ADDlepated

I spent the better part of today setting up and organizing my new Wikispace. See, I've been on the verge of a bit of an ADD meltdown lately, coming up with one neat idea (at least, neat to me) after another that I IN NO WAY have time to do, getting overwhelmed and feeling like since I don't have time for new things I don't have time for ANYTHING, because I have no filter sometimes when it comes to deciding what's the most worthy of my time at a given moment. Instead of freaking out and doing something stupid and potentially publicly humiliating (again), I managed to step back, take a deep breath, and experiment with ways to track my ideas so that they can leave me alone and let me get on with my life until I have time for them.

I started out with multiple Tada Lists for every potential project that's been nagging at me, but the to do list structure made me feel pressured and wasn't helping at all with the prioritization part. From there I clicked on over to Back Pack, a promised "information organizer." Eureka! This was exactly what I was looking for! I opened an account and started dumping my brain into it right away, but then I discovered it only had room for so much of my brain unless I wanted to pay a monthly fee. Bummer.

Really, said fee was pretty reasonable ($5/month for up to 25 pages) for such an awesome service; but if you read my personal finance blog, you already know I'm cheap frugal. So I hunted around for a free version.

After checking out several Wiki-type sites, one of which is exactly the same platform used by Wikipedia, and most of which confused the poo out of me, I stumbled upon Wiki Spaces. It's just as easy to use as Back Pack, and you get to create an unlimited (up to 10MB) amount of pages for the low, low price of FREE! And we have a winner.

I actually only set up what's there so far in less than half an hour. The basic idea here is that when I get an idea for a project, story, article, new blog, whatever, I add it to the list on the main page, and then as those ideas start to flesh out I can give them their very own page for brainstorming, etc. The big hope is that A) once I get these ideas down, they'll shut up and leave me alone so I can work on what actually needs doing, B) fleshing them out in this manner will help me decide which are worth doing, and C) new toy! Shiny!

At any rate, whether it works in the long run, it's gotten me down off the ledge for the time being. And I'm feeling much better now, thanks.

Huh.

Well now, this is interesting and kind of unexpected:

Your Aspie score: 137 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 77 of 200
You are very likely an Aspie




I... well, yeah, that would explain a few things, I guess (like why I'm so firmly encamped in Team Heather). Still, I'm going to take that with a grain of salt. Of course, now I'm wondering how closely ADD and Asperger's are linked.

Aspie Quiz

Screw it.

I've decided that today is simply going to be all about surviving and not screwing up my job. Once again I--sing it with me; it's an old and familiar refrain, I'm sure you know the words--forgot to order my ADD supplements in time to keep from running out completely, so my brain's got nothing but its own flighty, flaky, fidgety self to guide it. So I hereby give myself permission to only worry about being productive enough to keep my bosses happy, or at least keep them from noticing that anything's amiss. My regular writing schedule can just wait on hold until I've got my pills, which according to Vitacost's shipping schedule should be tomorrow. One writing skip day won't kill me or my novel.

Today is going to be a tough one. My allergies are acting up, for one thing. Three hours since I dosed up on Sudafed and eye drops and my eye is still swollen and leaking. I brought my makeup to work in the hopes that I'd be able to put it on once I got here, but nope. I look like a pale, washed out, crying mess, prompting everyone who knows I went to a funeral yesterday to be especially concerned.

There's a whole rant about my mom burning leaves in the yard and the smoke exacerbating my allergies, and how we just really, really want to hurry up and move, but I'll save that for later.

I'm also still out of my ADD supplements, and the allergies are just compounding my ADD. Which is just too bad, because there's a ton of work to get done today, and I can't very well just say, "Sorry, I'm out of focus. Can somebody else handle that?" I've got to figure out a way to pull it all together and concentrate.

I was actually looking forward to going to the gym, knowing how exercise helps with the focus factor, but I just got a reminder that there's a mandatory admin meeting scheduled for lunchtime. At least they'll feed me. That makes the time I spent making tuna salad last night kind of unnecessary, but I guess now Friday's lunch is also covered.

Somebody said something about a ton of drawings needing to go out this afternoon. On the bright side, that will give me something physical to do that doesn't require too much thought. But as it sounds like I'll get to spend the afternoon stuck down in the copy center, I'm hurrying to get all of my personal business wrapped up while things are still relatively slow.

Bleah. I should have asked for two days off.

I went and ran out of MegaMind again, so my intentions of getting ahead today to take up the slack for tomorrow are not coming to frution. My brain is full of static. I guess I really ought to just put those pills on auto-ship, shouldn't I? I'm apparently way too ADD to remember to re-order my ADD pills on my own.

I think I'm taking tomorrow off, anyway. I've gotten half of the approval I need, although I think the other half is just to approve using vacation time to cover it, not to actually miss work. My vacation hours, such as they are, are still at a negative balance from all the ice and snow. At this rate I'm never going to earn enough vacation time to actually go anywhere.

My focus is so non-existent right now, it's not even funny.

Maybe I'm just warped by too much Food Network and HGTV.

We had a cozy, long weekend, in which a lot of sleeping, snuggling, and lazing about was mingled in there with the chores and whatnot. I've decided that one of the days I like best about having extra time off is the luxury of being able to take my time with food preparation. I actually enjoy cooking and being all domestic when it's not rushed and when I don't feel like it's taking up too much of the only real day off I'll get all week. You know, I hate to seem all un-feminist and old-fashioned, but I can get totally psyched about the idea of becoming a domestic diva. I only dislike cooking and cleaning and decorating and general home maintenance when I'm trying to squeeze it into two days a week, which is when it becomes overwhelming. But I know I'd love getting to stay home and focus on all that stuff full-time. I know I'd never get bored. I'd always have twenty projects going at a time, as I'm wont to do anyway.

I guess it's a good thing I'm looking forward to eventually becoming a housewife, since the other day Matt dropped a bit of a bomb with the off-handed mention that he hopes we'll be able to homeschool our hypothetical future kids. Far from being the stink-bomb that you'd expect, it was actually a pleasant surprise, and a relief--I'd been thinking the same thing, and figured it would take some convincing to get him to agree. But hey! He's already there! Further proof that he's SO the guy for me.

Why on earth would I want to homeschool? It's not so much that I'm entirely down on the public school system, or that I have anything but the utmost admiration and respect for teachers. But my own experiences with public school were pretty dismal all the way around. A lot of that simply had to do with the times. My teachers couldn't very well be expected to recognize that I had a learning disorder when nobody had even heard of ADD. But the labels I got instead -- smart but lazy, stupid and lazy, bad kid, bad student, underachiever, full of wasted potential -- those labels did a lot of damage. A lot of teachers slapped that label on me the first day of class and then dismissed me as hopeless for the rest of the semester. And I got bullied relentlessly throughout my entire school career because those labels, combined with ADD-related behaviors I had no idea how to control, caused me to stand out as an easy target.

So, yeah. I don't want any part of that for my hypothetical future kids.

Of course, if we're going to homeschool, one of us has to be home full time, and we'd already talked about how if we have kids I'd like to be a stay-at-home mom. So I guess it'll fall to me. I hope it falls to me, that Matt's eventually able to get a job that will make all of this possible. Not that I plan to let him bring home ALL of the bacon, mind. I'll still write, and I still plan to take the web design training, and I'm still kicking around ideas for eventually going pro with the knitting, for whatever income that's worth. And I realize that none of this is new, some epiphany I've had since getting married that I want to be the happy little homemaker. It's always been my fondest dream to work from home, keep my own hours, and unleash my inner Martha Stewart Sandra Lee in my spare time. I'm just grateful as heck that I've found myself a partner who's on board with all of that.

Mmm. Fish-oily.

There's this new thing I'm trying. It's not enough that I let Matt talk me into doing the Zone with him; now he's got me all graduated to the Omega Zone, which is basically where you eat according to the Zone way, but you also obsess over how much fish oil you consume on a daily basis.

So he went out and bought the latest book on the subject (see sidebar) just before Christmas, in the hopes that it would help motivate us to get back on track once the holidays were out of the way. And according to this book, the right amount of highly concentrated fish oil will all but cure my ADD. I'd heard such things before and remained unconvinced, but the science behind the theory seemed sound, and since I'm so totally over taking 30 pills a day, most of which are for controlling my focus issues, I figured, what the hey? I'll give it a whirl. I'm now on day three of said whirl.

So far, so good. Today is my first on-the-job trial, which is the big test. Things to take into account are that (a) there hasn't yet been enough time for all of my other supplements to be completely depleted from my system, and (b) quality, highly concentrated fish oil is not inexpensive, so I'm reluctant to take more than half as much as the book recommends for ADD, which is still about three times as much as I had been taking. If I continue to be able to tell a difference after this amount, then I might break down and invest in enough to cover the full recommended amount. If I can stop taking all those other supplements and take only this, then I figure the cost will even itself out.

The full amount is 15 grams. That, you guys, is a LOT of fish oil to consume in a day. It's still a lot of pills, if that's the way I end up taking it, but for now I'm trying it in liquid form. Not straight, mind, because all appearances to the contrary, I'm not a masochist. I mix it in a shake with 2% milk, frozen berries and protein powder, and it's... still fish-oily. But tolerably so.

So for now I'm doing the shakes--which only contain 7.5 grams, and of which you're supposed to drink two a day, and I'm only drinking one--for lunch on days I go to the gym. On gym skip days I guess I'll take pills. It seems to be working about as well as the Mega-Mind/St. John's Wort combo I've been taking, but like I said, it's still too soon to tell. Since the fish oil is supposed to have the added benefits of keeping my PMS in check and all that heart-healthiness, I'm kind of rooting for it to work. I'll keep you posted.

I could get lost in my own back yard.

Do you know what's awesome? Apparently it's becoming standard practice around here to turn big copy and production jobs over to the drafters instead of the project admins. This is probably not so awesome for CAG, who loves getting to hide in the print shop for hours at at ime, but personally, I'm thrilled by this turn of events.

Do you know what's not so awesome, but kind of funny, in the "if I don't laugh about this I'll cry" kind of way? Being so tired when you leave the office that your ADD takes over completely and you zone out and miss your exit.

But wait: this story needs more set-up.

Basically, there are two ways to get home from my office. One is the Interstate/Route 66 combo that takes me through two big towns, a lot of stop lights, and past the big Cherokee casino with it's giant Vegas-style marquis that sits right by the highway and can be seen for miles; otherwise known as a Major Hassle, or The Way To Be Avoided At All Costs.

The other way is to exit from the interstate onto a state highway that only goes through one big town, has but one stop light, and is practically a straight shot to my front door; otherwise known as The Way I Usually Go.

So, I missed my exit, and ended up having to take the hassle-way home. But that's not the funny-sad part. The funny-sad part is how long it took me, once I realized something was amiss, to figure out what had happened and where I was. My thought process went something like this:

Daydream daydream daydream. Huh, that McDonald's billboard is new. Do they mean the McD's inside the Wal-Mart? Weird that that would get it's own billboard. Daydream daydream obliviousness daydream. What's that bright thing up there? Is that a casino sign? When did they put a casino sign there? WHY did they put one there? The casino's miles from here. Wait... none of these signs look familiar! What the hell? Oh my God, where the hell am I? Panic! Cursing! Pleading to God! Oh, wait... there's the casino. You're still on the interstate, doofus. Dammit.

In my defense, for all I knew, by the time I came back from zoning out I'd already driven halfway to Missouri. If not for the casino sign snapping me out of my fugue there's actually a good chance I'd have driven all the way there.

I just plain should not be allowed to drive when I'm tired.

Me, a Guest Blogger

Adult ADD and Money posted a short essay by yours truly on how I trained myself to be (more or less) financially responsible.

At Least It's Not Fescue

I was in a weird mood yesterday. I didn't sleep well the night before, and as it tends to do, sleep deprivation made me introspective. Sometimes, introspection makes me all nostalgic. Such was the case yesterday. It was the kind of mood that gets me to sign onto Classmates.com under the pseudonymous account I've set up there (99% of the time I don't give a squirrel's nut about 99% of the people I went to high school with, and I don't want any of them to know about the 1% of the time that curiosity gets the better of me) and see if I can glean any news about the 1% of schoolmates with whom I was actually on friendly terms. It was that mood that also got me to Google the rock band of This Girl I Once Knew.

I knew This Girl in college -- my first attempt at the U of OK when I was actually college-age, not my more recent and successful return. She didn't actually go to school there, but she was the good friend of a good friend who did, and she and I were friendly by association, hanging out with the same people, going to the same parties, sometimes even hanging out with each other. She was one of those Fabulously Cool types, all cultured and well-travelled and ueber-talented and always gorgeously put together, who made me feel like a completely inadequate dork poseur. I never felt I could truly be friends with her because I felt like I could never be cool enough for her. Not that she ever said or did anything to make me feel that way, mind; she was also a genuinely sweet person with a fun and self-depracating sense of humor. But she gave such an impression of being so much more than adequate at everything she did that all I could see when I was in her presence were my own faults and how I failed to measure up.

Taking all of this into account, I should have taken her a little more seriously when she said she was going to start a rock band, and not been so surprised when it actually turned out to be somewhat successful. But you know how it is when your friend says s/he's going to start a rock band--90% of the time you both know that it's just wishful thinking, and if they do go so far as to actually assemble a group of musicians, they probably won't make it out of their parents' garage. But This Girl is someone who actually does the things she sets her mind to. Before long, she and her critically-acclaimed local band were packing up and moving to LA to be bona fide rock stars--headlining at famous LA clubs, national tours, rabid groupies, the whole works. We kept in sporadic touch via e-mail, and I tried to keep up with the band's doings, but somewhere in there we lost touch, as I had already lost touch with most of the rest of our friends from those days.

I haven't checked up on her or her band in years, or given either that much thought, until yesterday. For some reason, she was on my mind. So I plugged TGIOK's band name into Google. What I learned is that the band is now defunct. She's living in north Cali and is starting a solo career, and also has a few other creative and business ventures going. She appears to be doing well, and also appears to be even more fabulous than ever.

Somehow, this news bummed me out. Not that I'm not thrilled for her and her successes; but just as I did back in the day, I suddenly find myself using her extraordinary life as a measuring stick for my own ordinary self, and coming up wanting. She's a few years my junior, which just adds to my sense of failure and mediocrity. She's thirty now, and spent her twenties living a dream and building a great life for herself. I spent my twenties floundering and struggling to figure out how this whole adulthood thing works. She has numerous successes already behind her. I have numerous false starts behind me, with hardly any finishes. She's right where she wanted to be by 30, and I'm nowhere near where I thought I would be by the time I got to my thirties.

The grass on her side of the fence is a lush, tropical garden.

But, y'know, the grass on my side ain't so bad, either. It's Bermuda--ordinary and not that pretty, but hardy in bad weather and still very green and fun to walk around barefoot in. I may be a mediocre wannabe with vague entrepreneurial aspirations who is still struggling to jumpstart a writing career and bring some semblance of fabulousness into my life. But you know what? I still believe I'll get there. It might happen ten years later than that girl back at OU who couldn't decide whether to girlcrush on or resent the hell out of This Girl She Knew ever dreamed it would happen, but it will happen.

In the mean time, I have a pretty fantastic life. I have a husband whom I adore, and a good job that I actually like, and... okay, I'm not so thrilled with my current living situation, but that's only a few months away from improving. I have a bright future. I'm still on the way up, and all of my successes are ahead of me.

I think, what with my ADD-ish tendencies to get really excited about a new idea, tackle the implementation with all I've got and then peter out and not see it through, that I naturally get depressed when confronted with someone who actually has the drive and ability to make something out of their talents, and This Girl is, to me, the embodiment of drive and ability combined with talent and energy. But I know that I shouldn't measure my life by anybody else's. I live according to my own time-table, and I've always been a late bloomer. If it takes till my forties to finally write a book that's fit to publish, by the time I'm fifty nobody will care that it happened ten or fifteen years later than I expected. So I just need to keep writing, and stop comparing myself to other people, and remember that I love my life. It's mine and it's good and it's going places.

Dusting Off my Psych-Soc Degree and Getting My Intellectual On...

This Boing Boing article on whether autism and psychopathy can genuinely be defined as mental disorders asks the question, "are there many 'disorders' that are really 'adaptations'?" It's an interesting question, and touches a nerve with me because I've long thought there was some credence to the theory that Attention Deficit Disorder wouldn't exist as such if not for the fact that our society simply isn't designed to accomodate, let alone reward, those who are wired with the traits that make up ADD.

This is supported by the fact that the best "cure" that I've encountered is simply arranging my life to capitalize on these traits instead of being hindered by them. But since that's not really a practical solution for anyone who has to hold down a day job, I instead manage my ADD traits through a combo of behavioral conditioning and nutritional supplements, in effect carving my square brain to fit in society's round hole. I'm tempted to become resentful of this sometimes, to shuck it all and just say "That's just the way I'm wired, baby!" And it would be freeing and a huge relief, for a while, until my ADDness got out of control to the point that I can no longer manage my finances, my marriage erodes, and soon I'm staying down at the Y and scraping a living by selling my craft projects at flea markets. And so I take my pills and religiously keep my lists and my calendars and am grateful for my job. And consider that maybe the fact that nutritional supplements have such an impact on my brain's ability to function is a pretty good indicator that my brain is missing something, that on its own it doesn't have what it needs to produce the chemicals necessary for "normal" functioning. And that's what makes it a disorder.

I suppose, sociologically speaking, a mental disorder can be defined as any wired behavior that prevents an individual from being a functional member of the society in which she lives. So then the question follows, what happens when it's the society that's broken? My clinical psychology prof, on the other hand, taught that it's not right to make the diagnosis of a disorder if the symptoms aren't causing the individual significant distress. Makes sense. This is why I have and am treated for Attention Deficit Disorder, but I merely have OCD-like tendencies--the latter are manageable and don't cause me any problems outside of odd looks from people who just don't get my quirks, whereas the former has been known to significantly jack up my life.

I suppose that doesn't really answer the question of whether I'd still be considered to have a disorder if our school and work systems were designed to be more ADD-friendly, or for that matter whether it should be my responsibility to conform to society, or society's responsibility to conform to me and those like me. But for now this is the world in which I live, and my life in this world requires that I treat my ADD the way the world defines it. So I'll keep popping my focus aides. And dreaming of the day when I can quit the 9 to 5 grind and write full time and hire people to manage my life for me, and wondering if, when that day happens, will I still have ADD?