Self Portrait at 300

What a ramble.

This morning I started writing Item 1. There followed a thought pertaining to the Glycogen Hypothesis; so I made an addition to that post. Then noticed the next post would be post number 300. This fact caused me to start tracking down prior posts numbers 100 and 200. While undertaking this search, I made multiple edits to other pages. Many of them had work that had been left incomplete. Time was spent editing and making corrections. Time was also devoted to reading old posts. Much of the described activity had been completely forgotten. Did I actually do that? Returned to locating milestone posts. Post 150 was found to contain a detailed report on the time required for post creation. Began to collect similar data. Finally located all prior milestone posts and captured the URLs. Then commenced to calculate calender day intervals between milestone posts. Identified a discrepancy in my calculations. Created worksheet to resolve. Fixed that discrepancy but found another. Became frustrated with my inability to do simple math calculations and gave up. Realized it was now almost 1430. I had devoted almost 4 hours to a fruitless, meandering, set of still incomplete tasks. Exactly two sentences had been written for the start of Item 1 before my attention was captured and turned elsewhere. The majority of the time was spent performing actions which are not vital to any undertaking. Actions which are not on my to do list. Actions which are nigh well irrelevant if not absolutely useless. Am becoming increasingly disillusioned.

I have this vision of creating a scientific, data driven environment to assist in making a complete recovery. The problem is that the key operator (me) is subject to frustration and mood swings, is unable to maintain focus, becomes easily distracted, and has problems performing basic calculations. Writing this paragraph results in a strong urge to escape into the forest.

I am still telling myself fables about improvement when the data suggests very little improvement.

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I return to this draft with a query in regard to the cognitive complexity of the tasks I was performing earlier this morning. It is relatively simple for me to write a narrative of what I am experiencing at this present moment. It becomes increasingly difficult when I am trying to extract data from past documents. First need to locate the document, review it, obtain the date, calculate intervals between dates, ensure all is correct, fix errors.

I have decided I am not going anywhere until I have Item 1 completed in draft.

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Returned to work on Item 3 and realized that Item 3 was the trigger event for the entire four hour blog review. My goal was to incorporate experiential data contained in prior blog posts into the creation of the Item 3 document. This intention resulted in the chain of events described in the opening paragraph above. I have now edited the chain of events to clarify what I was doing, or was attempting to do, and to avoid the original Jack Kerouac style paragraph composed of a single run on sentence with no breaks and no punctuation and possibly no breathing or editorial thought that just continued on and on and on. And I have had to correct “Item 1” to “Item 3.” And then decided to leave the initial error in place.

The prior milestone posts are as follows:

Post 100

Post 150

Post 200

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I have another observation on these matters. First, the documentation of my discursive activity is very helpful in getting a “fix” on the problem. In reading some of my earlier posts the problematic nature of my engagement with reality is apparent. In still earlier posts this problematic effect has been edited out. I made a concerted effort to write a “good” post, one with some degree of “literary quality.” Without realizing I was doing so, I was correcting the presentation of the difficulties I experience daily. I painted a “good” portrait of events. This was due to the attempt to create a quality “product.” It likely also served to burnish my own ego in that it delivered a positive self-impression. But it constitutes an incorrect portrait.

One final thought. People pay vast amounts of money in order to gain a unique experience and perspective on life. Those persons confronted with a truly unique lived experience simply wish to return to normalcy.