// μ = m // dayvan cowboy // music is math

I’ve been wading through my better posts — the ones that actually “deliver the goods” — and I noticed an important difference between my writing and that of people who appear to be able to succintly convey comparably complex messages. There are two “styles” of storytelling, which I’ve nicknamed the mathematician style and the journalist style.

In a nutshell, the mathematician style is bottom-up and the journalist style is top-down, which means the journalist presents the gist of what’s being said right at the beginning, while the mathematician will demonstrate what he’s trying to say from ideas he assumes you’ll find trivial or obvious. On a blog journal post, that will often prevent the reader from getting his point at all. [The way this post is constructed, it has the journalist style if you read this paragraph or the mathematician style if you strike this one out. Try and start re-reading this post skipping this paragraph.]

A mathematician will always start in familiar territory. If you have basic (calculus, linear algebra, etc.) mathematical training, you can walk into a post-doc lecture on Anosov diffeomorphism in non-ergodic systems and understand the first two or three minutes of it. Much of advanced mathematics relies generalizations of simple structures one has learnt in basic training, and if you’re fluent in Riemann integration you might get an intuitive idea of the Stieltjes integrals the lecturer is drawing on the board. Sure, you’ll get lost soon because you never had the prerequisite knowledge to understand the actual point of the talk.

There are multiple reasons for this phenomenon. A mathematical lecture will often start behind its prerequisites, to get everyone’s brain into “math mode”, to ensure everyone’s in the same starting point — often terminologies vary, and what a brazilian calls a “body” (corpo) is what’s known in english as a “field” — and no one’s thinking of diffeomorphisms in ordinary topology, for example. This is also the way mathematics is done since calculus 101, and it probably trickles up throughout a mathematician’s career. The more important thing, though, is that mathematics is all about deriving the nontrivial from the trivial — which is why the obvious is stated first.

Stream of consciousness today — I apologize for the bad style. I fucked up big time when I  tried 10mg ritalin knowing I had skipped one dose of anticonvulsant. I had just run out and thought Seroquel was strong enough everything else was just an add-on. I think it’s a full hypomanic flip-out. I do know Ritalin competes with Seroquel for receptors. I’ve already taken six miligrams of clonazepam — which sure did chill me out — and two susie-Qs, and I’m still insomniac. Usually one 100mg seroquel will knock me out for 10-12 hours. 

I do hope the extra antipsychotic stops this on its tracks. If it doesn’t  I’m upping the anticonvulsant. But I don’t have the time for that, I’m supposed to function as a normal human being or get fired. 

On a second thought, I should up the anticonvulsant right now.  Maybe a Depakote, but if I’m depressed tomorrow I won’t be able to function. Lamictal has that antidepressant effect which could get in the way of stopping mania in its tracks. Maybe Risperdal?

Jesus, self-medicating is hard. I should have gotten an algorithm in case of a manic flip-out, but I wanted the Ritalin enough that I downplayed the pro-manic effects of it at my last season. 

What’s worse, as soon as I feel stabilized — no chaos attracting my brain even if ultrafocused on ritalin — I’ll still take ritalin, though in much more moderated amounts.

If the pre-psychotic “chaos attracting my brain” is the problem, I think I might do half a 2mg Risperdal. Seroquel is way too expensive to keep one-upping it in hopes of getting okay. OTOH a full 2mg Risperdal steals my entire soul. But hey, 1mg Risperdal plus 200mg Seroquel might be way too much antipsychotic and might numb my soul far worse than 2mg Risperdal did — even though Seroquel is much smarter.