Hello you fellow lovely kind beautiful Steemians!
My name's Jojo, and my blog JojoRambles (@Janhedlund) is about...uh...well...whatever's on my mind I suppose, which is often quite a lot. If you took a look at my blog header you'd get an idea of the extent to which I have no idea what my niche is. It's a mess.
I'll tell you all a little ('little' being a relative term) about me. (TLDR: at bottom)
How I Got Here
I became interested in blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies in May of this year. I had heard about Bitcoins years previously, and every once in a while they were mentioned, but I never thought anything of it, and never went looking for more information. Then...I did. What a strange experience it's all been since.
This space is still like the Wild West; still in it's infancy, friendly to newcomers, vastly deep and vastly broad, poised to become the foundation of countless lives, waiting to change everything...all just hiding, but not hiding very well. You'd never find it if you didn't look. But look at all and you'll start finding and never stop.
I was hooked. I started watching the trading charts, followed a million Redditors and Youtubers and Medium blogs and Slack channels, I learned Solidity and brushed up on my HTML, and watched the charts rise and fall, just kind of feeling my way into the community from the shadows. Eventually I worked up the courage to buy a bitcoin.
I found Steemit not long after, and I've been lurking silently for the past month, save for a comment here and there, and a couple of posts two weeks ago about a (very) strange happening on the CoinMarketCap charts that STILL no one has seemed to notice or say anything about (did I hallucinate that 260,000% ghost spike in price? am I crazy?).
I've really enjoyed bumming around Steemit this past month! It seems like so much has happened in the whole Crypto space since July 1, I can hardly believe it's only been a month. What a great community, what a great idea. Isn't it kind of weird how nice everyone is over here? Surely a bit of that is the financial incentivization, but I think we'd be cynical to think that's all that's going on here. I think we all want to see the same thing succeed. We all must have finally figured out that good things happen when people work together supportively: encouraging, constructively criticizing, and building this bizarre new thing from the ground up. But best of all, we all must feel like we're in on a secret. We're privy to a whole world, and it changes everything, and no one on the outside can even imagine. Blockchain. We're a subculture. We're the underbelly.
The Underbelly: Ahh, How It's Good To Be Back
It's not my first time in the underbelly. I've known a subculture once or twice; known what it's like to know that no one knows. It might just be the best feeling in the world. Before Christmas 2016 I was a cook. And I was good, too. Back then, I was putting in 70-80 hour weeks at one of the finest restaurants in Manhattan. 17 seats. 17 courses. Dinner for two with wine: $1200. 2 seatings, 34 guests a night, 5 nights a week. I was a 19-year-old unpaid stagier when I first showed up, having signed on for 3 months as an underling on the crew of a quickly rising Danish prodigy, and his much-feared sous-chef. I was off on externship from the finest culinary institute this side of the Atlantic, and I knew I would be prepared for anything.
I was so wrong. Work in the Bigs has a learning curve that will hit you like a freight train. A crumb on your station? A drop of sauce? A fallen spoon clanging on the floor? A towel folded improperly? You, my friend, are going to get eaten alive. The 15 hour days, sweating in a sub-basement under fluorescent lights, the pressure to perform, the stress, the lack of sleep... there's no preparing for that.
But I got over the screaming eventually, and the sleeplessness wasn't so bad, and the days all started to run together, and before I knew it, 3 months had gone, and I was due to sign off and head back to school. But I couldn't afford to go back to school, and besides, a job as a paid commis at a place like this would be better than I'd hoped for even with a degree. The Dane, always kind of heart, and perhaps taking pity on me, offered me the job. I was promised I would't even have to stay in the basement all day anymore!
(fun fact; that picture was taken by Sean Brock, celebrity chef and TV host: https://www.instagram.com/p/BKN-0XthkfL/?taken-by=hseanbrock)
I cooked there for 6 more months, working my way through the ranks at an alarming pace, and found myself as the Chef de Partie de Entremetier, responsible for all hot garnishes, sauces, and purees, and possessed of some authority over the growing gaggle of terrified unpaid South-Korean interns back in the basement from which I'd since emerged. I vaguely remember cooking and serving dinner for Neil deGrasse Tyson. He asked me a lot of hard questions. "That black currant paper was wonderful! Is that set with gelatin or with agar?" "Neither, sir, it's pectin-set, naturally present in the currants." He nodded, clearly understanding exactly how the chemistry of that would work. That guy's as smart as he comes across, at least.
But it was all over in a blink, the way things always are. Eventually my lease ended and my new apartment fell through. My girlfriend had moved back to Maine, and I was getting burnt out after just 9 months at full steam. Conveniently, there was a mutiny on, and I decided I may as well join up. That's how I became homeless in Manhattan, searching simultaneously for a job and an apartment, crashing on cook's couches most nights, and spending my days smoking pot and wandering around the city: December at the Center of the Earth. It was kind of nice after all the responsibility to so suddenly have none whatsoever.
Before long, though, I was running out of couches, and I was forced to make an expeditious retreat back up the Hudson to my former school, where I crashed in an old friend's dorm room for a long weekend. Shortly thereafter, I headed back West, a full day and night on a bus pointed at the middle of nowhere where I'd grown up. I was home for Christmas. It had been more than 2 years since I'd left for New York. My parents had divorced while I was away. I had no idea what I wanted anymore. I really just wanted to sleep. I was to fall for months into a deep depression, spending my days stoned, lying in bed at my Dad's house, watching Netflix and eating Pringles. I felt I'd failed so miserably. I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, badly wrong, but I couldn't put a finger on it. I'd had so little time to think, I'd hardly kept track of how any of it had happened in the first place. Everything since Argentina had been a blur.
How I Became a Cook: Angst, Drug-Dealing, Arrest, and Escape To Argentina
When I graduated high-school, I didn't know what to do. I was 16, almost 17. My test scores were off the charts. My GPA was in the trash. I was very brilliant, and very lazy, and very full of hatred. I should have known back then that something was wrong, but it was to be another four years until I caught on.
I didn't feel like a lazy disrespectful asshole, but that, in essence, was what I'd always heard from every adult in my life. I think they were so frustrated mostly because they felt like I had so much potential with which I was unwilling to do anything. They didn't seem to understand that I was entirely unable to do anything. Something so mundane as to regulate my own habits of diet or of rest was a task Sisyphean. I could hardly muster the motivation to get out of bed most of the time, let alone conform to some idea of hard work or discipline. I was defeated totally by the likes of the prospects of going to school each day or of holding a simple conversation. Worse, they always wanted me to listen when they talked, even if I wasn't interested. That seemed like a completely unreasonable request to me, in some small part on account of my hardly ever being interested, but mostly because I couldn't do it. These seemed to me then to be expectations so common and so impossible as to be nigh-on perverse. Like I say; I should have known something was wrong.
By 16 it had been at least 10 years of all that, and I'd long-since resigned myself to the fact that I must've been a lazy disrespectful asshole in my very bones, and that there was simply nothing to be done about the matter.
They didn't understand anyway, I felt. They didn't know what I'd been through. They'd never felt alone like me. No one understood. (It turned out later I was right about all of that, but not in any way I would have guessed.) And besides, what did I care if I was lazy? I was a genius, I was certain, just as I was certain that that alone would be enough. (On this point, contrarily, it later turned out I'd been sorely mistake. Cooking would serve somewhat to educate me in that regard, but that was still a lifetime away, as you'll soon understand.)
I decided to take a gap year to make some money, figure out what I wanted to do with my life, and travel a bit. I got a job cooking at a Cracker Barrel. That was the catalyst of one of the earliest transfigurations. Many more were to come. I remember my first day at Cracker Barrel: cooks running back and fourth, everyone yelling in Spanish, an uninterrupted stream of order tickets flowing freely from the printers. I had no idea what was going on. I couldn't think, I couldn't hear, I could hardly move. It was absolute, unadulterated chaos. I was home.
Those were the first days of my brief culinary career. I was newly motivated, and I took on more and more hours and responsibilities as I increasingly found myself able, for the first time in my life, to give a shit.
But as much as I began to love cooking, it wasn't very lucrative, and the middle of nowhere was getting kind of dull in my off-hours. Cracker Barrel would only give me 39.5 a week (classic ObamaCare work-around) which left me with a great deal of dangerously unoccupied time. My best friend was on a gap year of his own, facing the same dilemma of being bored and poor. We came up with a great plan. We'd kill two birds with one stone. We'd sell some drugs.
Our little business took off like a rocket, and (literally) before I knew it I was spending thousands of dollars a week on weed, acid, Xanax, molly, and cocaine, among other curious molecules, most of which I'd never tried myself. My partner got out, but I kept on dealing. I was having fun. (below: me)
After a few months, I'd pocketed a cool 15 grand or so (turns out it's not hard to make money as a drug dealer) and decided it was time to quit dealing and finally do some of that traveling I'd been so intent on at the start of my year off. I bought a ticket less than a week in advance, one way to Buenos Aires, Argentina, connecting in Miami. I figured I'd decide later when to come back, and with that ensued the mad dash to sell all of the rest of my huge collection of drugs...in under 5 days. I almost made it, too. Almost, but I forgot about a simple twist of fate.
The night before I was due to leave I was arrested for Felony Trafficking and Distribution of LSD and MDMA. They took me to jail. I was very pleasant to them, if I do say, and they even took my handcuffs off early. They told me bail was to be $1,000 plus an additional $55 in fees. They asked who I'd like to call to come bail me out, but I'd been running drugs all night. "$1,055 total?," I said, "Why...I have that in cash!" They didn't think that was so funny.
I called a friend to pick me up, and I spent the night at his house. A little research revealed the maximum sentence for my crimes to be 30 years in federal prison. That was a lot more punishment than my 17-year-old brain could handle, and so I decided then and there that I was headed to Buenos Aires the next morning as planned.
And that's how I became a 17-year-old international drug fugitive.
I spent almost a month in Buenos Aires, but eventually there were so many warrants out for my arrest (a new one was being issued, and a new court date set, for each successive court date I missed) that it became clear to me that I either had to at once return to the States, or else never return again. A life on the run didn't appeal to me much, and I was wholly unprepared for that sort of stress. I caved, and went back home to face justice. Excepting a pleasant talk with the friendly folks from the DHS at Dallas Fort Worth (who were very keen to know who exactly I was and why exactly I was so very wanted), everything went off without a hitch, and I was home safe.
In the end, it turned out the traffic stop was all sketchy on the probable-cause front. My lawyer (whom I gravely suspect of the practice of black magicks and the manufacture of voodoo dolls) worked me out a plea for 6 months' non-reporting probation on a paraphernalia possession misdemeanor charge. I got a call telling me I'd been accepted to culinary school. I even had a bunch of drug money left over! Everything was (kind of) looking up!
It had been a long year since graduating high-school, and it was starting to feel like a lot to process. I was due to head off to New York in a month, and I decided to go see a therapist to just get a lot of it off of my chest. I didn't understand any of the ways I had been acting my whole life, and I was becoming acutely aware that there was something wrong with me. Specifically, I wanted to know if I was diagnosably sociopathic: a sufferer of Anti-Social Personality Disorder. I was not, she assured me, almost on sight, and I was at first a bit insulted that she thought she knew me so well. I soon found out I had very little idea what sociopathy actually looked like, and that she had obviously been right. After a couple of sessions, however, she did tell me that I might have ADHD.
But by then it was time to head to New York. "Oh. That's cool. Alright, I'm leaving for years now, bye." I basically said. Typical.
What I Should Have Known
Fast forward 2 years and 5 months. It was February 2017, and I was still lying in my bed at my Dad's, stoned in my boxer shorts and halfway through a can of Pringles when, in classic ADHD fashion, I remembered something that seemed important. "Hey. Wait a second. Wasn't there some lady forever ago who said that I might have ADHD." Yeah...typical. I figured that might be worth looking into, so I found out who she'd been and I set up an appointment.
She started giving me tests. I remember one in particular: a survey of my dispositions and thinking patterns on a scale of 1-5. To be eligible for formal diagnosis, an aggregate score of 15 or greater was required (of course she didn't tell me that at the time.) I proceeded to score over 50.
And that, not yet 6 months ago, is how I was diagnosed with crushingly severe ADHD at the age of 20, after which everything started to make a lot more sense.
It's All Going To Be Alright (probably, I mean, who knows, right?)
I now take the maximum prescribable dosage of Vyvanse, and a supplement later in the day. It's 80mg, all told, but I'll always remember the first day I had the prescription. It was only 20mg then, as one has to build tolerance. I got up in the morning and took one with breakfast. 45 minutes later the fog began to lift. The whole world literally brightened before my eyes, and for the first time in my life I understood what it must be like to think clearly. Words cannot begin to express. But chances are you have a 'neurotypical brain', so you know what thinking is like.
Since then, everything has changed. I've decided I can't cook my whole life, and I want to go to 'real college'. That being said, I have no money, which mean's I'll need to go for free. To that end (but mostly because it's now the only thing I love) I spend all of my time studying and creating. CS, Math, Philosophy, Theology, Music, Writing, Economics, Physics, Blockchain Tech, and Crypto-trading constitute a few of my interests.
I've also gotten in shape for the first time in my life. I wake up at the same time each morning (6 am), and stretch and do yoga. I run 6 days a week. Almost 6 months ago, I even became a vegan, which is shocking to me. I've always been suspicious of the vegans at best, and at worst openly contemptuous. Despite being one of them, I maintain that they're not to be trusted. We're all nuts (pun very much intended).
I've also completely rederived my concept of morality and my philosophy for living. I've long been an atheist, so those areas have always been a bit full of open questions, as far as I'm concerned. Three things (in essence, that is; this is already so long I won't get into the bulk of it now) have really made the difference
- I finally have the mental and emotional energy to care about other people in a meaningful way and to begin to appreciate the beauty and the vastness of others.
- Serious autodidactical philosophical, scientific, and mathematical inquiry has allowed me to begin to more fully appreciate the same beauty and vastness as it pertains to everything.
- That same inquiry, particularly its philosophical incarnation, has lead me to finally give up on my belief in free will. I've embraced hard deterministic incompatibilism, and out of that has come a rejection of the concepts of shame, fault, blame, pride, praise, punishment, and justice. At first this makes the world a difficult place to navigate for a while, but it all makes more sense this way in the end (I promise).
I say none of this to leave you with the impression that I've got it all together at this point. I definitely don't, and I never will. I've only realized how wonderful it is to come fully to terms with the fact that never getting there is the point. That's where all the beauty is.
In Conclusion
I said at the beginning it was a mess. But that's not it at all. It's not a mess. It's just me. And I don't know who I am yet, or what I want to do with my life, or any of that. I haven't found my niche. But I'm looking everywhere, and I'm so filled with awe. Awe for the beauty and the vastness, the breadth and the depth and the infinity of this tiny little rock we're all from. Times are strange and getting stranger. Donald Trump is the President. The robots are going to take all of our jobs. The threats of overpopulation, climate change, and nuclear war loom. There's still a whole lot of suffering and hatred and violence in the world. Sometimes it all seems it's too much: too much to do anything about, and too much to ever overcome, and some days I can only despair.
But most days I don't. I thought I'd seen too much, and I was full of hatred, and there was no turning back. But it turned out I'd seen too little, and I just had to know more to start to find some joy.
I'm 20 now, and it's been a hell of a ride, and I'm really excited about continuing to learn and grow with all of you here on Steemit, and with all of you in our funny little blockchain space. I'm in it for the long haul, I think (my rewards are set 100% power-up if that convinces anyone). Steemit (or something very like it) is going to change the world, and I'd like to say I was here when it all got started.
Good luck, humans! Keep in touch with yourselves! 'Till next time.
I was a smart lazy disrespectful asshole, did bad in school, took a gap year, became a bad cook, sold some drugs, got arrested, fled to Argentina ("and that's how I became a 17-year-old international drug fugitive"), came back, got probation, went to culinary school, became a good cook, moved to Manhattan, became a very good cook indeed, left Manhattan, found out I had the mother of all ADHD, found out I hadn't been a lazy disrespectful asshole the whole time after all(!!!), learned a bunch of stuff, started loving other people, found out about blockchain, signed up for steemit, and now I'm here. Yep. That's pretty much the gist of it.
If that sounds interesting, give the larger piece a skim; I'd honestly be delighted if even one human reads this whole ordeal.
As a final note, I'll be up-voting this myself upon posting. I don't know what the 'customs' are surrounding that sort of behavior. If self-up-voting is frowned upon on steemit, would one of you lovely kind beautiful Steemians please let me know that in the comments?