Voicemail of the year.

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"Okay, you really need to call me back, because the one-legged motherfucker that hops around the pool table is here and you really motherfucking need to be involved in this, okay? So fucking call me back right now. Please..............Dude. Did you just fart?"

---

You are someone else. I am still right here.

---

...Empedocles claims that in utero, our backbone is one long solid; and that through the constriction of the womb and the punishments of birth it must be snapped again and again to form our vertebrae; that for the child to have a spine, his back must first be broken....

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The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party  by M.T. Anderson

What a strange week. I've gotten so much done. There's still a long way to go, but I feel like my troubles are in front of me now, waiting patiently to be addressed; and no longer this writhing, ever-growing mass that I must carry on my shoulders and cannot ever put down. The pressure is gone, in good ways and in bad.

It horrifies me that my emotions can be so completely divorced from my intellect. I've always known what I wanted. The one thing I've learned, the one thing that is now painfully clear, is that other people change. You can't predict it, there aren't any reasons for it, and you just have to suck it up and live with the new hole in your heart and the stab wound in your back. I'm still me, though. I haven't changed. I haven't changed, and yet I was the one who somehow became "not good enough."

I was building a fire in the woodstove earlier and wound up kneeling on the hearth, crying and choking on ash. I can't believe how alone I feel, how bereft. Even when I'm laughing, cuddling with armfuls of cats, marveling at how great I feel...I am still hollow on the inside. So. Crying and ashes and a cold draft coming down the chimney, and my phone rang. It was Sandy, drunk as a skunk, out with the girls, and thinking of me. I fucking love her so fucking much. No less than three people told me they loved me before the damn tears had even dried on my face.

On a lighter note, remember that horrible pain in my shoulder? It's worse than ever, and tonight I noticed that my shoulder is actually swollen in that spot. This can't be good. Sure wish I had health insurance. I'm sure my second and third jobs aren't going to improve the situation all that much.

Rise and shine/pleasant dreams.

Kiki, waking me up this morning: Gad. Last night I processed a bag full of bloody--

My brain: Oh this cannot be good. 

Kiki: Does the word jejuuuuune mean anything to you? It looked like a squid in a bag of blood. With green bits hanging off of it.

Me: Ah. Jejunum, then.

Kiki: I have to go eat some toothpaste.

Me, a short while later as Kiki pulled on her giant rubber boots, her coat, and her hat and then grabbed a black plastic garbage bag:

"You look like you're about to go murder a bunch of horny teenagers."

All in all, not a bad start to the day.

A conversation in ADD.

 

I realize that virtually all internet conversations have a natural tendency to wander from topic to topic, but when I glanced back on the IM chat I had with TL tonight, it struck me as particularly amusing.

Topics covered:

• The new Humane Society shelter in Shreveport
• Partial-birth abortion propaganda
• Possums
• YouTube
• Debating on the internet
• Debating on the internet because you have ADHD
• The sanctity of motherhood
• Coconut-milk ice cream!
• The wrongness of putting nuts and fruit in ice cream
• Eugene, OR
• Anarchists
• Average travel times between Portland and Eugene
• Phone booths
• The cost of a public phone call way back when
• The Museum of Science & Industry
• Using books as foot rests
• ADHD!
  
• Bookshelves
• It's really late!
• Dexedrine
• We should go to sleep because it's late
• Time-release versus instant-release
• Drug holidays
• Diet and exercise and ADHD
• I have to go to bed! Goodnight!

Earlier.

Me: Curly Joe, get away from that cat food. What am I always telling you?
Curly Joe: "Watch out for Sammy"?
Me:: No...
Curly Joe: "There's no crying in baseball"?
Me: Nooooo...
Curly Joe: "I'm going to murder you if you don't spit that out right this very minute"?
Me: Got it in three! Now go downstairs before I kill you.

I notice you've stopped stuttering.

I took 20 mg of Adderall two hours ago. Not quite sure how I feel yet, but...um. I just got finished painting the mud room. Now I'm sitting here waiting to have a heart attack. I should probably try to get some transcribing done and see if there's any improvement there.

I had my second appointment with the new ADD nurse practitioner/PhD today. She's really fantastic. I can't say enough good things about her. I was expecting a short med eval, but I was there for 50 minutes, and she did quite a bit of counseling as well as reviewing how the Adderall was working. She gave me so many helpful suggestions.

My big "ah ha!" moment of the day was when she suggested that I wasn't necessarily disorganized, just differently-organized. In other words, not organized like "normal." All of my stuff is in piles, but I know what's in the piles and I know how to find it when I need it. I've spent so much of my life trying to force myself to function "the way everyone else does" instead of devising a system of functioning that would come more naturally to the way my brain operates. It has caused me so much pain and anguish, so much shame, so much frustration. I've wasted so much time and energy trying to force my square-peg self into a round hole, and I've beaten myself up mercilessly for not being able to get through. For not being able to be "normal." The agony eventually became unbearable and I broke down.

I wanted to cry. Then I realized: those tiny goals I've been setting for myself at TL's suggestion? I've actually been reorganizing my world in a way that actually works for me. One tiny step at a time, I am allowing the world to make sense again. I'm listening to myself, learning to pay attention to what defeats me, what overwhelms me, what confuses me, as well as what empowers and motivates me.

Same with how mad he used to get at me about cleaning. He'd yell at me to clean the living room, and I'd try to tell him that I didn't know how -- I had no idea where to put anything, I couldn't make heads or tails of it, and I didn't know where to begin. I begged him for some bookshelves -- there was no way I'd have been able to put them together myself -- because a) WE HAVE NO FURNITURE AND NO STORAGE. AT ALL.; and b) having shelves would help me visualize where to put stuff. He refused. He said I could have bookshelves after I cleaned the house. But I couldn't do it without the bookshelves, dig? I didn't know how to explain it to him...or maybe he just wasn't interested in listening. More and more lately I have been wondering exactly when he gave up on me. It's ironic that he was the very first person to tell me I had ADD and yet was the least supportive person in my life. Maybe he just wanted a label to slap on his reason for abandoning me and the animals. Whatever.

Well, now I'm rambling. I had some other stuff to say, but it's gone now. What I eventually wanted to get at was that I stopped at Powell's after the ADD thing (and after stopping at Home Depot for wood pellets and Petco for cat food -- my poor shocks) because I wanted to check out Thom Hartmann's books on ADD. What I ended up buying instead was Four Weeks to an Organized Life with AD/HD by Jeffrey Freed, M.A.T and Joan Shapiro, MD. What caught my eye was this:

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Finishing with the Phobia

The simplest things sometimes seem out of reach. If these things were complicated, it would make sense to put them off forever. But they aren't. And, yet, some of us treat them as if we are facing a session of bamboo spikes under the fingernails. Perhaps we are a bit like Ed, caught in the same spot again.

Ed sat at his desk, staring at the usual disaster. Stacks, some six or eight inches high, perched and balanced on each other and covered almost the entire writing surface. Sound familiar? But, as it is with many people who use this "horizontal filing system," Ed felt confident that he knew waht was in each of the piles. It was a good thing that he did, because he had two bills that had to be paid immediately. If he didn't get the payment made by the end of the banking day, he would incur eighty-six dollars in late fees, and it was most likely that his cell phone would not be working by the weekend.

It would take only seconds to locate the bills that Ed had to pay. But Ed sat and stared at his desk. "I should do this," ran through his thoughts, and yet his body didn't move. What was it that made it so difficult for him to get this small chore over with? He looked at his watch. He had just under half an hour to get the bills to the mailbox two blocks away. Suddenly galvanized into activity, he dug furiously through the piles. In minutes, he had the bills he needed, a checkbook, and a pen. Now that he had the checks written (though not entered into the register) and the envelopes sealed, all he had to do was find some stamps. Scrounging through his top drawer, he found three. Wow, and he only needed two! He bounded out of the front door, jogged three blocks, and dropped the bills into the mailbox with minutes to spare.

Ambling home, feeling a mellow feeling of relief and calm, Ed asked himself a question that most people with AD/HD ask of themselves quite regularly: "That wasn't so bad. Why didn't I get that started earlier?" Although this is asked as a rhetorical question, there is a very good answer. The stimulation created by the deadline creates enough dopamine to get the odious task done. It's as simple as that. This is one of the ways in which medication is often helpful, because it raises the level of dopamine enough to get started and to complete the job. But there's more to this than just a need for medication....

---

Then it goes on to say that some people become almost literally phobic about certain tasks due to repeated bad experiences doing these difficult things:

...even if you have pretty effective neurochemistry, even if you have learned new skills, even if you have a clear understanding of your problem, you still have the buildup of years of experiencing failure and pain....Naturally, then, you want to avoid that situation....

This, my friends, is why my line count is in the crapper. It's why I can't concentrate on my work. It was only very recently (in the past day or so) that I began to recognize my need for the stress of an approaching deadline, and reading just those few pages in the book was like a lightning bolt to the brain. I'M NOT CRAZY.

I.

AM.

NOT.

CRAZY.

I'm so grateful for the wonderful support I have received from my friends and other loved ones and from the competent clinicians I tracked down on my own behalf. My ADD diagnosis in August started me on a journey that I really am only just now beginning. I'm so happy, I could dance; and so heartbroken for the years I've lost...I could curl up and weep. A little understanding and compassion can make all the difference in a person's life. I am still learning what it is like to not be judged for my "failings." Being relieved of all of those metric tons of others' expectation is a feeling I can't even describe. I feel so alive. I feel so worthy of being alive.

Diamond in the rough.

Sometimes -- sometimes -- you will find something worth reading in the comments section of any given internet site. I like to peruse the comment section after I read an article on my local news site, KATU. I can't think of any particular reason why I habituated to that particular channel, except for the fact that I used to utilize their traffic maps when I worked in Gresham.

Anyway. Unimportant. Don't read that paragraph. Sorry.

Today Portland's TriMet opened its newest leg of commuter rail service: "...the Westside Express Service, or WES, which will run the 15 miles between Wilsonville and Beaverton."

Naturally, as soon as the article went live the war began in the comment section between the "government is wasteful" camp and the "less cars on the road is a good thing" camp. I skimmed; nothing interesting in the arguments...until I saw this comment by boggler99:

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commute to gresham from wilsonville in as little as 3 hours! WOOPIE, 3 hours to gresham, 3 hours in hospital in gresham after beating on max, 3 hours back..sounds like a fun filled day to me.

---

I laughed like a friggin' loon. I don't know, just something about his/her tone gives the impression that they know a thing or two about beatings on the Max. And the hospitals in Gresham.

It's only a flesh wound.

My shoulders are killing me. It's definitely related to keyboarding; my right shoulder is a little bit worse, and that's my mouse hand. I blame my craptastic chair, my abysmal desk setup, and my huge boobs.

My arms are pretty much useless; even taking 800 mg of ibuprofen four times a day isn't helping. It is exquisitely painful if I press even lightly on my acromion. I can't tell if it's the bursa or what, but the pain is so bad that it makes me nauseous. It's a hot, sickening pain. I can barely get out of bed in the morning, and work itself is agony. I'm trying to take frequent breaks and carefully stretch my arms; it doesn't seem to be getting any worse, so maybe I'm doing myself some good by at least preventing further damage. Or maybe the ibuprofen just makes it so I can't feel it. I dunno.

Sure wish I had health insurance. Think icing would help?

Obama: Snowy Washington Needs 'Chicago Toughness'

By Frank Ahrens

Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, January 28, 2009; 11:24 AM

President Obama, you're not in Chicago anymore.

Shortly before a meeting with business leaders on the economy at the White House, Obama said he wanted to make an unrelated comment to the press. In a slightly amused tone, he noted this his daughters' school, Sidwell Friends, was canceled today because of a snow and ice storm that hit Washington.

The suburban schools systems and many private schools in the region were closed today and the District public schools opted for a delayed opening because of the sleet and freezing rain that made some roads and many sidewalks treacherous.

"Because of what? Because of some ice?" Obama said to laughter around the table. He said Sasha, his 7-year-old, pointed out that in Chicago, not only is school never canceled for snow, "you'd go outside for recess. You wouldn't even stay indoors."

He concluded by saying: "We're going to have to apply some flinty Chicago toughness to this town. I'm saying that when it comes to the weather, folks in Washington don't seem to be able to handle things."