i wrote most of this last night on a walk and meant to give it one more pass when i got home as per usual. then i got home and adhd brain kicked in and, well, i completely forgot i had hands, apparently. so it sat in drafts, and now it gets to be one post instead of two, which honestly works better, because the thing i was angry about last night is the thing i finished today. nice resolution.
seven minutes into Anki i wanted to throw my laptop
i said i was skipping Anki. then i took a shower, ran it cold at the end to reset my firing neurons, and negotiated myself into one fifteen-minute session anyway, because apparently i can’t leave a streak alone.
i lasted about seven minutes before i was genuinely furious. not tired-furious. actually pissed. i was flipping cards and it felt like staring at blank pieces of paper. the card asks a thing and there’s nothing there to grab onto. no answer waiting in the back of my head, no “oh right.” just blank.
the cards weren’t the problem, they were the messenger
once i cooled off i realized the anger wasn’t about the cards. if a card feels like blank paper, it’s testing something that never got learned in the first place. you can’t recall what you never encoded. the deck wasn’t failing me — it was showing me a hole i didn’t want to admit was there.
and here’s the part that stung. i have the freeCodeCamp responsive web design version 8 certification, claimed it and everything. but the certification says i finished the modules, not that the material is solid. those are two completely different things, and seven minutes of flashcards found the gap the certificate was papering over.
so i shut the laptop. went outside. bounced my bouncy ball. did some thinking instead of grinding through it angry. came back with a conclusion instead of just a bad mood, which is progress for me.
the fix isn’t more cards. it’s building. i’d already been working through The Odin Project – freeCodeCamp Remix Path and gotten up through Build a Recipe Page. so that’s where i start again.
the day the meds came back
today started at the playground park in my apartment complex, guided meditation on a bench before the day had a chance to get loud. then i walked to the pharmacy and finally picked up the Adderall refill i’d been rationing air over for two days.
came home and went absolutely feral on the stretch routines. the long wake & shake, fifteen minutes of core, ten of shoulders, ten of chest. the twenty-minute posture gauntlet is still waiting for me tonight and i’m choosing not to think about it yet.
then a walk. then back to the same bench with Lullaby, because Chuck Palahniuk writes in short scenes and my brain is currently built for short scenes and nothing else. shake, OCD.app routine, a little bit of stream.
the internet staggered mid-stream so i cut it short, which stung less than it normally would because it was a genuinely beautiful day. dry. barely humid. in a New York summer that’s not weather, that’s a gift, and you don’t interrogate a gift.
the recipe page, but my way this time
not click through it. rebuild it, the way i do my shippable projects now — html and css comments on every single line, explaining what each piece is actually doing and why. if i can’t explain the line in a comment, i don’t know the line.
that’s the whole method now.
and it isn’t even a redo. the old one isn’t published on my GitHub anymore. gonezo bonzo. so i’m not repeating busywork, i’m building fresh and replacing a dead link with something real. nothing lost.
and it’s done. built today, line by line, every line commented. css foundations lesson A knocked out alongside it. later tonight, it’ll ship to guerz.lol
less than twenty-four hours from “i want to throw my laptop” to a finished build. i’ll take that trade every time.
a small thing about logging
i noticed today that i’ve barely touched Obsidian lately, and i was about to feel bad about it before i realized: there hasn’t been anything worth logging. i’m not going to write down that i did Anki flashcards again. that’s not a log entry, that’s just a tuesday.
the log is for signal. when something actually shifts, i feel the pull to write it down. like right now, apparently.
tomorrow: Discogs, five at a time
starting a daily upload of listings to Discogs. goal of five a day. that’s it, that’s the whole ambition. i want to see how much time and effort five actually takes before i pretend to know what a sustainable number is.
five is small enough that i can’t talk myself out of it, and honest enough that the data will be real.
mostly i’m just relieved to be back on a structured path. the Anki stretch was excruciating in a way i couldn’t name until it broke. lessons and builds have a shape. flashcards on a foundation full of holes just have a scoreboard.
i was mad because i didn’t understand something. that’s not failure. that’s just the part right before you go learn it.
current mood: 😤 pissed off into clarity into a shipped build
currently listening to: