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NOS neural dysphoria Monday, October 29 2018
I've been watching so much car-crash video on Youtube lately (it's a good thing to watch before going to sleep) that it's begun to affect my driving. I've become a bit more cautious at intersections, since that's where the bulk of crash footage seems to be shot. I'm also just more nervous about driving generally; the other night in Saugerties after the movie, I wanted to Gretchen to drive, but after getting rechargeable AAA batteries (for the landline phones) at the Price Chopper, I wanted to drive again, because I'd started thinking about how hot Gretchen tends to drive. Those YouTube videos, you see, always begin with a mystery: which car is going to be the one that instigates the crash we know is coming? There are a few surprises, but it's almost always the one who's driving "hot," the one pushing the limits and making sudden moves, usually in the sort of vehicle driven by pricks. (I imagine insurance companies know what those are.) In an urban environment, even one as small-change as Saugerties, driving hot has its advantages (and carries less risk). But out on the interstate and down long curvy country roads, my style of driving is probably the safer one.
I spent most of the day continuing to try get my brain around the ExtJS framework enough to make a fairly radical improvement to some frontend functionality. Much of what happens in modern frameworks of any description takes place in the configuration, something I'm still not quite used to. And beyond that, a lot of what happens happens for mysterious reasons. Debugging through all the layers of abstraction makes me pine for the imperative style that makes the most sense to the way my brain is wired.
I ate a homemade burrito (containing last night's chili) for lunch, though later I drove out to the nearby Hannaford to get a few groceries: stand'n'stuff taco shells, whole wheat soft tortillas, yet more antacids, a big jar of store-brand fire-roasted peanuts, a surprisingly inexpensive pack of rawhide bones, and a "NOS High Performance Energy Drink." (I don't often drink energy drinks, but when I do, at least for the past couple months, it's been NOS.) I don't know if it was caffeine overdose or what, but shortly thereafter I started feeling kind of ill. This manifested some in my stomach and also in my body generally, as a kind of neural dysphoria. I think in this particular workplace I am somewhat vulnerable to such things in the mid-afternoon, because that's when they always seem to happen.
By the time I got home, I was feeling well enough to go out on a firewood salvaging foray. This time I got all my wood from the upper branches of a large fallen red oak lying top-down on the steep escarpment just west of (and above) the Stick Trail, a couple hundred feet south of the Chamomile. That tree has been there, ready for me to salvage, for three or four years now, and I've always left it be, thinking I might need it for easy-to-salvage firewood in the middle of some snow winter. But what's the use of not harvesting it if it just rots away? Already, most of the sapwood has indeed rotted away. Fortunately, most of the heartwood seems fairly dry.
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