My job was to hand out shopping carts to costumers at the tax free store in the Ben-Gurion airport. Either that or “guarding” the exit, which primarily involved telling people where the entrance was, that they shouldn’t leave with the cart and where various facilities were located.

The goal of each and every actor in this charade had been to subject the docile minds of weak travelers to as many temptations as possible. For instance, the store’s manager had ordered for the passage between the tobacco section and the checkout to be conveniently obstructed by shopping carts, hence forcing smokers to take the long way around and hopefully buy a few things on the way. It looked like a supermarket, one where excess was displayed as a necessity and sold as if within anyone’s reach, if only they wanted it.

It was another day apart from the incident with the carpool which never arrived. I stood by the entrance, dispirited, broken and demotivated to do anything. Not that I needed to. Saturday mornings aren’t exactly ever full. The alcohol salesman approached me and, slumped over a shopping cart, he complained endlessly, praising himself. Poured his heart out on me like those liquor samples he was to give out. His stories were, without a doubt, over the top. Tall-tales he conjured, though not all of it I would imagine. How he worked as a bartender at one club or the other and that the entire town knew him. About how he “did” Swedes in Thailand and how he used to work in telemarketing.

I truly did not want to believe most of it. The part with the 13,000 shekel salaries in particular. And to think he was working on 24 shekel an hour plus commissions (and evidently didn’t sell much).

Complaints about the economy came and kept coming and by the end of it I felt bitter myself and began to question why I was there as well.

When I told him about my experiences with the carpool that morning he answered, “they’re stupid. They’re animals. It’s a dead end” and I didn’t argue. He was right after all. The drivers were those marginal leftovers that entered the workforce regardless of their utter lack of professionalism. It was enough for their accents to give that detail away, and I almost felt a hatred for them for having them – though I know, that’s just a convenient thing I can blame.

We and the drivers were both prole trash. But we weren’t on the same team. We hated them, and they hated us, and with such passion. Hard working men who didn’t give two shits whether I got to work or not, just as long as they could get paid. Did they even have free time?

A woman, maybe in her late twenties, a smoker, with the same light blue sweatshirt every day shared my woes at times in trying to make sense of this situation. Asked me if I wanted to share a cab once, but I brushed that off. I simply don’t have the money, it’s quite simple. The perfume promotion worker – a tall Romanian who was equally unhappy as I was about being a victim to this system had unlike myself a useful way to vent her anger. She told me how she on her first day of work gave a little bit of “straight-talkin’” to the driver on how he should watch his tone with her.

“People like that have no limits. You’ve got to draw the line.”
I shrugged and said, “I just try to let it go.”
“But you can’t let it go!”

I would have told her she was right, but I knew I couldn’t do it myself at the same time. I had to either soak the blows or avoid them altogether. But knowing myself for long enough, as much as I’d like to spit in their face and kick them in the eye, that never would have happened. At least not to their face.

The way it worked, my schedule for the next day or so will be sent out to the drivers and their respective companies and thus I will be put down on a list. The pickup location I chose, though, did not actually exist. That is, it showed up on the list of locations given to me, but if I wanted it I would simply be dropped from the lists for the way back and occasionally for pick-up too.

And so one day I made up my mind and decided to change my pick-up location to a different one. The “deputy” referred me to the shift manager. When I spoke to him, he said he would fix it temporarily, and told me to talk to someone who can only be reached during office hours for a “permanent solution”. But since it’s a Saturday, I have to wait until Sunday – office hours in particular – and speak to one of the two women in charge. Both of which had ridiculously similar names and functions. Lee and Lee-at. The latter was described as a “revengeful bitch” by the aforementioned alcohol salesman. Or it may have been the other – I quite frankly don’t know as they practically have the same name and job description.

He never actually did that “temporary solution” and I was dropped from the list on the way back, along with four others.

By the time I managed to get to one of the similarly named clerks, it was technically speaking the wrong one, and that took two days as well as she was in meetings (who would a lowly clerk meet?), generally unavailable (i.e. not answering the phone) and mysteriously gone (not in the office). That link between my employers and the carpool service was impenetrable to me.

Calling Bontour directly resulted in being shoved aside very rudely so and be referred to See & Tour, a different company. Though the logos on the side of the car did say Bontour, it’s unclear to me why. See & Tour gave me the same treatment. Some rude secretary answered the phone, gave me the usual “I don’t know” sorts of answers and rudely hung up on me. I recommend neither of these companies solely due to their employees’ lack of professionalism, repulsive behavior and failures to simply do their job. Getting me from point A to point B and back.

The carpool failed to come again. Or maybe it did come, except not to where I stood since the list failed to come through as intendede again and left me there twenty minutes before work wondering where the hell was my ride to the airport and how was I supposed to get there?

I called the shift manager, whose line was busy for some time, who told me to wait. I waited for a call back, and when it came, the answer was, “he was there at 18:03, you weren’t. There was also a bookstore worker there, but who knows. The only thing you can do is try to get here on your own.”

I tried to explain how there was no such way. I didn’t have a car, no money for a taxi and hardly even a train (which would have taken an hour as well). I said I can’t do that unless they stop pulling that shit on me. Except I used much nicer words.

I shouldn’t have, I should have just punched her in the face through the phone somehow.

The job itself, disregarding any flaky systems to get me there and back is just barely under the threshold of enjoyable. The costumers don’t hate you (though that’s because I wasn’t a cashier, who probably get more flak).

I speak of it in past tense and it saddens me to think that I may end up coming back to it after all. And it worries me to think I “have” to get along with these inferior types. Unfortunately, as someone who holds grudges, perhaps I ought to find something else to do.

“Oh no, I have an essay tomorrow… and then I have my math homework… and then <something else>”. I hear that every now and then. No, sorry. All the time. People keep telling me just how “stressed” they are. They complain, whine, tell me how miserable they are. O NOEZ IM STRESSED.

Me, personally, I’m subjected to more or less the same amount of work. Am I stressed? Not really. How come? Easy:

I don’t let it disrupt other areas of my life.

If “stress” going to make me even more suicidal than now, maybe I should do less work. Yep, I do that.

I have hobbies, sure, and I don’t want to give up on them, and I don’t. On Xfire it says I played about 30 hours of World of Warcraft in the past 7 days. Note, I don’t feel stressed and I get about as much work as anyone else around here. How come I’m not feeling any stress, let’s see.

I’m naturally calm, I’d say. My cousin has this really awful dog, still does probably, and I remember how I was pretty much the only person around who’d get the damn thing to calm down. This anti-stress energy is just radiating from me. Yes, you could say I’m hypoactive. Note: Nowadays I try not to think about this dog, her hair is amazingly similar to that of an ex of mine (whom I had previously mentioned in the blog)

Tip 1: Skip the fucking readings

Nobody, nobody cares if you read the stuff you’re supposed to. Sure, it’s generally a good idea, but my social anthropology and English teachers talk about the material so much that there’s no real use in actually reading it. They’ll talk about it anyway, so you don’t have to read it.

Tip 2: Audiobooks

Me personally, I have a serious problem. Even if I did read something, I would very often not understand it, not be able to spit out raw facts from the text, not be able to process it, etc. It happens very often, don’t even know why. Audio seems to work much better with me. So what I do is pirate audiobooks and “read” those instead. And that works for me.

Tip 3: If it’s “good enough”, it really is, good enough

Don’t perfect everything! What are you, a Chinese sweatshop worker? Just do something rough that gets you an acceptable grade. Perfection is too much for anyone. No, don’t do a half assed job, just do something acceptable.

Tip 4: Ungraded homework = unimportant

Just in case you didn’t realize it yet, you are at university/school for one reason: a number (or letter in some places). Don’t do ungraded homework! What’s the point?

I hope this guide helps you accomplish the minimum possible. Have fun, take some ritalin, and just really, do the minimum. It’s better for your mental health, I guess.

For a while now, I’ve been complaining about my attention span slowly shortening and trapping me inside myself. In previous blog posts, I think I made that point very clear.

The trouble I was having recently prompted me to considering giving Ritalin a try. And so this fine morning I decided to do just that. Getting hold of it was easy, as my brother has a prescription.

I took a single 10mg Ritalin dose at around 08:30 shortly after waking up. What mostly scared me was having read that Ritalin might cause psychosis in some individuals. Those claims were probably bogus. And at any rate, no psychosis here.

Since I had today off, and I need to study for my exams, today was the natural choice.

Every few minutes, whenever I was doing something significant or changing tasks or so on, I made a note of it including a time stamp.

The experiment

08:34 – I took 10mg of Ritalin. The minimum I have around the house. My brother takes 10mg every day 20mg slow-release every schoolday, and so I realized that it can’t be that bad if I took one on this specific occasion. (Health-wise.)

08:43 – So far I don’t believe the effects have kicked in. I feel just about the same.

09:10 – I realized that there’s no way the pill hasn’t kicked in yet, and so I’m going to try to sit down and read a book and see what my experience is.

09:50 – I came back from reading for a straight 40 minutes. I could have even went on for another 40 minutes, but eventually gave up. It seems like the pill is definitely affecting me and I certainly feel less restless. I would however like to check my brother’s complaints regarding not being able to laugh, a certain numbness. [note: I stopped because I reached the end of the chapter.]

I feel no urge to actually go to eat. I feel physically hungry, but no real urge to go eat. This is probably part of the pill’s influence on me, I presume.

I read with great concentration, unlike anything I’ve had in the past few months. Kind of sad, considering that I am on Schedule II drugs. I found myself analyzing the characters and deducing a lot about their behavior, personality and so forth.

10:15 – I just finished watching an episode of Futurama. Concentrating was easy, and I did not switch focus back to other applications all the while. I paid close attention to the movie, and my sitting posture was in fact proper.

I feel slightly strange around the chest and upper back. Though I believe this is because I’m not used to actually sitting up straight for this long (~40 minutes at a time). At the moment I’m still keeping the same posture with relatively no effort. The only thing which distracted me was an alert from Growl, telling me that somebody had sent me a message.

In other words, the only distractions out there were really just external stimuli. Otherwise, keeping a clear mind is ridiculously easy.

Although the jokes in Futurama usually fit my taste, I only laughed very briefly, and very often although I did get the joke I remained for the most part unaffected.

Now I think I will attempt to rewrite my social anthropology paper, as I’ve been putting it off for a long time now.

11:06 – I have been working nonstop on my anthropology paper since the last report. This is absolutely remarkable. I did not feel the need to check my email or see who is online. I’ve been working without any music in the background either, which is rare and remarkable.

I have decided to take a short break, although I could probably go on concentrating like this for a long time.

I don’t think I was ever this productive in years – and since I am doing IB now, and this draft is long overdue (it’s an internal deadline thankfully), this is most definitely working for me.

11:13 – I forced myself to go to the kitchen and have something to eat. While I am feeling physically hungry, mentally I don’t feel like eating anything. I had some cucumber, but even that was forced. My interest in sex is very low at the moment, that is to say that I can’t even take the slightest interest in it. And although I would experiment and try to find interest in it, I simply find myself doing something mildly uninteresting, but at least I can pay attention to it.

If this is what normal people are like the whole time, only now do I begin to understand how bad my disability actually is.

11:23 – It’s noteworthy to say that it feels as if time goes much faster. I start writing something, and the next thing I know I’ve been doing so for two minutes without even knowing.

12:03 – I finished watching another episode of Futurama. Again, no real distractions. Although the window is open and I live right above a major artery in the area with a high traffic volume, the noise didn’t seem to bother me a lot.

I’m still hungry, and I think it might be affecting my concentration. I will force myself to eat something and have a glass of water.

Maybe I’ll finish another chapter in the book.

12:19 – I worked on the draft for a while more, considering to go down to 7-11 to get me something to eat. I might as well do that, but before that I need to make a phone call.

12:38 – I called my dad and talked to him about how it feels to be under the influence of Ritalin. My brother takes 20mg, but for some reason we also have 10mg. That said, I caused no harm by taking that pill.

My appetite is coming back to me, and my hunger is worse than it was before. My concentration is fluctuating. Anyway, I’ll go get me something to eat and see what I can do with my time afterwards.

Since the pill should affect me for about 3-4 hours, it probably wore off already.

12:56 – I’m done eating. I’ll try to sit down and read a book to see whether I can actually do it. While eating I started recalling all sorts of songs, which would usually happen to me a lot during the day, and in retrospect it didn’t seem to occur to me back when the pill was still affecting me.

Strangely enough, I only checked for new online messages maybe 3 times. Usually I would end up checking for new messages every 10 minutes or even more frequently. This is surprising, especially now, as I am waiting for a reply from a certain person.

I’m still in two minds about taking Ritalin, and I will have to talk to a professional about it. I was also never actually diagnosed with ADD. Weird, I should say, because I have the exact same symptoms.

The urge to listen to music, which was not present a while ago, seems to bother me now.

Conclusion

Yes, it works. I’m pretty much done with all the work I had to do, and I managed to do things which otherwise I would never have done without great amounts of willpower.

At the moment of writing this conclusion, I’m doing about 3 other things.

I’m considering very seriously to go get a prescription of my own and starting to take it on a regular basis. Or maybe just for exams? Or something, I don’t know.

I still haven’t really felt any depression or aggression or any of the reported side-effects. Maybe to do with taking only 10mg and not 20mg.

Interesting to see how the length of the notes changes over time. From the very brief ones in the beginning of the experiment to the later, longer and more descriptive notes later on.

Maybe the reason why I was never diagnosed as having ADD is because instead of doing something else physically other than working I would just think about something else and look as if I’m still working. Happens to me a lot that I start reading something, think about something else, and come back to the text not actually knowing what I was doing the whole time.

As I said before, my attention span is at an all-time low. It comes and goes with waves, productivity that is.

It comes and goes in waves.

It’s also to do with not being able to sit down still. I should probably be taking ritalin, but apparently it was never prescribed to me for other reasons. Maybe to do with my Tourettes Syndrome, as my mom once said or otherwise. I do certainly believe that it should have been.

My attention span is very short even when it comes tasks I otherwise enjoy doing. Getting myself away from stimulants doesn’t seem to help much as I just get bored and start thinking all sorts of stuff.

It’s horrible. I come up with amazing hypotheses about human nature, the universe, etc. and yet they all boil down to just being plain dangerous. Dangerous thoughts.

When I sit down to write about those things however, I end up, again, losing concentration, disinterested, unmotivated or otherwise just at a general lack of things to say after some point.

Trying to sit down and force myself to write this post is in itself a challenge.

Last night I found myself wandering around town for about two hours. I was trying to make myself walking into gay bars, to no avail. If there’s nobody pushing me, it’s not going to be done, period. Even if I want it, need it, or otherwise – if there’s no person to directly tell me what to do – I just won’t be able to make myself do it.

I guess to some extent it was also for my own sake, going to gay bars (or trying for that matter) but the main idea was to try to complete my social anthropology paper, which requires me to do fieldwork.

Maybe it was a poor choice of subject, but I couldn’t think of anything else. I ended up choosing something which:

• I know I should have done
• Which I don’t do on a regular basis

or otherwise

• which I’ve never done
• and which I wish to do

The problem is, I walk up there, and the moment I see the door, I do a 180 and retrace my steps.

That’s when it occurred to me, that I really have a serious problem. An emotional block. A fear of crowded places. Something about them, and I wish I knew what it is, makes me feel subconsciously incompatible and neglected, and in turn I will resort to confining myself somewhere away from “real live people.”

I had a vague notion that I can’t walk into those places on my own and therefor tried to ask a friend for help. She accepted, and so we were supposed to meet with two others at Nørreport station, 20:00. Terribly early, even for me. But then again, they just wanted to check the place out. As long as I walk through the door, fine by me. I can make a few notes, write some paragraph and come up with something to fit the data like a good Pith-Helmet wearing anthropologist.

I practically ran to Nørreport, and surprisingly enough, arrived on time.

Funny thing is, the moment the little yellow LEDs around the door opening button, I received a message saying: “I’ll be late.”

Be late, I don’t mind.

Another person came at that point. He was actually on time. He told me, in these very words, “when [she] says she’ll be there at 8, she means she’ll be out of the house at 8.” And there’s your problem. While I’m rushing to get my things together, make sure I catch the bus on time and so on, she simply did not care.

That was not the time to get angry, not yet. The rest came, 20 minutes late, and we started walking towards “Dunkel.” On our way there, we saw Jailhouse and Masken. Unfortunately, Dunkel was closed.

Now, instead of being – excuse me for using this word in the same sentence with those irresponsible children – practical; they went back to Nørreport station to see “the others.” The others were of course more irresponsible teenagers with alcohol problems.

I couldn’t stand it any longer, and at Gammel Torv I simply made the decision to just go on my own and try to do some fieldwork somewhere.

And that’s how I ended up on the streets for two hours.

I eventually gave up and decided to just start walking aimlessly, ending up on Kultorvet, as that friend who originally wanted me to go out finally managed to get in contact with me. I took the plunge and laid the cards on the table – which I don’t do very often. I said that I have a problem, that if I don’t get pushed to do things I just won’t do them, and that I need help. Quite literally, I asked for help. To be perfectly honest, it doesn’t happen very often that I actually ask for help and not imply it or otherwise.

“Just come to the Austrian Bar.” She explained me how to get there, and I went.

Of course, they won’t let me get in, having only my diplomat ID and not much besides. Not much I was willing to show at any rate. I tried calling her, to no avail. 15 minutes later, she walks out voluntarily without me being reaching her phone (not because I wasn’t trying).

The next 30 minutes we spent switching between arbitrary modes, goals and targets:

• “Where’s Person X?”
• “Where should we go?” (my opinion was of course not taken into account)
• My pleas to have someone push me around
• Dealing with the bouncer over at Retro

The resolution about where to go after long sessions of argument was of course: No resolution.

This whole absolute failure in management, organization and fucking common sense made me think. I would have been doing just that had it not been for the fact that I now knew how to organize myself. I could no longer fit in the group because I simply could not stand the lack of authority and structure as well as the general mood of indecision.

I don’t actually belong with them, I figured. Will I ever go out again? I might as well, but probably not with these guys, and most certainly not with a group of more than 3 people including myself.

It’s not that much fun unless you drink. Problem is, I can drink at home and get 3 times more work done than by hanging out with these guys. I genuinely hate society.

Ridiculous how I managed to write this thing. Problem is I’m supposed to do about five other things at the moment.

I really like to have control over who I’m actually around. There are certain people I dislike, and simply don’t want around me. This definition somehow comes to include pretty much all of the people I know with the exception of suppose 3-5 people.

I need a holiday, I need the company of certain people (one in particular), I need to get away from those I don’t like.

I know I can’t lock myself up in some wrench down in Jylland with all the people I want to be around, and that’s exactly what bothers me. When it so happens that I ask for help, nothing happens. It’s all the same whether or not I take part in it. I’m not committing suicide just yet, I still have a book to write, whenever I get down to doing it, and there’s maybe one person out there whom I promised I won’t do just that, and I, unlike some people, do keep promises.

Organization is not a learned “skill.” It’s not a “skill” to begin with. It’s about spending time dealing with bureaucracy and the paper-hell in advance. In my experience, it saves practically no time whatsoever.

Unfortunately, I seem to have this self destructive tendency to work great under pressure. If Dushkin works great under pressure, Dushkin will try to push self to edge, Dushkin will create stress for Dushkin to finish work. In other words, I procrastinate on purpose.

“Know thyself” my ass. It’s obviously self-destructive, and mazochistic. One of my incompatible wishes somewhere down in my id, to only work under pressure.

Organization detached me from the rest of the world. You start reading self improvement books, working on things in pieces, and the next thing you know, there’s a distance between you and the rest of the world and you just can’t do anything about it. A thin membrane will seperate you from your peers, parents, “community” and friends. “Sorry, can’t talk now, I’m busy.”

By decompressing your work, you leave yourself practically no time to do other things which are, probably, more important. When you do have the time, you will realize that your “friends” have already gotten into the habbit of not inviting you to social gatherings (of whatever nature.)

Reversing the situation is theoretically impossible. For instance, my birthday “party.” I invited various people, out of which two people came, and one uninvited guest, another one arrived an hour and a half late and insisted on leavingbecome midnight for a total of about 1 hour of actually doing anything. The other three decided it’ll be a great idea to go smoke pot, although I made it very clear that I have no interest in it. The whole thing ended at around 11:40 pm.

I timed it, phoned all the parties that needed to be phoned, passed emails around, begged, and wrote everything down. When it came to the practical stage, nothing went as planned.

It crossed a certain line when I began planning social interaction and trying to make sense of my world using the calendar. After two very long phone calls with BlueCoffee, I finally began to snap out of this organization-overdrive.

There is, I would say, no correlation between organization and saving time. Some of us just work slower, some are less able to isolate themselves from their environment.

It basically became very clear to me what I really wanted to do with myself and how to stop this organization madness. Unfortunately, without it, my grades are starting to slip. I might be a “better person”. I do find myself facing my incompatible wishes and slowly my super-ego dissolving and making less descisions. The former view, which accepted self-help books, now rejects standards, ideas, laws and roles and substitutes it with something else.

At the same time, I can’t convince myself of all sorts of things. The result of less self discipline. I also find it much harder to read, listen to records all the way through and stick to a single task.

My advice, don’t “get organized”! Your superiors are going to go nuts, but at least you don’t sell yourself to the whole bureaucracy.

Actually, I’m quite sick of organization. All I really want is just to run around aimlessly in grassy meadows and not think about anything. Society is all about normalization. Not very pleasant.

Every now and then, I want to run an X11 program. VNC takes up my whole screen, and therefor it’s counter productive, but there’s another way.

Mac OS X has an optional X11 server. After installing it, programs could connect to it and coexist in the Aqua environment.

The thing is that while my server doesn’t change IP, my MacBook does, since I often alternate between wi-fi and ethernet, and even then I can’t be bothered to set it every time. So basically, the IP always changes.

For this purpose, I made this useful script. I’ve tested it on zsh, but it should work in Bash as well, I believe. I put the following lines in my .zshrc:

if [ $SSH_CLIENT ]
then
export DISPLAY=`echo $SSH_CLIENT | sed 's/ [0-9]* [0-9]*$//'`:0
fi

Basically, if the variable $SSH_CLIENT is defined, it takes that variable, nips the last two figures (one being the source port and the other being the destination port), which leaves us only with the IP of the machine we’re SSHing from. Pretty useful. Now all you need to do is put xhost the_ip, where the_ip is the IP of the machine you want to connect to you, in your .xinitrc to automatically allow it to connect to you.

It werks!

Just how many times do you hear your colleges/co-workers/classmates complain about terrible headaches? You can’t actually tell that they’re having a headache by just looking at them, they’ll have to tell you that they have one. Complaining about it is a deliberate action.

By admitting (and accentuating) symptoms, you accomplish various goals. Most notably, you can decide that you are “incapable of doing any work”, and thus, excuse yourself from any work that might cross your path.

The reason why I don’t go around telling people how bad I feel is because I am aware that I have to finish the tasks I’m assigned to, that I wish to complete them, and thus, I don’t have the urge to tell everyone about my nausea.

So basically, unless you’re actually dying, admitting your symptoms to others means, more or less, that you’re simply being lazy.

So go back to work.

I myself stopped playing games around the time I moved to Linux, mainly because I felt I didn’t need them anymore. Every now and then there’d be something interesting (Morrowind), but I just stopped playing after a while – I just sort of forgot it.

You know what, just stop playing games. They suck, nobody needs them, just keep on working.

That was by now listening to other people you can finally concentrate on your things.

If you’re working on something, make sure you turn off sounds in IM programs. What I mean is that you should tell Gaim, MSN, ICQ or whatever you’re using to shut the hell up while you’re working on those extremely important documents.

It’ll save you time. Imagine yourself trying to do your important report for your boss – which happens to be due tomorrow in a crowded room where everybody’s talking. Not the ideas environment, eh?

Turn off those sounds while you’re working on something, it’ll help you.