Love A.D.D.erall
At 21 they diagnosed me with AD/HD & gave me smart pills. My grades shot up & my future brightened & some said I was better. But I am numb inside of this drug. People I love become distant strangers sometimes, so proud of me for victories I didn’t earn. How do I tell them I am not what I do or have done. I’ll never be happy on this drug, but I’ll never be successful without it. If only I could Love Adderall.Archive for September, 2007
Compulsive Reading and the Inefficiency of Books
As an academic I am supposed to worship books and literacy.
“The more you read the more you know!”
But this doesn’t fit with me, and usually fellow-scholars are underwhelmed by my limited interest in reading. Though I’m addicted to learning I sort of have an aversion to reading. I lack the book fetish that many of my colleagues see as mandatory and in fact find books to be an incredibly inefficient way to learn.
Books, in my “book,” often function as a way for people with knowledge and power to regulate the dissemination of both–especially in the ivory tower. So often I’ll go to an adviser asking for the gist of a particular concept, and he’ll tell me I have to read four friggin’ books on the topic before he’ll grace my brain with his input.
So I get a little pissy whenever I see simplistic and cynical articles bashing Americans for not reading enough, as if reading hours are the end-all and be-all indicator of an intelligent, motivated society.
Compulsive reading is neither necessary nor sufficient for becoming an informed citizen. I hate reading because I suck at it. My reading speed is that of a middle schooler, though my comprehension is normal.This will sound lame to people who don’t have AD/HD, but one of my main beefs with reading is that it’s such an antisocial endeavor. There’s no intellectual intercourse in the one-sided exchange that takes place between books and readers. I need communication, interaction. I need to feel like the person communicating knowledge to me actually gives a damn about me and my opinions. Most of all, I need to ask questions, to challenge and be challenged.
None of this happens with reading. Instead I feel like I’m back in those stadium-sized undergrad lecture halls, with some pseudo-expert standing before me on a soapbox, doing a horrendous job of pretending his boring sermon is really a discussion.
Polls like the one cited above minimize the importance of other forms of learning, more collaborative modes of knowledge dissemination. Pessimists who scoff at the disturbing results conclude that we as a society are becoming less enlightened.
Yet as the poll uncovers, much of the reading that gets done in this country consists of reading religious texts. To me, there is nothing Enlightened about being brainwashed. I’d take a stimulating conversation over pathological panicking about death & hellfire any day of the week.
“Somebody Woke Me Before I Could Have My American Dream”
Here in the land of opportunity we’re said to enjoy a slew of unalienable rights; we begin paying lip service to them in elementary school, reciting words before we know their meanings: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
But invoking any two of these rights often renders the third irrelevant, elusive, unattainable. Like zombies we honor soldiers who die for patriotic causes; yet we find far less “support” for those who dare to live by them. A recent study shows that on average Americans spend three hours a day procrastinating at work. The main reasons they cite for wasting time are being bored, not having enough to do, and feeling underpaid and/or unappreciated.
Boredom not withstanding, these men and women are reaping the benefits of the two-thirds of American dream. They earn enough money to put food on the table (“life”), and I suppose the fact that they’re not technically required to work makes them something like free (“liberty”). But for most Americans “the pursuit of happiness” poops out well shy of happiness itself.
Sure buying new toys is fun as is playing with them–to say nothing of the shear exhilaration one must feel upon driving the faster car, buying his wife the bigger diamond or boobs. But is that all we’re really here for–to accumulate flashier trinkets than the have-nots next door?
Sorry, but if I’m expected to surrender 40 hours a week for the rest of my life to some mind-numbing job in some dead end career that sucks away all of my spirit & ambition & creativity, I need a better reason than the ones currently being offered.
To me the thought of a 9-to-5 job is the antithesis of life, liberty, and happiness. The price, as it stands now, is just too high. I lose more than I’d gain, and I’ve always been a really sore loser! I can’t & won’t do it.
But why not? Why can’t I suck it up and join the rat-race? Surely I could acquire the wit and charisma necessary to give some happy help-desk agent a run for his money. Maybe, if I found the right asses and chapped my lips upon them, I could even slither into middle management and negotiate my way to a respectable benefits package. Why not throw my hat into that ring, give up this scholarly horsehit it leaves and actually “contribute to society”?
Often I ask myself these very questions, if only because it’s one I cannot now answer in a way that relieves the discomfort of those who are emotionally, personally, and/or familially invested in me. Why can’t I bring myself to that place where everyone else seems to live? It’s only eight hours a day–why can’t I shut off that part of my brain that dreams and that part of my heart that believes, and just sit quietly, mindlessly and heartlessly at some desk somewhere doing my boss’s work to make his boss’s money? Why am I so inconveniently stubborn in my outright refusal to sell myself in this manner?
Can I blame this on my A.D.D.? Is it really a “problem”? And if so, is it really my problem? What if those without A.D.D. are the ones with the real problem? What if the whole world suffers from a screwy brain disorder where everything gets flipped around backwards so that some corporation, for the right price, can purchase permission to insert corporate goals where its individual employees once had unique goals of their own? What if the only people who are immune to this widespread “aspiration deficit disorder” are the ones for whom labels and learning disabilities have been contrived?
It’s not the requirement of being surrounded daily with brainwashed passionless nincompoops, that would do me in. What makes the thought of working for some corporate, capitalist cause I don’t believe in absolutely unbearable is the opportunity cost. By wasting energy on one task Imagine you were told that you had to work out for eight hours a day at the gym, completely busting your ass. In return for your troubles you got some snazzy gold star, but didn’t reap the benefits of having spent all day at the gym. Instead, you got fatter, lazier. And some other guy vicariously got in shape for the fact that YOU had exercised.
Of course, at the end of the workday you too can make the decision to get in shape on your own behalf. Or you can become a “weekend warrior.” But who wants to work the same muscles on your “day off” that you exerted all week at work. You need to rest them, otherwise you’ll have a terrible workout on Monday when you go back to exercising for your boss.
That’s how I feel about my brain. If I spend all my time applying it to corporate, where will I find the time or energy to push it for other purposes?
I’ve never in my life met a person from whom I couldn’t learn something. Every one of us has something special and unique to give, yet so few of us ever end up finding out what exactly that gift is. The old ‘Back to the Future’ maxim that “you can accomplish anything if you put your mind to it” sounds pretty cool when you’re five; but for most of us this shiny happy quotation slowly begins to fizzle during our teen years and ultimately proves to be total bullshit. The practicalities of life block the paths that lead us where we wanted to go. Formerly ambitious individuals run out of money or time, or they lose their capacity to dream.
Absent the adrenalin rush of hope, many of us never realize those lofty goals our ancestors set forth centuries ago on our behalves. We achieve life and usually some form of liberty only once we stop pursuing happiness with the childlike fervor we inherited from after-school assemblies and hip PG-13 movies. The lucky ones waste away at boring desk jobs, having had the good sense to ditch their dreams while there still was time to enter rat races. Those less fortunate are the dreamers who hang on, waiting too long for the big break that never comes. By the time we realize the land of opportunity has no intention of making good on its mythical promises, often there’s nothing left but bitchwork for them to do.
This is when Tylenol is swallowed; when wrists bleed; when thick ropes squeeze windpipes.
Or at least that’s what I used to think–that people who lost their sense of purpose continued asking “what’s the point?” until eventually they realized there wasn’t one and called off the search. But now I know they prefer to keep breathing. I walk around in the world and I watch them, these soulless human beings who long ago traded in passion for borrowed/rented stability. And they’ve all found loopholes, little tricks so their lives seem less trivial. Some of them pretend to feel almost relieved that all their suffocating dreams finally choked and died off one by one. Its more comfortable for them to live without purpose; or maybe that’s just what “growing up” entails–lingering in limbo between living and death like braindead car crash victims with purpling lips and plugged in machine lungs.
Upon hearing me express these ideas, non-dreamers may moan from their lifelong deathbeds:
“HowGruesome!HowMorbid!HowDepressing!
HowCynical!HowNegative!HowPessimistic!“
To which I offer the standard response I’ve reserved for anyone who redefines unpleasant adjectives so as to avoid looking in mirrors:
What’s Gruesome & Morbid is to lug yourself through life as if you’ve already died.
What’s Depressing & Cynical is to see the world as an object that does not change.
When did it become sufficient merely to romanticize the pursuit of happiness; to know it only vicariously, through Will Smith movies, but not firsthand? Whose idea was it to canonize all those great minds who once thought outside the box while somehow forgetting to be emulate them? Why recite “sacred” words in the first if the point was never to let them inspire us?
What’s Negative & Pessimistic is only being willing and able to see things as they are. For me to speak instead of how things can be & should be & WILL be–that’s radically optimistic.”
Am I a “Good” Writer? Or Do Most People Just Suck?
The above is a rhetorical question–no need to spray me with compliments! But lately I’ve been wondering how I stack up against people who successfully write for a living.
Until recently, every last inch of me went into winning rat races in the ivory tower. In my program, there’s a lot of “you should be more jealous of so-and-so” bullshit, and I dutifully played along for awhile. But whenever I read something written by the students I was told to emulate, my first thought was of how poorly they’d written it.
The blandness in fellow-students’ writing seems almost poetic, when contrasted against he stuff published by upper-echelon social scientists in academic journals is even shabbier. Social scientists may follow grammatical rules relatively well–and sometimes better than me–but they make no attempt whatsoever to write in an illuminating way, nor to their private jargon intelligible to an engaged public. Thats why reading the scholarly journals ranks somewhere between “sleeping” and “watching a dog take a shit” on most people’s list of fun things to do. Bad writing is excruciating, like silverware scraping sharply across a dinner plate. Scholars in my discipline come to the table with an entourage of forks and knives, content to screech away unapologetically as the rest of the world grimaces.
Though my actual research was, and is, average by comparison, I took pride in my writing, if only because it was the only aspect of our work knowing I could outdo most of my colleagues in at least one arena. Knowing I was a more engaging writer than pretty much everyone in my discipline allowed me briefly to gain a really huge head.
But now that I’m immersing myself in the blogging scene, I’m feeling once again like a minnow swimming around in the Great Lakes. Where are all the shitty writers who have been putting me to sleep in the ivory tower? People who write blogs are mainly unemployed bums, right? People who write blogs do so only because they have no actual skills, right? Nothing better to do with their lives than screw around on The Net, right?
Oh, wait, that’s how most social scientists would categorize me! Damn. Looks like I picked up some “skills” in grad school after all.
Changing the World is an Unmarketable Plan
As I near completion of my Ph.D. I feel no closer to accomplishing goals than I was when I graduated college. Back then I didn’t know myself well enough to understand the most unique thing about me: that financial success alone can never be enough for me. Sometimes I genuinely miss being that simplified person.
Coming full-circle does not appear that it will produce the sense of purpose I’ve been coveting. When I got my B.A. four years ago I felt unqualified to do pretty much anything that paid the salary I wanted. But that hurdle would have been much easier to clear than the one impeding me now. It’s easier to be rich with cash than it is to be rich inside.
After spending the better part of my twenties on overstuffed university campuses, I’m eager to remove myself permanently from “college towns.”
It is not that the people who inhabit these communities are inherently unintelligent–many of them explain the inaccessible BCS formula with the informed precision of the seasoned statisticians who derived it. But finding anyone who has something substantive to say requires a bit more rummaging. It seems the parts of our brains that actively and passionately seek new information are switched into “hibernate” mode when there is a sports team to cheer for or a trendy bar in which serious drinking is in order.
Thus, by and large, the only people in academe who like talking about politics or world affairs are the professors who work here. Limiting my intellectual development to the whims and fancies of my so-called “mentors” has stifled it in many ways. The same social science that “opened” my mind as an undergraduate has fought during my grad school years to keep it at bay (only slightly ajar).
Open minds and critical thought are (supposedly) desirable. But once a student obtains these tools, using them to pursue paths he or she finds meaningful is taught to be rather superfluous endeavor (in the minds of the vast majority of social science professors I’ve encountered). The goal instead is to publish research articles in obscure academic journals which literally nobody (not even our professional colleagues) bothers to read.
So if you want to find yourself in graduate school–if you want to explore other ways of using your newfound knowledge in addition to (or in lieu of) preaching to fellow-academics in half-empty hotel conference rooms–you’re on your own.
The presumed academic objective to mold students into productive human beings has been uniquely tweaked by most professors in my discipline. In a profession that sacrifices monetary reward in exchange for power and prestige, one of your prized accomplishments is to have successful students who are ready and willing to carry on your work in your name. For many mentors, including the one who recently kicked my ass to the curb, the only incentive to assist students on their intellectual journey is the prospect that one day the student might publish a profound book–at which point the protégé (forever labeled as “Dr. so-and-so’s student”) will solidify the mentor’s intellectual immortality.
I’ve heard several professors use the phrase “investing in a student” to refer to a scholar’s decision to mentor an understudy. If one doesn’t fit the academic mold then there is no particular incentive for anyone in academia to “invest” in that student, just like you wouldn’t buy a rusty old car if someone offered a shiny new one at the same price.
Many students are weeded out via this mechanism; without much fanfare, these students tend to leave the academic world and pursue meaningful work outside of it. Like pledges blackballed from fraternities, the discarded students will never again have anything positive to say about about the ivory tower. The professors, willingly oblivious to the inherent functionality of their own system, internalize the notion that those students they’ve discarded were unprofessional, unfocused, or untalented.
What ends up becoming of all those students for whom the goal of “advancing disciplinary knowledge” was simply too pointless. Some of them flow smoothly into society; others will forever get caught on it’s snags and cumbersome obstacles. Rest assured however, few egos can survive the incessant bashing that befalls students that are too bright and dynamic for their own good. And alas rather than use their dreams to change the world for the better, they must sit by and watch as the world changes their dreams for the worse.
The Futures of My Past
Once we were young & willing and waiting to inhale. Everything we had inside us laughed at life with a nervous energy that still believed life could be tamed & conquered, even defeated. Youth hung on our faces like pimples waiting to pop. The future was a redwood and I worshiped it from my bedroom window.
In those days people told us we could become anything, and we believed them. I used to say I’d be making six figures by the time I was twenty-five; friends would gaze in jealous admiration at my kick-ass report cards and believe me; adults would nod approvingly as if mastering geometry was a worthwhile achievement and earning six figures a worthy goal.
Then slowly the backyard leaves evacuated the trees inside me. Men came with hardhats & sharp, loud tools; they tore down my hopes that any compatibility might exist between the things I wanted and the things I wanted to do. Doubt & disparity rose like a charismatic dictators who bring hope to ailing countries in which living is less important than believing. And finally dreams toppled like deadwood giving way to chainsaws—trees could never rival swimming pools inside the duplex families new to excessive white living.
Could it really be that ten years have gone by? Whose unsatisfied eyes are those that scowl at me from the crying mirror?
It’s been some time now since the daydreams have stopped keeping me afloat. Today lines forge across my skin like involuntary rivers rerouting to accommodate new colonies. People no longer promise me I can be “anything”; now they say “get a real job” and they roll their eyes at my lazy alibis. And even as I do the things I’m supposed to want to need to do, I can’t shake this feeling that something else–or maybe everything else–is more important.
It is.
Taking It Up The Tailpipe!
Let’s begin today’s impulsive, childish rant by recapping four symptoms of A.D.D., according to leading scholar Edward Hallowell and all the experts:
- Misplacing/losing/forgetting things.
- Trouble going through established channels.
- Inability/refusal to repeat situations that have been frustrating in the past.
- Inability to learn or even tolerate the mundane and that which is not stimulating.
On their own these symptoms are relatively benign; but taken together they are deadly, as my present predicament shows.
I am about 65% sure I’ve lost my debit card, and about 15% sure its lost somewhere in my clutter, and about 2o% sure its waiting for me in some bar somewhere. On the off chance that one of the latter two is the case, I’ve hesitated to close my account and pay the bank–which is already an extremely shady bank, as all are–to replace my card.
So today I got a mini-statement and of course the fucking bank is so cheap the damn mini-statements won’t even tell me where the money was spent, just when. About $200.00 was spent on my card on 9/4/07, but I’m not sure if it was me who spent it or some sonofabitch who stole my card. I needed to see where the transactions took place, so that I could see if the venue sounded familiar and thus gain some clue as to whether my card is lost or whether it is stolen. I tried to sign up for online banking, but that took literally over an hour because I’m too impatient to sit and read the prompts… I just scan my computer screen for something that looks like a button that says “continue” or “next” or “yes” and I just click it. So I guess I kept clicking the wrong buttons because I kept having passwords that didn’t match or “required fields” left empty or some similar shit.
Finally I got all situated: signed up for the online banking. When I went to view my recent transactions I was at first pleasantly surprised to see the mysterious 9/4 transactions had disappeared. But so had other ones–transactions I know that I made. This inevitably led to yet another safari through the disorganized FAQs until I found the following FAQ:
- QUESTION: Is some transaction history not showing for your accounts?
- ANSWER: Here’s how we gather transaction history: For checking, savings and money markets, we gather 90 days of history for you the day after you set up your CompassPC service, so there won’t be any history prior to that time.
I can view my transactions from 2006, but I can’t view the ones from last week to ascertain where the fuck I or some stranger went berserk with my debit card. Thanks a lot, Compass. AND they made me use Internet Explorer to set up my account, because they said Mozilla was unsafe. There is not a soul on this planet who finds IE better than Mozilla, but Bill Gates sure does have a lot more money than Mozilla’s creators, meaning my bank is more than happy to prostitute itself out at the expense of its customers.
So now I know there are all these established channels I’m supposed to go through, but I know where that leads. First of all, my loved ones who could and should be there for me will get irritated and fed up almost instantly; and they’ll decide I need to be lectured and judged rather than helped. So knowing I can’t turn their without getting bitchslapped and verbally emasculated I won’t even try. Another logical option would be to go back into the bank, and to rap with the bank clerk about my situation. But I’ve been there, too, and here’s how that will go: In the process of seeking help I’ll fail to use the proper, conventional bank jargon terms that everyone east of Midway Island had the patience to familiarize themselves with when they were like seven. But because my bank literacy is that of a four-year-old, the douche bag behind the counter will treat me as if I’m one notch below the homeless. And then I’ll have to break his nose for him, or (best-case scenario) act like a petty child and rattle off everything in the world that I’m better at than bank clerks, which would only lead to more lecturing and more people judging me.
So to be quite honest, as absurd as this probably sounds to you who don’t understand me, I think what I’m going to do is absolutely nothing, to “piss and moan like an impotent jerk and then bend over and take it up the tailpipe!” much like Jim Carey’s character did in the following “Liar, Liar” clip:
The plan is to cross my fingers and hope whoever ended up with my card threw it away when it bottomed out last week–under the assumption that I was responsible enough to cancel it. Then I’ll just make deposits and withdrawals from now on and bag the ATM until I switch banks. The thought of filling out bureaucratic paper work and having to go through the established channels and looking/feeling stupid and having to go through a whole frustrating, boring, annoying process just to get my money back–that’s too excruciating.
Besides, losing money isn’t half as frustrating as the feeling that nobody in my life can understand just how impossible it is for me to stay on top of mundane, everyday tasks.
You Cannot Reimburse Wasted Time
What is wrong with people who DON’T get pissed off when their computers fuck up? I find myself constantly wanting to behave like this guy:
I waste on average about three hours out of every week compensating for my laptop’s incompetence.
It’s not even that shitty of a laptop–it’s not as if it constantly freezes up or deletes my files without my permission. But it’s three-years-old, which in computer years makes it a dinosaur. So it takes two or three seconds longer than normal for my computer to do just about everything I ask of it. Often I have a really important thought, but by the time my computer navigates me to where I need to be, the thought is gone (or impaired).
Then today Bill hit me with the sledge hammer. Usually about twice a day my wireless connection bitches out; I used to mooch off some nearby neighbor named “Bill.” But today I clicked on his little icon to discover that “Bill’s Wireless” is suddenly a “Security-enabled Network,” which apparently means I’m cut off.
Fuck you too Bill.
Now I’ll have to reboot incessantly (i.e., about twice a day), and of course it takes me longer than it should to do that as well.
Perhaps the normal person can tolerate such delays. Not me. I’d rather waste my money than my time, any day. I can work hard and recover lost profits or file a claim to be reimbursed for stolen money.
But as for the time I’d forced to waste doing things I hate (like waiting on my computer to get its shit together), I will never get that back.
