Busy, Busy, Busy
Tue., November 26, 01:43 PM
This is about ADHD — or whatever they’re calling it this year. It seems to me that the abbreviation is adding a letter every generation. And while I recognize that a disorder exists, I’m very wary of the diagnoses and recommended treatments.
My little sister was a wild kid. As designated babysitter and a sedentary kid myself, maybe I was more aware of it. But the grown-ups talked about it too. I can only say she was the only baby I ever knew who progressed from crawling to running without ever learning to walk slowly — and after fifty years I still say so! If you ask her about now, she says, “I was busy.”
We dealt with it — family, neighbors, and teachers — and she grew into a normal productive adult. Maybe she was a little more curious than some people you’d meet, but I consider that an asset. When she was in her twenties, we began to hear about “hyperactive” kids and how the experts were treating hyperactivity. “Y’know,” she said, “I bet I was hyperactive.” Probably she was, but we didn’t know anything about that. She was treated with patience rather than amphetamines, and she outgrew it.
A generation after that, Attention Deficit was the excuse for anyone who couldn’t seem to function in the programmed mode. The prescription was Ritalin©. All the schools were recommending it; it was so much cheaper to blame the parents than it was to hire sufficient classroom help. I know of at least one little boy whose mother managed to resist the pressure from the school. He is now an adult with a lucrative trade, and he doesn’t believe in drugs of any kind. Nice.
[[digression]] I have a long history of refusing certain medications. When I was about five years old, I was hospitalized with a serious infection that was treated with massive doses of penicillin. My mother told me I was very lucky, because with the War over, they weren’t just saving it for the soldiers. After a couple of weeks, I developed allergic reactions. That may be one of the oldest penicillin allergies in on record. Anyway, I don’t take penicillin, and I resisted other antibiotics even when doctors were prescribing them regularly. I didn’t let my kids take them automatically either. Now doctors are telling us that antibiotics have been overprescribed for a couple of generations, resulting in infections that are immune to them and patients who are not immune to common infections. I must have a guardian angel. I’m also glad that no one tried to administer amphetamines to Sister, for they would have wrought havoc with her later medical issues. [[end digression]]
What exactly is Attention Deficit anyhow? Who defines it? Consider the Airhead. From my point of view, that boy had the attention span of a rabbit. But he had earned a bachelor’s degree and had worked in state and local government as well. (Does that explain ADD or does it explain the government?) And then there are women like me, running around six ways of center and getting things done. Though I’ve always described that as multi-tasking, a talent that made me an excellent secretary/bookkeeper/office manager, there are those who would group it with the ADD’s. And there are men who just don’t understand the concept.
Once, during a job interview, a man set me three hypothetical tasks and asked me how I would accomplish them. All three were critical — of course — and all three had the same deadline. He wanted to see how I would “prioritize” them, which one I would do first. Recognizing a “wait time” in at least one of them, I said I would make initial phone calls and then start the typing assignment while I waited for return calls. In other words, I could do more than one at a time, but he didn’t get it. Naturally, I didn’t get the job either. But talking to the series of women who worked for him afterward, I think I was lucky; I might have ended up on one of those depression drugs.
Some women write down a list of things to do, while others keep a similar list in their heads. But we do it because, like my sister, we’re busy. We know we have a lot to do, and we go ahead and do it. It goes without saying that if you have six tasks and complete five of them, there will be some jackass who wants to know why you couldn’t get to the sixth.
I can’t stand to hang around waiting for some things get done. I never go anywhere without something to read, just in case I have to wait in line — a habit from college days. You may have heard some guy say he gets his best ideas while shaving. That’s just a case of being able to concentrate on more important matters while accomplishing mindless tasks. I do it while I sweep the floor or wash dishes or put on makeup. If I’m not listening to the radio — and talking back to it — I’m polishing an entry for Diaryland.
I used to find myself playing games while waiting for an internet page to load, because I can’t just do nothing. (U.D. solved that problem by installing DSL.) Maybe I’m more patient, or maybe I’m just cheap, but I’m not paying extra for speed. As a matter of fact, when I got the faster modem, I found I was doing more things in less time online, and I opted for a lower rate on my ISP. (I don’t need unlimited hours.) But I was still playing games mdash; until I hit on the idea of opening two screens at once. I check Diaryland while I’m waiting for the bank to load my accounts, and I read the news while I wait for the Weasels. Heck, this jumping between screens is a new game!
But I can get carried away. The other day I was dancing the new dance as well as chatting with Son, and I almost forgot — I was supposed to get dressed and go to work! If I had actually forgotten to go, someone would have been bound to say, “I swear that woman is mentally deficient.” No, as Brett Somers used to say, just “too smart for the room.”
