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brain capacity under known observation
Monday, March 21 2016
Just before 1:00pm today, I ground up 25 milligrams of time-release Adderall, mixed it with hot water, and drank it. That's the way I've been doing my weekly dose of Adderall of late. I had a job interview at 2:00pm this afternoon that would involve some sort of interactive skill test on a site called collabedit.com, and I didn't want my social anxiety to get in the way of a good performance. Then again, I wasn't entirely sure how Adderall works with my neurochemistry.
It wasn't long into the interview before I was given my test. The idea was that, given a canvas size, I was supposed to compute the dimensions of an image scaled to completely fit on that canvas and the coordinates of the upper left hand corner. I stared at the code and thought and then thought of the interviewer on the other end of the Skype connection and my brain just froze. I couldn't stop thinking about the waiting interviewer, and those thoughts used all the brain capacity I needed to solve the problem. Eventually I came up with a solution, which I reworked as I discussed it with the interviewer. In the end it was wrong because I'd placed the image within the canvas instead of expanding it beyond the canvas to fit, and my brain couldn't figure out how to make the change to get it right while the interviewer was there (probably tapping his fingers). I've encountered the problem of being unable to perform while being observed many times. If there is any complexity to a problem at all, I need to be able to solve it on my own. Frequently what happens is that I'll be trying to solve something while on Skype with a colleague, they'll have to take a call, and then immediately (once the pressure is off) I'll solve it in seconds. Perhaps this is a characteristic of mild Asperger's syndrome, but the task of maintaining a live social interaction is too taxing of my logical facilities for me to perform elaborate logical feats before a live (or otherwise expectant) audience. (Oddly, though, this isn't true of my linguistic capabilities; I'm usually at my funniest — and humor is the ultimate expression of linguistic power — when I have an audience.)
Suffice it to say, the interview did not end on a good note. It left me feeling stupid and somewhat fraudulent. Admittedly, the company I'd been applying to work for wasn't exactly inspiring; it involved the printing of baby pictures on sleeping bags among other things. But to dismiss it at this point is sour grapes; I would've gladly taken that job. The only thing keeping me from it was my inability to perform graphics mathematics before a live audience.
Gretchen had been excited about this job interview, so I had to break the bad news to her. She was sympathetic (as one would want a wife to be), but I still felt fragile and damaged.
In an effort to regain some control of my life's story, I immediately turned my attention to the living room, which needed to be prepared for painting later this week. On the occasional winters our house has suffered ice damming (which has been, on average, every other winter — and hasn't included this one), water had entered the house beneath the living room collar tie nearest the bottom of the west roof valley. From there, it's gradually delaminated the drywall and caused occasional problems with dripping form the top of the window below. This afternoon, I used an oscillating tool to remove a large rectangle of drywall between the collar tie and the window below. Then I covered the framing beneath the collar tie with tar, and places strips of polyethylene foam in the tar in a triangular pattern, directing any water that might flow out from beneath the collar tie to central location. At that central location, I attached a brass fitting as a funnel into a narrow piece of polyethylene tube. I then drilled a series of holes through the framing so that tube would end up in the middle of the top of the window. The idea is for the tube to collect any water resulting from ice damming and direct it to a place where I can put a bucket. Short of completely redoing the roof, this is the only way to manage the problem.
At 5:00pm, I drove down to Ray & Nancy's house in Old Hurley to meet up with Nancy so we could go to another life drawing class at the Shirt Factory in Midtown, Kingston. (Ray had to work and couldn't come.) I was still feeling bad from that job interview, so I'd brought a travel mug containing grapejuice spiked with gin.
Initially, not many people turned up for the living drawing class. But several showed up late and there ended up being at least six of us. The model was a middle-aged Asian guy in reasonably-good shape. Unfortunately, he didn't hold particularly still, and, because they kept changing, I had problems getting his eyes to look right. Still, the Boschian hellscape I produced tonight was my best so far:
Later, back home with Gretchen, she and I watched the first episode of the second season of Better Call Saul. I loved how psychological it was. Also, pro tip: if Mike Ehrmantraut tells you to do something, it's best if you just do it.
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