YuviSense: Codin Kid

Update: Part II here.

Spoiler: No, I’m not a drug addict. And hopefully, I won’t be one in the future (If I look like being one, you can always point me back here to get me on my bearings). This is just about my very brief stint with a prescription drug (which was not prescribed for me) which seemed addictive to me after about the fourth dose. I stopped it immediately, and am not going back to it. Period.

It started out pretty innocuously. Dad asked me to check out the properties of the new meds that the doc had prescribed for him. One of these was Modafinil. This one said “Wakefullness Promoting Agent”, which, if you are not living under the dead spider between my two RAM chips on my System, is marketing speech for something which I forgot as I was trying to ape Rory and build a mind-numbingly complex sentence which atleast appears to be grammatically correct yet gives you a laugh like saying Modafinil starts with F and end with Y with u and k inbetween.

So, basically, what I was saying before I got sidetracked by thinking about Rory was that I was quite excited to see this “Wakefullness promoting agent” among my father’s medicines. I secretly, silently slipped one off his supplies. He probably didn’t notice.

I took it for a test drive the next day. My idea was that I could stay up later than usual and still be productive (hah!). And, the first day, it worked wonders: I wasn’t feeling the tiniest bit sleepy till 2, and was up sharp the next day at 6:30 without feeling a bit sleepy. It was around this point in time that I called it the “only drug I’ve actually used that actually made me feel good”. I felt a little bit sleepy at around 12 noon the next day, but at that point of time, shrugged it off. I had with me the false notion that I had discovered a wonderful weapon that would be able to get me better grades in the coming exam by allowing me to stay up late, make me more alert in inter-school competitions, be able to wake me up by myself without having the equivalent of 97 instances of Rory working on it full time, and even cure cancer (not mine). In short, I believed that I had found the silver bullet.

Then came the Horlicks Wizkids 2007 competition. I got the second prize in still photography (thanks for not applauding(bigger thanks if you did. Nobody has yet. Even Mom:()) in all of Chennai, and I attribute some of this to the drug: It allowed me to stay up till around 1 with no ill effects. It allowed me to finish up my custom designed album which beat the heck out of the other contestants even though my shots were more candid and so eventually suffered from high ISO induced noise (of the chromic kind, not the Rory is a fish pirate kind). I was damn happy about it the day after, even though I was starting to feel slightly depressed and sleepy (aka my usual state of health) around the next day’s afternoon, but didn’t give it much thought at that time. I thought I had just confirmed that I had found the silver bullet.

Next week was the Mid Terms. I wasn’t prepared to face this in the least bit. At all. I hadn’t studied an ounce of anything. If studies had mass, which mine do. This isn’t new to me, as I had done almost all my exams in this fashion However, the studies started to have non-negligible mass after the 11th Standard, and I’m still trying to cope up with this. I couldn’t just finish everything in 3 hours time and have time for revision like I used to have before the 11th. And this year was just worser.

I snuck up one 200 mg tablet of Modafinil out of my Dad’s meds box without him knowing it, and planned to use it for the days before the Physics and Maths exams by splitting it into two by biting them into halves. I figured I’d be able to get around 8 hours of solid preparation, which’ll set me in good stead. Yeah.

To be continued in a new post, because I’m about to reformat my hard-drive and re-install XP since VS 2008 Beta 2 won’t install on my system But rest-assured, I’m not addicted to anything. Atleast anything physical.