blog (January, 2004)
coffee
Everything becomes agitated; ideas are set in motion like army battalions on the battlefields, and then the battle begins. Memories charge forward, banners flying; the light cavalry of comparisons progresses at a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic hastens into the fray with its cannons and cartridge....
-- Balzac
I haven't figured out coffee yet.
I never had a taste at all for the stuff until one day in Ireland (2002 - November mos'likely?) when I downed 8 or 9 cappucinos in the last 45 minutes of the workday. The bulletproof buzz walking through streets and feeling the -- do! do! city-action, nature alive and people zig-zagging about -- hooked me, and the stuff coarsed through me for the next month or two, til I broke the habit at the end of my trip.
With brewing machines at home and at work now, I've been drinking the stuff on and off for the last few months. Mostly on. So easy to get yanked into the rushabout frenetic ideaflurry that moves my surrounding world like a machine, makes every crumpled up paper go straight into the basket, and loves checking things off of the to-do list. A cup or two too many, though, and words rush out my mouth before I've put them in the right order, and I get nervous, shaky and lose grip on flowsmoothness.
Lately, though, I'm beginning to find tea a better choice on weekdays. Coffee seems to solidify possible stresses at work. Come Friday when pressures recede, joe charges the weekends with electric relaxation.
Striving for the very edge of the untipped balance in everything...
a case of the mondays
My workworld is spinning. Administering a Windows computer network is something like raking a cheese-grater back and forth across your face. I'm becoming more and more proficient, but it just hurts more. I'm constantly talking about trying to make the infrastructure here more efficient and self-administering, but every time I try to concentrate on one task, ten others present themselves.
Today has been virus/worm/trojan/etc day. That's not a hell of an exciting day, but I chalk it up, as usual, to teaching me a bit more, and forcing me to button down the systems here further. We have a long way to go though; I refuse to let things teeter constantly on the edge of disaster. Well, maybe disaster is an exaggeration. Right now the status bar is yellow and half-full at "bothersome and prohibitively time-consuming." Got to get back to green.
MyCoy Tyner's Enlightenment is knocking down doors through my headphones and into my brain.
hypergraphia & manic-depression
Another thing I learned from my illness was the experience -- the direct, physical experience -- of having ideas pour in that fast, and to feel as if they were coming from somewhere else. That's an experience that's worth everything. It's worth all the misery.
Tell me what it felt like.
Oh, my God. I mean, I remember one time, it was early in the morning. I had to pick up some bread. As I was driving, everything looked different. Everything had this extra significance. You know when you're in love with someone, if you see them in a big crowd, they have a black line around them -- they stand out. [That morning,] everything caught my attention -- the arches of phone lines, the arches of windows, the tops of buildings, and especially trees. Every time there was a [traffic] light, I was writing on my arm. I was watching how the things in the near distance were moving differently from things in the far distance. What struck me was that it was incredibly beautiful.
-- Writer's block sign of deeper problems, Interview with Dr. Alice Flaherty, Harvard Neurologist with a compulsive writing problem
