I could explain the lame title of this post with an equally lame joke: something along the lines of “Like it? It took me a whole year to think it up.”
Or I could say that I chose it to reflect the average frequency of my postings.
The truth is that I started with the title. I know, that’s where you, the reader, started it, but as the writer I can’t start there, because I’m not one of
those Mozart-freak-genius types who have the entire symphony composed in their heads before they pick up a quill. I can’t name this before it’s born – “I’ve always liked Christopher….” I must first meet this post, and that only comes after the long and painful labor rife with expletives and a desire for medication. Then, if I am lucky, the perfect title may perhaps coyly reveal itself from behind the corner of a convoluted paragraph, temptingly adorable. I type it at the top, and just as I hit POST it morphs into overly precious with a wink and a sickening giggle, but I keep it because some part of me still believes it will appear clever one day.
But I wasn’t planning to create an actual post; I was just idly testing my account to see if it was active after all this time, and replacing the prompt word “Title” seemed to be as good a test as any, so I thought up that scintillating humdinger of “Blog Post 2016” and began to type it into the title box.
B…..
L…..
It took so long for those first two keystrokes to travel the path from external keyboard up the Brontosaurus-tail-cable to my laptop screen that feared I might have to change the title to “Blog Post 2017.” Something was gumming up the works, and for once, it wasn’t my brain. I hovered, waiting. Accept my offering, blessed Motherboard….The suspense reached cinematic levels, early 1980s minus the green ASCII-font text; one of those close-up shots where we await the computer’s response, all eyes fixed on the cursor, waiting for it…to…reveal…the…message….
TOTAL-WORLD-ANNIHILATION-SEQUENCE: ACTIVATE?: Y/N_
The movie lingers for the ironic moment of the cursor blinking in indifferent silence….
No, not today! I’m going to resist the urge to hurl this ancient laptop across the room – though with tethered keyboard it would make an awesome spectacle – and instead be The Bigger Person. Yes, I’m fully aware I am the only person in this scenario; that’s what makes the tantrum a viable option in the first place. But no, here, with nobody watching (nor reading, in all probability) I will instead calmly pause the passionate artistry of creating this test page, and look for computer applications I can close in order to coax some speed out of this machine.
B…..R……B…….
Back, and trying again. Things got infinitely better once I closed my email. The process of closing it was, like the typing, aggravatingly slow, thanks to a brilliant upgrade I’d made to my email a couple of years ago. At the urging of my husband, who actually cares if the entire world knows our entire life, I added extra security layers to my email account. It worked; now my mail is Top-Secret from myself, securely hidden behind an error message about a server. Hillary Clinton keeps calling me to ask how she can get an account just like it.
Since I can read my email on my iPad, I’ve been steadfastly ignoring the MacBook email problem for the past two years, save for my genius plan of waiting for it to serendipitously fix itself in some future upgrade. Two years after implementing this method, I’m slowly embracing the reality that the solution lies in me actually doing something.
I suspect fixing it involves having a Top-Secret security text message sent to my cell phone. It just so happens that I’ve misplaced my cell phone and therefore its contents are also Top Secret at this time. For consistency’s sake, the same serendipity problem-solving method outlined above is the one I’ve put in place to locate the phone. Phone Progress Report: Three weeks and counting!
So the slowness of my computer is the result of the poor thing choking on the massive message backlog in the MacBook Mail queue. Cue music: “I Am the Very Model of a MacBook E-Mail Message Mess!” Alas, clicking on anything, like “Ignore,” or “Retry” or “QUIT THIS GODDAMNED BROKEN EMAIL THAT ALWAYS AUTOMATICALLY LAUNCHES AT STARTUP EVEN THOUGH I’VE CHANGED THE SETTINGS IN THREE DIFFERENT PLACES TO MAKE IT NOT DO THAT GODBLESSITFUCKINGDAMN!!” unleashes a flashback of calendar-alert reminders, ping, ping, ping. It’s a hideous rapid-fire sequence of old dental appointments, school concerts, other people’s birthdays, sign-up deadlines, and all the other obligations I’ve ever asked my computer to scold me about. Press key, induce panic attack.
That feature is new since the last upgrade, and I don’t much care for it. As with all the email problems, I have waved it away with a big old “FQ.” That’s for Force Quit, as in, “You don’t need to run this application; these are not the emails you are looking for.”
So it looks like my test page really wants to be a full-fledged entry. And I’m willing to indulge. I’ve missed this whole blogging business (ha, ha, business – good one). Yes, it’s got great acoustics, being all big and empty of readers. It didn’t matter because I only ever do this because I love the sound of my own writing voice bouncing back at me.
But the entries had been getting progressively less funny. And I care deeply about my audience. If I wasn’t making myself laugh, then what was the point? I mean, I fervently hope for laughs from you, accidental reader out there in random Internet space, but they’re hard to hear. If I am laughing I can pretend that you are, too, and that makes me happy. Making my future self laugh is pretty cool, too. And I wasn’t laughing; Future-Now-Past-Self (damn, that’s complicated) was just reading, then scrolling, then wincing and moving on. My posts all seemed to trend towards…random medical complaints. My blog had become the grumpy old lady at the wedding reception that you get stuck sitting next to and never figure out exactly how she is related to anybody.
I think it got that way because I was attempting to put this blog in a compartment. This was supposed to be my ADD blog, for an ADD audience. I had another blog, supposedly devoted to my life in general, but it had started as part of a silly fandom and thus the chronology of public posts was peppered with friends-only entries. I’d become uncomfortable adding to it; I felt I was just adding dots for readers to connect Actual Me to all the Weird I’ve ever posted on the Internet. My readership was never more than a dozen, but I fretted all the same.
The ADD blog was always going to be anonymous, because I didn’t feel – still don’t feel – terribly comfortable revealing this fact to those who know me save for my husband and kids. I fear being accused of copping out, accepting a fad diagnosis, being lazy, needlessly medicating, etc. I wanted to vent about that in this blog. I think I did, somewhere in this blog, because this was that blog, The Brain Fog Blog, a blog about ADD, specifically, my personal journey through an ADD diagnosis and the resultant changes in my life strategies.
Yes, I was trying to focus my blogging, at the same time that I was trying to focus myself. 
The result, oddly enough, was altogether too much focus. The blog pinpointed down into sexy sentences such as these:
“I got a couple of whiteboard weekly calendars – one for the kitchen, one for the bathroom mirror – but it seems I only update them every other week.”
“10 mg less didn’t seem to change much, so at the next appointment I asked to go down another 10.”
“Too headachy, tired, etc. this morning to accomplish the original list of tasks slated for today…”
The last post even included some commentary on the state of my gastrointestinal tract. Why I thought anyone cared isn’t even worth pondering, because I was probably well aware nobody would. Why I felt I needed to express those thoughts in permanent form is more of a puzzle: Did I want to remember this later? And if so, was this really the best location? Here, in the long thoughtful passages of the blog, so I could rediscover it and feel the joy anew, exulting in the beauty of my dancing prose?
Sure, I could reboot the thing, make another one, new layout, new title. And maybe I will, someday, after this, The World’s Longest Test Page, is posted. But I’m going with change via the lazy, serendipitous method because unlike fixing and finding electronic gadgets, I actually get results when I let my writing unfold. Yes, it ends up being absurdly long, one of those “too long; didn’t read” posts. I have to stop worrying about that crap. Especially since the people who use that phrase went on to become even more impatient and now just type tl;dr. And I worry that these folks will think I’m lazy.
So maybe this is really still some kind of test post after all. What do I want to write, and who is it for?
Test post. No proper subject, no focus, just a long free-association. Sure, I’ve edited it; mostly for things like typos, and better humor, and occasional clarity. I’ve jazzed it up with some photos. I’m already happy because I want to edit it. Those posts about my Vyvanse dosages I couldn’t wait to get away from. But this all-over-the-map test post, I’ve enjoyed hanging out with it.
Maybe somebody whose motto isn’t tl;dr might enjoy it, too. That probably doesn’t include an ADD person, which may be another problem with me attempting to write a blog for that audience. And yet I’ll post it here, in this existing blog about ADD, and pretend the connection is that ADD folks love to go all over the map, because they do. That’s one thing I share in common with them and makes me think, yes, maybe I am in the club after all. That’s where that silly serendipitous method comes from. I don’t find gloves by looking in the glove compartment. I find them by absent-mindedly sticking my hands in the pocket of a long-forgotten coat: Hey, I’ve been looking for those! Why search, when you can discover?
It’s time to say goodbye, Blog Post 2016, and send you out into the Internet. I hope somebody discovers you. Me, I’ll be hoping to discover my cell phone before Blog Post 2017 rolls around.
The Brain Fog Blog 