30th of January, 2004 ANTE·MERIDIEM 12:43

I am really, really bad at smoking weed. Kind of wound-up at the best of times, the ѕhіt pushes me into being an edgy, paranoiac, thick-tongued moron. So, if I’m around of an evening and you’re calculating how much you need, that’s one less person. In case you were wondering.

Alcohol, on the other hand ... I’m a bad drunk, and there’s no shortage of stories to underline that. But, at this stage, I haven’t had a night that ended in drunken blackout in a long  time—I seem to have a better idea of what is too much too fast. When I’m not doing the drunken blackout thing, alcohol kills the feverish internal self-analysis that makes me a conversational invalid when I’m remotely unsure of my ground, whether it’s talking to a chica I’m into or about a subject I’m interested in with someone who knows the area much better than I do. So, I like it.

Coffee ... I’m Irish, from the country, so my exposure to it was late in my teens, and I’ve a low threshold of resistance to it. Two espressos at the end of a long day will keep a conversation going okay, three will push me into the feverish internal self-analysis above. On the other hand, feverish analysis is not per se  a bad thing when coding, but you have to watch that you don’t flick to other apps too much. And you can lose perspective on what you’re doing. Perspective is, in general, good; sometimes when something small needs to be written or fixed losing it is temporarily good, but that’s scant compensation for losing the wider picture.

Tea; Great. Slow release of caffeine, tannins, resistance built up since youth so I don’t have to pay too much attention to how much I drink, warming as a noticeable effect (as opposed to coffee, where the kick seems to drown out the heat). I probably don’t drink enough of it.

And, as http://​douweosinga.​com/​projects/​googletalk puts it, “The lunch lady the plot is the MHz rating of the moisture content of wood in the Shadow of the Vampire.” But, no, never done LSD, here ends how I react to drugs.

(I’ve had diamorphine too, but it was some years ago and it’s not something I’m about to look into getting again.)