Lou Pickney's Online Commentary
Gaining Focus
Sunday
February 17, 2013
"And now the state line felt like the Berlin Wall"
Death Cab For Cutie "Crooked Teeth"
As I begin writing this, I do so with the desperation of Leonard Shelby in Memento, trying to record my thoughts before they cascade into the blur of half-pondered thoughts and histories, plummeting into the abyss of time with the speed of gravity. Poof, thought to concept to idea to the scattershot distraction of a thousand new thoughts competing for my attention.
Note: this is what happens when I haven't taken my Adderall. I'm considerably better as a news producer with it -- the ability to concentrate on the task at hand is much easier when you can actually focus long enough to accomplish your goal before moving on to the next objective. Getting it prescribed is a pain because of its potential for abuse, but it has made a world of difference for me and has been well worth all the hoops I had to jump through to get my doctor to sign off on it.
Last week I didn't have any to take for a few days because my pharmacy inexplicably ran out of it in their stock, which was more than slightly frustrating but outside of my control. Next time I'll make damn sure they don't have it backordered before I drop off my script. But I had to deal with it and my work was notably weaker as a result. In a related note, does this make me a hypocrite if I criticize pro athletes for taking PEDs? Probably.
On the flip side, Adderall kills my creativity. If someone turns down the faucet and the waterfall of 10,000 ideas a minute is suddenly cut to 100, you're going to have less to choose from... that's just the reality of it. I made those numbers up; I can't quantify it, but it's very real. It makes me wonder how I ever got anything finished en route to my college diploma. To point, I have dozens of short stories that I wrote the first 2-3 pages for in college and my early post-UE days saved away in my archives that I started and then abruptly stopped as I became distracted over and over by the Next Big Thing.
You would think that ADHD medicine would make me write more on here, but the inverse is true: if nothing from the smaller pond of ideas jumps out at me as a worthwhile or compelling topic, I'm less motivated to start writing. Of course, the flip side is that it takes me considerably longer to write when I'm not properly medicated, so this column will probably take me 3-4 times longer to complete than it would otherwise. But that doesn't matter, since if I never start writing a given column, the hypothetical time savings are immaterial.
I've made some design tweaks to the look of this site. It took some consideration to find the right shade of purple: #996699. I didn't want it to be too dark, like the Baltic and Mediterranean Avenue purple properties in Monopoly, but also not so light that it would look pink. But I found something that works: the hex code #996699, which is kind of like powder blue, subtle yet highly effective. Has the name powder purple been taken yet? If not, that's what I decree #996699 should be: powder purple.
Meanwhile, at least for now, I have a giant photo of my brother Matt's dog Titus laying out on the backyard deck up on the front page. It's from August 2008, and I ran across it while looking through some old photos I have saved on my computer. Inspiration struck and I slapped it up there along with the background color change and the header redesign.
I'm not 100% sold on the font just yet for the header, and I went through a bunch of them, but it's good enough for the short-term. Maybe the medium is the message, but the words are what I want: Writer, Journalist, Analyst, Unapologetically Headstrong. That's probably as good of a summation of myself as I'm going to be able to come up with, at least for now.
My 2013 New Year's Resolution of writing something new on here at least once a week didn't make it through mid-January. Guess that makes it like how most of them usually turn out. So it goes.
Between last night and this morning, I finally watched the film The Hangover Part II. You know how something can be built up too much to the point where it's almost impossible to meet your expectations? This was the inverse of that: I had heard so many people dog it that I never bothered to see it, even when it hit Redbox. Meeting the legacy of the original was a near impossible task, and to be sure this film was not as good as the first one... but it was very funny. At least I thought so, and I was expecting a dropoff like Caddyshack II based on what I had heard.
I also saw an episode of the MTV show Buckwild for the first time today. By the low standards of Contrived Reality television it was actually pretty entertaining. It's probably going to be in my best interest to learn the names of the cast members since I suspect I haven't written my last article about one of them getting arrested. You think I'm joking? I can't share specifics because it's privileged information, but believe me when I tell you that this article is probably the most widely-read thing I've written online this year that wasn't on Draft King.
It's worth noting that where I stayed last night in Proctorville, Ohio is the Verizon Dead Zone. No 4G, no 3G, no texting, no phone signal. Cross the Ohio River into West Virginia and, like magic, I can stream HD quality movies on my phone. In some ways it was somewhat refreshing to be "off the grid" and free to relax for awhile, but the flip side to that is not knowing if something truly urgent needs to be addressed. But that's the reality of how things are with the cell phone territory system that's currently in place.
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