Notices by Don Romano 🍹 (thj@mastodon.cloud), page 21

Oh, I see what's going on now...

My digestive system is pulling shit on me again.

Occasionally, when I take Ritalin, it has no effect until, hours later, it siddenly kicks in.

I've always had a very slow digestive system, and bowel movements are especially infrequent now that I've had gastric bypass surgery and am eating these ridiculously tiny meals.

I can easily go two days without a bowel movement now. It was actually more frequent when I ate more junk, which gave me a loose stomach.

I tried to fall asleep for 30 minutes, but it wasn't happening. Am now in the living room wrapped in my banket and snacking on some nuts. Sometimes, eating some calorie rich food can help me sleep.

My braon has some explaining to do. It slept very badly last night, but refused to take a nap earlier today; and is now refusing to sleep. What... The...

Just went through a few hours of a recording of myself sleeping. Very revealing. My sleep is basically horrible. My own snoring keeps waking me up. It doesn't seem that I stop breathing, but it definitely sounds very uncomfortable. I'm going to try a sleeping position I tested earlier today by trying to breathe limply to provoke a snore, and checking which position provoked it less than the others.

I'm feeling an increasing amount of despair at the fact that Google Search is no longer the helpful source of information it once was. Due to my ADHD and medication schedule, I have many questions that need to be answered more urgently and in more detail than my monthly psychiatrist appointments allow for.

Does anyone have any tips on how to teach yourself the habit of checking what time it is?

Having all these alarms on my cellphone just to remember basic things is driving me nuts.

I have ADHD and I've recently started on medication, but it doesn't teach you basic life skills like knowing the right moment to look at the clock.

I mean, if you do it all the time, it'll just feel like time is passing too slowly, but if you don't do it often enough, you'll forget something important.

One thought has been haunting me recently:

"Why does society make such demands on me that I must take this ADHD drug and endure all its side effects in order to be a functioning member of it? I am now the person I am required to be, but this feels so very wrong."

The drug helps me with issues that I personally care about too, but would I pay this price if I was independently wealthy and had no need to work? I'm not convinced.

@skypage In other news, results of Ritalin have been more predictable today. I've made sure to take every dose with a meal, and I've also spaced them out further. I can definitely feel the peaks and valleys more now, but I suspect I can manage, if I strategically intersperse Ritalin with coffee, which I have almost but not quite accomplished today, because I didn't time things quite right.

@skypage I've been trying to add some more fat content to my diet. You have a good point about the nuts. They are high-fat but are not associated with weight gain and have a good amount of fiber.

Does anyone happen to know if the function plotted in blue has a name other than "integral of two adjoined and equal but opposite triangular functions centred around zero"?

It looks vaguely like an off-axis sine wave, but it can't be, because sin'(x) = cos(x), and the derivative of my function is a modified triangular function.

I haven't yet looked at how I'd calculate a closed-form integral. I might need to do it for each segment, since the triangular function is not continuous.

@skypage I'm getting plenty of fiber and fluids. More fiber than most people would get, I suspect. The crackers I eat for most of my smaller meals have a 25% fiber content. My gut was never very fast to begin with. When I took Tramadol, an opiate, for my herniated disc in 2017, it basically brought my digestive system to a halt for the entire time I took it, which was several weeks.

@skypage I do. Thing is, I eat nearly the same things at the same times every day except for dinner. I'm beginning to suspect constipation. After I began taking Ritalin, I've noticed some clear signs of that, and I suspect this, ironically, is also causing delays in the absorption of the Ritalin itself. Yesterday, I had very poor effect for hours, followed by an overpowering one, as.of I had taken a large dose all at once.

Yeah, Google Search is still shit. It feels like Altavista did back in the day. Someone needs to disrupt the hell out of Google. They're Microsoft now.

I swear to god...

It's like all the Ritalin I took today got caught up on the way, and then suddenly came loose around 16.30.

I've been having this insanely drugged feeling since then, and I've never been so wired and tense in my life.

I suspect my stomach may have pulled this shit on me before, and that's why my dosage schemes keep falling apart unpredictably.

I'm getting plenty of fiber. I'm staying hydrated. I'm eating at predictable times. What else can I do?

My day so far has just been a long series of "feeling out of it" moments and confusion.

@commandlinekid I do love a good conspiracy theory.

If this coffee that I'm having now suddenly kicks me into action, my only question is: Why the *bleep* didn't the coffee I had a few hours ago do that for me?

@natevw I have these checklists that I answer. It's just been a mess today. Varying degrees of sleep deprivation is currently my strongest suspect. I have a tendency to wake up a bit too early, but when I shift my bedtime back, I just wake up even earlier, so it seems my body just doesn't want to sleep for longer than exactly 7.0 hours...

@natevw I'm trying to actually draw conclusions, but when the effectiveness keeps changing...

@natevw I've actually been able to tell quite clearly when it does. The problem is that I follow plan X on day 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, and get different results every day.