Apologies in advance for not proof-reading this, and sending it somewhat unfinished.
wooster wrote:sum1 wrote:
Johannes? My best guess is that you're German or Swedish. How close did I get?
^ eh I was trying to crack one of my inane jokes upthread
Upthread? Excellent word; I need to remember that, since it''s very useful. I would have said "previously", "before", "earlier", and the like, but "upthread" is really the most accurate. Indeed, it's more accurate than the cumbersome phrase "in a preceding message" and a great deal more concise. If nothing else, it's useful at least for variation. It's missing from the dictionary my browser uses to check spelling, so I had to add it manually. Somewhat irritatingly, I've had to add a great many words manually to this same word-list. It lacks even simple terms like "methylphenidate", "piperidine", "psychopharmacologically", "dopaminergically". "noradrenergically", and "serotonergically"! I had to add
THREE words just to make the red underlining go away from under all of the quoted terms.
Can you believe THAT? Have they never heard of the three major monoaminergic neurotransmitters? No, apparently
NOT, lest I would not have had to add "monoaminergic" to rid the previous sentence of underlining.
Crack? That's a word I should use more often. It's more concise than "come up with" or "dream up". I'm not sure "coin" would work here - what do you think? "Invent" certainly sounds inappropriate given in this context. Other alternatives?
Also, I like "crack" for its associations to crack cocaine and to the cracking of passwords, copy protection schemes and the like. Cocaine has a special place in my heart (or mind), and I'll be revisiting it later in this message.
I'd like to take this moment to point out that your writing is, in fact, more illustrious than it seems at the first glance. That is why I'm making an effort to point out instances in which I feel you surpass me. For the same reason, I shall also attempt to call your attention to aspects that detract, or at least distract, from your grandiloquence. I like that last word, perhaps because it contains the part "grand", and perhaps also because of "Grandi", which is a very tasty fruit juice sold in the shops around here.
What detracts is "^ eh ". First, the caret is superfluous since you say "upthread", so it adversely impacts the magnificence of the impression you leave in people like me, for no reason whatsoever. If you wish to make things clearer, then I would strongly advise you to
QUOTE the relevant parts to which you are referring - this is the gold standard, although it does make your posts look more lengthy, which people may perceive as daunting, causing them to skip ahead to the next post. The "eh" is somewhat questionable too. It makes you're style more conversational, and less magnanimous. I probably does attract a different subset of people, though.
wooster wrote:(just got a bit frustrated at the time by the booklists / music-threads here & stuff, that's all...)
The use of the and-sign (&) in place of the word "and" is quite clever, and I like to use it myself from time to time. However, it imparts a measure of sloppiness and nonchalance to the impressions you leave. I personally use it in some e-mail subject lines, and almost invariably when composing SMS mobile phone messages - if that's the correct term; I'm not much of a mobile phone aficionado, and have little command of the associated terminology.
wooster wrote:Johannes is not me but young Kreisler (the kappellmeister in Hoffmann's book 'Tomcat Murr' -
Here, you expose my ignorance.
I know of Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who first synthesised LSD (LSD-25, or Delysid), which he was also the first to test, both accidentally and intentionally. He wrote a book on it, entitled "LSD: My Problem Child", but I haven't read it, nor have I read "Tomcat Murr", which I presume he did NOT write. If I'm not mistaken, he also discovered the chemical identity of another psychedelic drug, which had long been used by a tribe of Indians. Hofmann visited the tribe, and they thanked him for providing them with some amount of the chemically refined drug, which they could use for their ceremonies at any time of the year, in contrast to the plant from which it was derived, which was only available during a limited season. I have no familiarity with LSD or other psychedelics, however. I might BECOME interested some day, as psychedelics hold some potential to help you think outside the box.
I think I also know of a Dustin Hoffmann, who is an American actor.
wooster wrote:although I'm toying with the idea of having him as a 'doppel',
Why not shorten it to Johann, as in J. Sebastian Bach, or the J. Strauss series? Johannes, reminds me of the Bible, and more specifically, what we in Swedish refer to as the Johannes evangelium, which is the Gospel of John. John is actually a rather cool name, and actually beats Johann for most practical purposes, although I would say Johann is the most grandiose. It funny how all the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew names of the Bible have all been transformed almost beyond recognition in English translations of the mythology. Johannes, Lukas, Markus, Mattheus have been changed into John, Luke, Mark, and Matthew. Strangely, they didn't change Jesus and Josef to Jesse and Joe, respectively, but they did change Christus or Christos to Christ, Maria to Mary, Petrus to Peter, Andreas to Andrew, etc. etc.
On the topic of Johannes and it's variations, in Swedish we spell Johann with one "n". There is a nice female form of the name, too, namely Johanna, which was the name of Hitler's maternal grandmother mother, Johanna Hiedler, and which is the name of a cousin of mine a few months younger than myself. Johanna is also the name of a particular woman who works at a local department store. She is of particular note, because I secretly have a bit of a crush on her. The only reason why I know her name is that the other girls have a habit of shouting her name out loud, because they need her help with the computers and various other matters. In plain text, Johanna is smarter than the rest. She has nice blond hair and blue eyes, but her most impressive features are her pretty face and her height... she's taller than me. If she has muscle, I don't know, but it's plausible, as she's somewhat overweight, and that's OK, because it doesn't show as a double-chin and she still has an hourglass figure. She probably knows she looks good, because she doesn't wear make up. Somewhat amazingly she doesn't have earrings or any other kind of jewellery, suggesting that she's not engaged or married. She doesn't smile for no reason, and she tends to have a bit of a poker face, and for this reason, her face is free from any noticeable wrinkles or other signs of ageing. Her attire is likewise low profile; like myself, she wears blue jeans and doesn't show cleavage (I'm not even capable, but she is). I wonder whether she's a narcissist or schizoid and thus lacking in empathy and emotionally blunted, but at least she's not as depressed as I am. So why have I not made any advances? Brainstorm, please?
Continuing on the Johannes theme, Giovanni is the Italian version of it, and i kind of like that, too. The feminine form, Giovanna, does not appear quite as good. As you may know, Don Giovanni is an opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Quoting Wikipedia:
Wikipedia article on Don Giovanni wrote:The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote a long essay in his book Enten – Eller (Either/Or) in which he argues, quoting Charles Gounod, that Mozart's Don Giovanni is “a work without blemish, of uninterrupted perfection.” The finale, in which Don Giovanni refuses to repent, has been a captivating philosophical and artistic topic for many writers including George Bernard Shaw, who in Man and Superman parodied the opera (with explicit mention of the Mozart score for the finale scene between the Commendatore and Don Giovanni).
Notice the parts I emphasised with boldface. Uninterrupted perfection? Wonderful! Refused to repent? Sounds like myself! Man and Superman? Like
what I am, and what my subconscious
insisted that I was until I shattered the delusions of grandeur? Is Don Giovanni like myself? I suppose I should read the rest of the Wikipedia article.
That concludes my ramblings on the topic of Johannes for this time, I hope.
wooster wrote:now
Wait... did you say wooster"? As in Bertie Wooster? The English gentleman who's rich enough to afford a clever and even more gentlemanly butler, namely Jeeves? He is one of the "idle rich", according to the Wikipedia article on "Bertie Wooster", much like I'm one of the "idle middle class", which is why I cannot afford a Jeeves. I've watched some of the TV series. While I like the style of the gentlemen a lot, there's
not enough ACTION to sustain my interest. You probably know that Hugh Laurie, the actor known for his role as Dr. Gregory House in recent years, also played Bertie Wooster. It's only now that I recognise the likeness of the faces of the characters clearly, although I've watched all of the House, MD serious except parts of the most recent season. Do you like House? I do, but I probably would never have bothered with him unless I had heard of him on this very forum. I think that was what led me to read the Wikipedia article on "House, MD", which taught me several important facts about Dr. House; more specifically:
- House is a pun on Homes, which is a pun on Holmes, or Sherlock Holmes to be specific. I love Sherlock Holmes.
- House is an opioid addicts. I like opioids, although I've never been an addict.
- House diagnoses is a consulting diagnostician, much like Holmes is a consulting detective.
- House is unconventional, and pays attention to clues others overlook, eventually leading to the correct diagnosis. It's not unlike my own methods of diagnosis and scientific hypothesis and modelling, for example of neuroscience and psychopharmacology.
- House lives alone, much like a schizoid like myself, although he's intended to be a psychopath. As Kane noted on this forum, House is a poor portrayal of a psychopath.
- House would not have his leg amputated. Of course not; that's for normal people. It's better to die, or to live with pain and narcotic painkillers and limp around with a cane than to limp around with a pain-free artificial limb, which one has to keep track of and attach and detach from the body repeatedly. Most importantly, a prosthesis is less aesthetically pleasing.
- House has a single friend, namely Dr. Wilson, who is an analogue of Dr. Watson - the companion of Holmes. I have approximately one friend, too.
- House doesn't like speaking to patients, like a schizoid. He doesn't wear a white coat, because he doesn't want to be recognised as a doctor.
- House lives at the address 221B, like Holmes. I live at 88, though.
However, some kind of impetus was still required to make me give up my regular reading, writing and disorganised researching, in favour of not only watching TV, but first downloading a lengthy TV series over the course of weeks. That final impetus was my temporary loss of access to the psychostimulants that make me think and which make me loquacious and reasonably speedy at typing. I was apathetic and lethargic, and the only kind thought I seemed capable of was suicidal ideation. To distract me from my preoccupation with death, I downloaded and watched all of House, MD. You know what? I don't regret it. I don't particularly regret anything, except going to the psychiatric hospital and almost be tortured to death slowly by means of boredom. I must remember to kill myself in time before I end up in a nursing home... a fate worse than death. My mother works in a nursing home. Two months at a boring hospital, as in my case, is bad enough, I can promise. The only relief from a nursing home is... Valhalla.
The so-called mental health professionals at the hospital mistook me for a schizophrenic even though I patiently (pun unintended, but welcome!) explained that my psychosis arose out of sleep deprivation secondary to months of excessive use of stimulants to stay up for two or three days with insufficient intervening sleep. They sent me home apathetic, lethargic and with death wishes. Wishfully, they imagined my symptoms would respond to high doses of the latest and most heavily marketed antipsychotics. More knowledgeable about clinical psychopharmacology than them, I knew that even a SSRI would have been better, and on one occasion, I took some sertraline (generic Zoloft) left over from previously failed attempts to treat depression. It relieved the suicidal ideation by making me apathetic and indifferent enough to lie in bed until hunger forced me to get up. Indifference reduced the allure of death to the same point of insignificance as life and everything in it. I didn't take a SSRI again. I decided to distract myself with House, MD instead.
I was trying to mitigate my agony with ephedrine. I managed to order acquire a supply of it by means of ordering a so-called weight loss product from the UK. It was delivered by registered mail so that I had to pick it up personally from the post office. This was significant, and may, possibly, have saved my life for some times. Who saved my life to this day? A sympathetic drug dealer, who did they job the mental health professionals neglected to do.
I contacted my old supplier of the powerful psychostimulants that made me sleep deprived and psychotic. He promptly dispatched a shipment of a product he orders directly from a chemical supplier in China. More potent and much longer-lasting than the methylphenidate (Ritalin, Concerta) the doctors refused to prescribe for fear of psychosis, and which is a controlled substance not readily available, the "research" chemical is perfectly legal to trade openly because it is not yet popular enough to have caught the attention of the establishment of zealous but thankfully incompetent fools who seek to ban everything of a chemical or herbal nature which really works, and who care little how much blood on they get on their hands, as long as they succeed in preventing a significant number of people from attaining better living through chemistry (BLTC). It' may seem to be mere Schadenfreude or malicious pleasure at first glance, but actually, their condition is that of pathological sadism. Fortunately, their amount of death and suffering they cause has hitherto been limited by their modest expertise, intellect, and capacity. Someone with my skills in their position would be capable of inflicting unprecedented damage onto society, because I know that methylphenidate and cocaine are just two examples of potent dopamine reuptake inhibitors. What I'm now using to write this is another example. At least hundreds, but more probably thousands of other alternative chemicals with the same mode of action exist. Each time the sadists ban a new drug, such as the cocaine-like stimulants of interest to me, the users interested in legal drugs available from professional chemical suppliers move on to a new research chemical that has usually only been tested on rodents before. Who cares about clinical trials when it's a matter getting high? THAT is a rhetorical question most users don't even THINK of asking, even for a moment. For a hedonist, having fun is THE meaning of life. Huge drug companies, like Pfizer and GlaxoSmitKline require millions, and indeed, billions of dollars to test and introduce a new drug onto the market of approved clinically available medications. Amateur hedonists require a few hundred dollars at most. In the good old days, chemists and pharmacists who had succeeded in synthesising a new chemical compound, or isolating one from a plant such as coca, first tested the substance on rodents, dogs, or cats. Then they tested it on themselves. If it seemed promising, they either used the substance in a patent medicine which they invented and marketed to the public, or they passed the new chemical on to friends, and to medical doctors. The doctors first tested the new drug on themselves, to see if the chemist's claims were true, or whether there were other notable effects. If all seemed well, and no-one seemed to die or become ill, the doctors proceeded to test the new drug on their patients. If the drug worked, they continued to use it extensively, and they published reports of their successes in medical journals, leading other medical practitioners to attempt to reproduce the claimed successes. Some chemists and doctors still work the same way, but they generally don't publish their results, for fear of condemnation. Drug companies and medicinal regulatory agencies are powerful and don't tolerate competition from little people, or grass-roots like patients, chemists and doctors. Hedonists, and the entrepreneurs that service them, however, dare to speak openly about the hedonic properties and other virtues of new substances. There are at least two major forums dedicated to the discussion of recreational drugs, including research chemicals. It was on one of these forums that I first learned about the drug I'm using now.
Sorry, I got carried away.
Anyway, the stimulant ordered didn't seem to arrive. I thought it had been lost, or that customs had somehow decided to confiscate it although it was legal. My supplier sent me another sample, which also failed to arrive. Unlike the so-called mental health professionals who thought I was schizophrenic, the drug dealer recognised the importance of the treating life-threatening depressive illness. He came up with the idea of making a trip across the border to dispatch the drug to me, making it a matter of domestic mail, and thus circumventing customs. However, I suspected that it was not the customs. I suspected the people even more incapable of keeping their hands and noses out of other people's business. I came up with the idea of dispatching the next shipment across the border as usual, but with the tiny modification of addressing it to a friends of mine instead of to myself. Accordingly, the dealer dispatched a small trial shipment of the drug to my friend's office located along the main street of my town. In connection to getting a haircut at a nearby salon, I dropped in to the office, and we chatted for a while. After some time, the friend noted that a letter had arrived for me,. I pocketed it, and later examined the contents at home. There was a document in Chinese. I e-mailed the dealer and described the contents. He replied, suggesting that if I looked again, I would also find a sample of the substance around which our interactions and business revolved. Indeed, it was true.
I used my digital scale to weight up a know amount of chemical which I dissolved in a know volume of distilled water. I administered the first dose for months by means of a graded pipette, with which I squirted a known quantity of drug into my nasal cavity, then tilting my head sideways and upside down to spread the solution over the intranasal mucous membranes for more efficient and rapid absorption. Onset is slow, rather than rapid as with cocaine or methylphenidate (eg. lines of coke or crushed Ritalin tablets). Therefore, there is a lack of the kind of highs of enthusiasm and hilarity reported by Sigmund Freud and other users of the latter two stimulants. On the other hand, this stimulant lasts much longer: from 12 hours or so with small doses, up to several days with large doses. The therapeutic index (safety margin) is excellent, and I've seen reports of people taking massive overdoses (hedonists; who else?) and living to brag about it, with prolonged wakefulness and paranoia as the only adverse effects. Overdoses of most antidepressants by similar orders of magnitude would cause rather unpleasant symptoms of overdose, or indeed, death in the case of the more toxic ones, such as the tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs), which are arrythmogenic - somewhat like cocaine, just more toxic.
What will my next drug of choice be after this supremely safe one gets too popular to remain legal? I am certain that the hedonists will have come up with a number of relatively safe, tried and trusted alternatives. Alas, they don't care to systematically record adverse effects, so it's possible for a drug that is toxic to a small minority of users to fall through the cracks of the safety net of hedonistic trials. While this is true of clinical trials as well, it is less likely than with hedonistic drug trials, not only because the hedonists are less systematic, but because they tend to neglect such things as regular tests of liver function, or regular ECGs. If a drug is hepatoxic enough to cause jaundice and liver failure, it's likely that even the hedonists would notice and report it, but it's very probable that they would miss trends hinting at the potential for serious liver toxicity They might even notice such a thing as marked QT-prolongation, but there would undoubtedly be a number of unreported deaths too. There little use in sacrificing oneself in the name of science, if science takes no note of one's sacrifices. An obvious problem is that no-one compiles all the reports of adverse effects into a single comprehensive database, as is done with clinical drug trials. Therefore, rare side effects easily escape one's notice. This was the case with myself and the popular stimulant MDPV (methylendioxypyrovalerone), for example, which seemed to be rather neurotoxic to me, but I fortunately I seemed to escape unscathed in the end. Really, it would be much easier if the just gave me the methylphenidate prescriptions I'm entitled to, if nothing else due to my status as a victim of treatment resistant depression and holder of an official diagnosis of severe ADHD-inattentive, from a leading expert on top of it.
Whoops! I wrote a lengthy piece on drugs, and on my suffering! How did that happen? Let see... Wooster -> Bertie Wooster -> Hugh Laurie -> House MD -> my suicidal ideation (reason for watching House) -> my hospital stay (reason for suicidal ideation) -> my psychosis (reason...) -> my sleep deprivation -> my drug use -> mental health professionals and their incompetence -> long exposition on drugs. That how Wooster turned into psychopharmacology.
Alas, I have to take a break here to prepare for the upcoming football match between Italy and New Zealand. Do you watch the FIFA 2010 World Cup? I do, but it's really the only thing on TV I've watched for months now.
) < While at it, initially it was Vaknin's CER reviews what convinced me of his brilliance, so I've cast aside the Narc. book for good, half-read, for the better fish. Then found his other stuffs, kept me reading for weeks (pity my pea-sized brain can take only thismuch - it's like a black hole...) Sod the 'credentials', some select few come von haus aus without the need of having to rely on 'credentials'. Yup, life is that "unfair". (or I'd rather call his case one the few instances when it's thoroughly "fair".)
I'm quite back on track now.)
). 
(or I just lose interest), being somewhat an airhead. I'm hideously uneducated. 
All style, no substance.)
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