The Blog

The worst possible thing I can do when I'm having a bad AuDHD day is start organizing my office, and that's the main thing I'm inclined to do, probably to somehow reclaim a bit of control.

The process is the same every time. I wake up, maybe tired after having only a few hours of sleep, and the tiredness throws off my morning routine. Maybe I didn't feel like brewing coffee, or I wasn't hungry and postponed breakfast. Or I overslept a little bit and I'm rushed to start working. Whatever it is, I feel like I'm not in control.

When Andrés, my oldest son, was 9, we were watching a video about Logo, the programming language. He got especially excited with Turtle Graphics, where you have a "pen" on screen that you can draw with using commands to move it.

That night I started a project using p5.js and my limited programming skills to do just that, drawing with commands, replacing my missing knowledge with unnecessary overcomplication and spaghetti code. But hey! It worked!

Smartphones have made traveling immeasurably easier. And I don’t think that was entirely free.

A couple of weeks ago I read The Last Quiet Thing by Terry Godier, and it made me very conscious of what my devices were asking from me.

I keep talking about seeking calm to everyone who’ll listen, and still I hadn’t seen it like that: our devices demanding work from us.

A life organized around a to-do list takes the joy out of living. There's always stuff to do, obviously: somebody has to wash the dishes, sweep, go grocery shopping, get that cabinet door fixed.

The problem is not the to-do list itself. It's the timing of tasks. I tend to do things whenever the stars and my brain chemistry get aligned and I actually want to do them. When I was living alone, dishes tended to pile up, laundry got unmanageable, the fridge was empty and I had to push things over on the table to make space to sit down to eat. Then, on a random morning, my mind was right and I powered through it all and left the place spotless. Suddenly there were no 'tasks', it was all joy.

I experience a sense of grief every time a great TV series ends. The sadness that there isn't going to be any more of it, the irrational feeling that there's never going to be anything as good, and the sensation of emptiness inside. It's a strong emotional response, not very different from losing someone you love, with the obvious differences in intensity.

It was ten, maybe eleven years ago. I was picking my oldest kid from school, he was 4 or 5. When he came out, I gave him a hug. We walked to the car, I buckled him into his car seat, and hugged him again.

In the last week I've found myself in two situations where I had to explain that despite all the crap I've been through, I wouldn't change a thing. That I love who I am, and I'm the product of everything I've lived, hence, I shall love all that past shit as much as I love past sunshine and rainbows.

I've always been a hoarder. I refuse to get rid of things, and that goes both for the box of cables and old electronics down in that cabinet in my office and for the files in my Google Drive, external hard drives, on my computers and phone.

We'll, I've been thinking a lot about photos, as you might have noticed. A few months ago I published Memories, my photo-blog-kinda-thing, and I loved it, but as it was a separate project from this website, I ignored it most of the time.