12/7/06
Since this is my blog and I get to be self-referential, navel-gazing, and woefully overestimate my own importance, I'd like to do a two-month check-in on My Adventures With Speed. It has been about ten weeks since I boarded the non-stop Dexedrine train bypassing ADD Central and Fatigue Hollow, and I have to say, it has been a wonderful ride.
First, the cons. There are a lot of pills to take, and I'm not even taking them all. It's supposed to be two pills in the morning, two at noon, and two at 4pm. I usually forego the late afternoon speed, or break a pill in half. Why? Because if you don't, you can find yourself at 3am wondering the name of the guy who had the locker next to you in 10th grade.
When they say Dexedrine stops narcolepsy, they're not frickin' kidding. I'd compare it with that crazy buzz you'd get in college during an all-nighter when your second wind kicks in. Your next day's exhaustion can be cured by more Dexedrine, of course, but that's a spiral with an unhappy ending.
One more thing; sometimes the drug can make you irritable, with a short fuse. I've had to apologize to Tessa a couple of times when the intensity of my drive has collided with hers. Cooler heads prevail mere seconds later, but it's best to head that off at the pass.
Other than that, my tour with Dexy's Midnight Runners has been a smashing success. I used to be routinely daunted by the big projects in my life; now I long to be in the middle of them. I used to have a 2-4pm crapout that would send me into a Coriolis Effect of lethargic misery; now I'm swinging for the fences.
Here's the best part - you'd think a drug that makes you concentrate better would send you down several rabbit holes, or intensifying your mundane tasks at the price of missing out on the greater sense of the world. It might force you to become the Anti-Buddhist. Yet this hasn't happened. My environs, the beauty and decay of the world, the hours I spend with Lucy, even daydreaming has been put into sharper focus.
Perhaps it's just having the energy, simple as that. The curtains of the world rise easily for the person who isn't struggling to stay awake during the previews.
Nice. But agh, why is it that lately, everyone my age (mid 30s) has been talking about all the pills they have to take? What are we, all 65??
I have to take two vitamins because my iron was too low at my last checkup, plus other things...it's just too much to keep track of. I didn't have to take any pills in my 20s. No one warned me that it would change in a matter of a few years!
Oh woe is me. Woe woe woe.
damn, sign me UP.
A UNC grad tells of his search for peace and a better life, which began at Chapel Hill:
http://www.mcleanbible.org/uploads/TheStoryOfAChangedLife.pdf
Copy and paste if the link doesn't take you there.
Wow, I want me some o' that stuff.
Ian, does it exacerbate anxiety? (I have AD and PD, for which I take various meds.) I don't drink caffeine, for example, because it makes me jittery. But I do have pretty awful attention and drowsiness problems at work; my mind wanders and zaps all over the place and I don't get much done at times. Bleah.
One pill makes you shorter, and one pill makes you tall..... 8-/
The effect of the medication, as I've always described it, is "sobering". The interesting thing is that ADHD has a lot of warning signs that seem pretty random, and one of them is the number of times you've been in a car crash.
You and I, and other people with disorders and diseases, have physical, biological problems. A professional athlete with a broken leg has a serious problem. A writer with ADHD also has a problem, and both of them can be dealt with in the material, biological world.
Since I've gone on medication, I sleep better at night, and, since my time spent working is actually productive, I relax more when I'm not working, I'm more at ease when I've put a project away, I understand better what my time frames are... It has not led to any sense of inner peace but it has put me in a position where I can make decisions for my life without the constant background noise, like mental cataracts.
Matt, I assume you posted the story of a person finding Christ as a response to Ian's medication, and if that's not right, I apologize. But if you did... what the hell does religion have to do with brain chemistry?
Damn, that sounds like some awesome stuff. How do I get some? Seriously, I have 3 kids and a husband who works until 9 or 10 almost every night and it's getting harder and harder to keep my head above the water.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dextroamphetamine
I keep thinking there has to be a catch, but I'm not seeing it yet. Energy and focus with no major downside? In the words of Jack Nicholson's character in Easy Rider, "I sure could use a little of that."
jesus was totally on speed. that's how he did that whole bread and fish thing. everybody knows that.
Cool! Congrats.
Sean, it wasn't offered as a substitute for prescribed medication, but rather as a prescription for joy and contentment for which there is no substitute.
Well, it seems to *you* that it is joy and contentment for which there is no substitute, but I suppose I could say there is medication which will help you understand that there is no supernatural existence, that those voices you hear are in your head, and that the good feeling you get is chemically no different than large quantities of chocolate. But I supposed if I insisted there is joy and contentment that exceeds religion, that would be considered disrespectful and presumptuously asinine.
after reading yesterdays entry i think there is also joy and contentment to be found with the use of a padsicle. and you cant find them at church.
Me lovey the speedy! All that Ian said, plus the side effects tend to decrease pretty quickly. A big change since the 1950s and 60s is time release technology. These days you can take an effective dose without the big jolt -- or crash. Also reduces the risk of things like seizure and compulsion to offer passionate detailed critiques of family, colleagues, and blogs.
After reading the comments yesterday, I decided to read Matt's link. I was curious about it anyway.
I respect Matt as a commenter and I do not believe he was meaning to rub anyone the wrong way there. I have a ton of frustrations about myriad religious attitudes and actions, but strive to respect the profound need that motivates religious seeking.
The link in and of itself, I confess, kind of gave me the heebie-jeebies, mainly because of the speaker's eagerness to denigrate, dismiss, and ridicule Judaism to a Christian audience (the speaker had been brought up as a Conservative Jew), as though Judaism flat cannot offer up the same depth as a spiritual practice that Christianity by its very nature (it seems to him) embodies.
This speaker undermines his efforts to be persuasive by dismissing the entire history of Jewish theological thought (which has a few hundred years on Christianity, if I remember correctly) as simplistic hokum primarily motivated by self-interest.
If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If your only tool is Jesus, you can't have a meaningful conversation with anyone except other people weilding their Jesus tool.
Wait, I didn't mean for it to come out sounding like that. Anyhoo.
I've always been fascinated by the catalog of ills that being washed in the blood of the Lamb has fixed. What's the physical mechanism involved? Does 'faith' -- the mental/spiritual phenomenon, not the abstract concept -- have such inevitably salubrious effect?
And though I can't hardly open my mouth without mocking someone, I don't really mean to mock Christians -- I have an honest curiosity about how faith in undecidable propositions can have such positive effects. The problem for anyone applying the scientific method to issues like this is that all undecidable propositions are logically equivalent. So you get in trouble with Christians when you assign equivalence to the statements "Christ is the only way to salvation" and "Scooby Doo is a real dog that lives in a different dimension."
Since the pinnacle of 20th Century Science is the Rumsfeld taxonomy of knowledge (Knowns, Known Unknowns, Unknown Unknowns) by way of Heisenberg and Gödel, I'm willing to accept that it can be beneficial to believe things that can't be proven true or measured, because a lot of real things can't be fully understood. What I can't accept, personally, is that accepting Christ as my personal savior is the only way. For two reasons: I have been amply exposed to people trying to persuade me of this my entire life, and never been persuaded, and I can't see how one unprovable proposition is better than another. People live their lives believing all sorts of crazy shit, and it's the crazy shit they believe in that they hold dearest.