if nothing had happened. My heart, however, still pounds with worry.

Thursday - Entry 32: I have finished the research part of my blog book. This is important because I foolishly stated in March that I would not cut my hair until I finished my book. I had received a particularly bad haircut at that time and wished I had gone to my regular hair stylist. Unfortunately, she was a bit more expensive than I could afford after three months of illness, so I thought I’d give myself an incentive. Then I got into a car accident which totaled my minivan, scrambled my brains, and gave me some prolapsed disks in my back & neck. Three months later, the only thing I had accomplished with this noble, nay, manly sacrifice was to grow my hair. Lots of hair. Luxurious, shiny hair. In 100°F weather, I am wishing I was less manly. In fact, after riding my bike to the physical therapists yesterday, my hair curled up on the sides in stringy wings. So cute & feathery. Like a heavy set Leif Garrett. The secretary at the physical therapists’— who was wearing a neon pink...

Update 2016: This article was featured in my book "Saying NO to Suicide" , with added commentary. Recently Apple has made changes to Siri to address the problem of suicide. Let’s take a look at those changes and see if they will be effective. Using Siri can be fun and even useful, but one of the downsides to Siri is that everything you ask her is sent to a server out across the Internet through the wires, switches, and tubes where your question is parsed by Apple’s servers before an answer is sent back to you. This is a downside because the “conversation” is often a stilted one like those you have on walkie-talkies. You need to keep your query simple so Siri won’t be confused, and you have to wait for her to get back to you. If the internet is down, you’re out of luck. The upside to all of this is that Apple gets to look over the types of questions people are seeking answers for. Apparently, a lot of people are asking Siri for help with suicide. Saying “I want to kill my b...

I may have been kidding in the above video, but I do like to walk & read at the same time. I especially like to do it when I feel bored and antsy late at night. It's a trick I learned from an ADHD advisor in college. He had found he concentrated best when he was in motion (hence our mutual ADHD love for pacing while talking on the phone), so he would grab his text books and go out to the track and walk around it while studying. I've achieved the same result on treadmills—an activity usually so boring I'd rather have my ears pulled off with dental floss than do even five minutes of it. I found, though, that when equipped with a good book on my iPad (or with a very loaded Instapaper account), I could walk for 45-60 minutes on a treadmill without even noticing. When studying Japanese or other material, memorizing while also walking briskly was very effective. I found clarity and peace while doing both tasks. You can read more about it here . Hey, if it's on Wikiped...