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adderall didn't facilitate a masterpiece
Saturday, March 12 2016
Because Dina was visiting, for breakfast Gretchen made pancakes containing berries and what she delicately dubbed "a morning stir fry." (For oft-stated reasons, I do not like the word "scramble.") Later Dina came up with ideas for where I should send my resume. Most of her ideas were journalism-related, and she thought I should check out open web developer positions at journalism sites such as Slate.com and qz.com, a site that seemed to be working very hard to identify as quirky but mind-blowingly deep. Before leaving with Gretchen for an event-filled day in Woodstock, Kingston, and Rosendale, Dina expressed dismay at how few journalists there are as old as herself. "The oldest people working at the Atlantic are in their thirties," she sighed.
For the first time since March 5th, I set out into the forest on a firewood salvaging foray. First I went to ongoing salvage up the Chamomile from the Stick Trail and cut up some smaller scraps and restacked some of the wood, a job that soon had me uncomfortably sweaty (temperatures were in the 60s). I was also feeling like perhaps I shouldn't've worked so hard so soon after being so ill. So when it came to the immediate-use salvaging part of the foray, I decided to work as close as possible to home. Most of today's 104.8 pound load came from a fairly rotten (but dry) piece of oak leaning against the stone cliffs just downstream from where the Stick Trail crosses the Chamomile. To keep from having to go up and down the steep slope back to the Stick Trail, I threw some of the pieces up to the top of the cliff. Others were too heavy for this and I had to climb partially up the cliff and stick them to a place high enough to be reached from above.
Since I would have the evening to myself, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a recreational 25 milligram dose of adderall, which (because it was time-release), I had to grind up with my mortar & pestle. This time I was careful and didn't send the little beads spraying everywhere when I opened the capsule containing them.
Within a half hour or so, the adderall took me from being a little sleepy and hungry to wide awake and not hungry at all. I didn't have a great plan for what to do with the mental focus, and at first I concentrated on the obsessive work required to clean up the messy results of putting a photograph through an online Shepard Fairey filter (the kind that produced the iconic "HOPE" image of Obama's 2008 presidential campaign). The image I wanted to give this treatment was one of a Trump supporter giving what turned out to be an ironic (but still terrifying) Hitler salute. The caption would read "Party like it's 1939." Unfortunately, the adderall didn't facilitate a masterpiece. But, in fairness, this was my first attempt at making something in the manner of Shepard Fairey.
A better use for the adderall was to download and experiment with Node.js, an application that allows one to serve web pages whose backend is written in javascript. I didn't get much beyond Hello World!, partly because it kept returning really unhelpful messages when it failed. But it was a good first step toward acquiring a valuable new skill that it a requirement of a lot of jobs I'm seeing advertised.
Tonight after Gretchen and Dina got back from dinner in Woodstock (there hadn't gone to the movie in Rosendale after all), I sat and talked with Dina about my copper pipe menorah. She was excited to learn that I might want to start making them professionally, and had lots of ideas for Judaica stores where they could be sold. She also gave me my first commission, a menorah similar to one I made for Dina as a wedding present for a Jewish woman who might be marrying a Mormon.
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