Be Careful of the Internet...

You never quite know where random searching where your ADD whims might take you on the internet might land you.

I just found the obituary for a friend of mine who I happen to know is quite alive - just receiving texts from her, in fact - and the woman's surviving brother has the same name as her son.  Kinda gives me the willies.

Oh, you know how it goes.  You see one thing on FaceBook or Twitter, and your mind goes wandering, and then you start googling.  Google counts on it.

I don't spend as much time on my laptop as I used to, it overheats, and I don't use it for work or for viewing television any more.  So every once in awhile when I get on it, I do that old sport of random browsing.  I don't do much random browsing anymore - I tend to be fishing for specific answers these days when I pull out the iDevice (whether it be iPhone or iPad), rather than random strolling through the Internet.

But today I went looking for an old friend (a different friend, in fact) and there, as one of the results was the "images on the web", and there really was an image for her.  So I went to see if there were any images for me, and was surprised by what I found that actually did relate to me, but that's a whole different story, and then I decided to punch in my other friend's name since I noticed her FB posts are being broadcast to the world.

I did NOT expect to find her funeral notice.  Nor I am sure, would she, and I don't plan on telling her.  If it gave me the willies, imagine how she'd feel?

Just goes to reinforce that the Internet can be a scary place...

Hidden Objects Game

So my wife and I were given an iPad as a wedding present, and we've been having fun exploring the opportunities available to us with this new powerhouse of technology and potential productivity.

What we've probably spent the most time doing, however, is playing hidden object games.  You know the ones, Mystery Manor and the like.  You go from room to room or area to area and you have a limited amount of time to find a particular set of objects.  Often these objects remain in relatively the same places, and sometimes they move around.  To suck you in, of course, they try to make it a little easier for you and keep things in the same two or three places so you have a chance at finding the objects.

Living with ADD, sometimes (and probably even without it) can be like playing a Hidden Object game.  In an ideal world, everything has it's place, so it takes you no time at all to find the hat on the ironing board, and for you to be ready to move onto the next thing.  But sometimes, things get tricky and they move around.  And you can't find them as easily even when they are sitting in front of your face.

Good habits teach us to put things back.  Life, however, often gets in the way.

So, for example, that hat that's usually in the closet next to the ironing board, if it doesn't get put back, could be anywhere within the apartment.  I know I wore it last night.  I wear it out sometimes when my hair is a bit of a mess - short hair, likes to spike up in all the wrong places sometimes.  Last night, in a brief lull in the thunderstorm we ran out to get pizza, and well, I wore the hat.

But where did I put the hat?  I'll tell you where it isn't.  It isn't in the closet next to the ironing board.  Nor is it on the couch or the coffee table, where it sometimes hangs out when it's not in the closet.  It's like one of those hidden object games.

I'm lucky.  Even though with my ADD I may play these games more often than others, I happen to have a wife who has a reasonably good memory. Definitely an above average memory.  And if I really needed that hat now to take down the pizza boxes, for example, to recycling, I could call her and ask her where it was.  She'd have in three guesses, I imagine.  The first would be the closet, but I might give her an early hint that it wasn't in there.  She might next think about the coffee table / couch, but she also might remember exactly where I was when I came back from bringing the soda up from her car, and where I put the hat when I returned.

It's probably on the soda.

An Open Letter to the Bloggess

This is too long a response to try and type and risk having my comment be erased, so I'm just going to write you a blog post.  My first blog post in well over a month.

I have bad news for you.  

You are human. 

Some days being human just sucks.  I know you know this already.  To answer your question, yes, we all have days where we feel that we don't measure up.  Even the perfect stepford wife looking parents all have moments where they don't feel that they measure up.  IN FACT, it is BECAUSE they feel that they don't measure up often that they work so hard to create a facade that suggests that they have it all together. And if someone knocks a chink in that facade, it might all fall apart like a house of cards.

Flylady is a website that often reminds me of this.  Not specifically relevant to the things you specifically mentioned, but it has a lot of people writing in about not being perfect, and always feeling that they're behind and that they didn't and don't do enough.  In fact, their motto, on their hundreds of emails that they send is "You're not behind"

Part of the secret of life is trying to figure out how to (or if to) measure oneself, and one's life.  At the end of the day, we must each find that way, that measure, that ideally will bring us happiness, or at a minimum, comfort.

I'll tell you a little about what works for me (and this from a woman who hasn't "worked" in the traditional sense in six months now; and I ain't no house-wife, either, my wife (God bless her) does 98% of the "housework" including the cooking and the dishes).

My goal is not to make things worse.

It's a real simple goal.

And this is an overall measurement.  Overall in the day, try to make things a little bit better, not worse.  Try not to offend people (that one might be hard for you... *grin!*), try not to hurt others, try not to add to the discord that is often swirling around us.  AND, if I'm lucky, try to add a bit of good.  Bring a smile to someone's face, a laugh (my sense of humor is one of my greatest strengths, I believe).  Help restore someone's belief, if only for a moment, in the kindness of their fellow human beings.

And if I make it through the day and make someone else smile, alleviate their burden for a moment, make someone else feel loved, then it's been a pretty damn good day.

I'm not that ambitious.  I prefer to think of myself as realistic.  I realized long ago I was never going to make some grand scientific discovery (I dropped out of college chemistry a lab or two in... I am sure beakers were broken, but I can't remember).  I will not develop penicillin (of course since it's already been discovered, it's kind of late now).  I won't be a great explorer, a record holder, a great athlete, or even a (great) parent.

And the most freeing realization is that I don't need to be any of those things to be a good person.  Neither do you.

I can list off like many would and you asked us not to do all the good things you've done.  But me recognizing it isn't the issue, is it?

The short answer, though, is no, you are not alone.  

(Really, have you NOT been reading your Twitter feed lately, or what??)

(P.S. Tonight I intend to check this off as my something good for the day, so-o-o....)