Exhausted.

I wanted to give a shout out to any foster parents out there.  I just got done volunteering at a week long camp made to give foster kids hope of a brighter future.  It is one of the greatest causes, and the week was absolutely amazing.  But oh my goodness, am I ever tired.  I cannot even imagine trying to parent these children 24/7.  The two people that started the camp are so wonderful, they have the biggest hearts and they are two very faithful servants of the Lord.  They take in about 25 little girls, age 6-11, and host them at a camp nearby for about 6 days.  The kids come for free, and volunteers like me and 30 others are the counselors (each kid gets a counselor) and we raise the funds by sending out support letters.  They just rely on God to get the money to make the camp possible, and somehow they get the funds every year with out any fundraiser at all (just the letters) and its almost $750 per girl.  Each girl comes to camp and they are blessed out of their minds.  They get three awesome full course meals a day, they get to make all sorts of awesome crafts, they get to swim in the lake and play in the pool every day.  They learn about Jesus and find hope away from their not so great home.  It really is a fantastic cause and God has blessed it greatly.  That being said.  This week was the most effective form of birth control I could ever think of for any woman. 


I AM SO TIRED. I could go on and explain as to why I'm so tired, but honestly, I really am so exhausted I have no desire to go through it again in my head let alone write it out at the moment.


I do however, want to say that without the foster parents these kids would have no future at all.  It takes such a special person to be able to do this.  Some of them do it for the paycheck, which I do know someone who does.  It makes me absolutely sick.  But the ones that do this for love, God bless them.  It is SO hard.  These kids are hurt, attention seeking, and brokenhearted.  To be able to put a smile on their face and show them that there really is love in this world is priceless.


So kudos, to those foster parents, and if you know any, that do it for reasons that have nothing to do with money, pat them on the back.  Give them a casserole.  Buy them a freaking car dang it.  They deserve it.


PS I also met a teenager who is ultra-conservative and wants to go into politics.  She's super smart and I think she'll make it there.  So that gave me a slight amount of hope, seeing that there still are a couple intelligent generations still out there.

Note To Self: Don't Post A Blog Before You Have The Means To Research It. Also, Don't Post After Working 72 Hours.

So I learned something today in the blogging world.  At first I was going to just put in a note after having looked up stuff about Reuters after I posted about them. The more I saw the more I got pissed.  Then I still wasn't satisfied because the whole thing made me mad.  So I call redo.  REDO.


I ran across Reuters, which I know I'm super late, but I didn't really know much about them. All I knew about them was that they were a British company.  After looking them up, I realized I really don't like them at all. Which honestly, I'm not sure why I thought I could ever find a conservative or even balanced news site aside from Fox (which has its liberal moments) and drudge. 


Reuters, apparently, doesn't like to use the word "terrorists." Because "We all know that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist."  That just makes me mad.  That's freaking stupid.  It's pretty obvious who's being the terrorists.  The ones attacking their own people usually. They've also been accused of having a bias AGAINST Israel, which I also, am not cool with.  Still like the pictures with the photographer's captions in the archives, however.  Not so okay with Reuters so far.  Stupid, liberal, biased. Like everything else anymore.


I did have a link to some pictures from Reuters. But I'm exhausted. And I really don't feel like linking to an even remotely liberal, lying, cheating website and complementing any part of it at the moment.  Some of those pictures were fantastic though. Maybe I will post about them at a later date. Nah. Nevermind. I'll just let you have your own opinion.


But now that I've changed this post at least 7 times, my eyes are half closed, and I keep finding more and more things to get really pissed off about, I'm just going to give you one of my pictures instead of this political liberal shit. Excuse my french. But seriously.  There's some freaking baby birds I took a picture of the other day.

I Gots A Idea.

The stupidity of state and local governments never cease to amaze me sometimes.  When was the last time you were intimidated by a firetruck.  I don't know about you guys, but seeing a firetruck or ambulance parked on the side of the street wouldn't stop me from doing anything.  
But instead of you know, hiring more police officers, let's just take these lovely men and women who are trained and paid to fight fires and save lives, and use them as the friendly neighborhood watch dogs.  Except these watch dogs are sitting ducks.  People fear police for a reason.  They have authority, law, guns, tazers, and tear gas on their side.  What are they expecting EMS to do? Call the police.  How brilliant!   I had no idea that's what people do when they see suspicious activity! "It's to prevent things from bubbling up.  The idea is that if you have a fire engine with adults there no one is going to commit a crime," said D.C. Deputy Mayor Paul Quander.  Sometimes I have really stupid ideas too.  Except I keep them to myself.  This reminds me of those absolutely awful commercials you see on TV where you're sitting in your chair shaking your head, wondering how on Earth someone EVER got this published.  It's those times I just picture myself sitting in on this town hall meeting.


"Alright..so we need to find a way to decrease street crime... Do we have any suggestions from the board?"
*man in suit raises his hand*
"Yes?"
"We could increase the police force and delegate specific teams to patrol in high risk areas."
*crickets*
"Uh..does anyone else have any ideas?.."
*small child in the corner raises hand*
"Yes?"
"I LOVE firetrucks."
"That's a GREAT idea! All in favor of sending them out to patrol our streets completely unarmed say aye!"
"Aye! (x9)"
"All oppose say nay!"
"Na-
*gavel hits table*


People like this just need to stay home. All the time. Seriously.

Mommy, Where Do Nincompoops Come From?

So I was pondering how people could become so ignorant, stupid, mindless, and heartless as some politicians and people are today.  It dawned on me.  American children scare the daylights out of me.  The new generations are so far beyond screwed up that I honestly don't even want to consider what is going to happen in the future of this country.  Consider this and remember the type of politicians, people, and celebrities that are emerging:

1) Punishment doesn't exist anymore.  Heaven forbid you have to be 'mean' to your child, or lay a hand on them.  Frankly, its abuse not to discipline your kid.  Every child is different, there are some you will never have to lay a finger on them, but others, need physical reinforcement to let them know they can't throw a jar of pickles at dad's head when he tells them they can't have what they want.  This kid will grow up to be an absolute arrogant brat, a person who expects everything to pan out for them.  A liberal politician who expects everything to be done for them, with little-to-no common sense what-so-ever.  A 12 year old girl comes into the ER and screams like a banshee because she doesn't want to be there.  She wants to go home and eat ice cream.  Mommy strokes her hair and goes, "It's okay baby, we can stop and get ice cream on the way home." Three people had to help get a simple splint on her slightly sprained ankle because she "didn't want it."  Heaven forbid.  Tell your kid to shut up, buck up, or get popped upside the head.

2) Divorce.  I can say not all, but a very large majority of people I know whose parents have gotten a divorce, have ended up mentally marred in some way by it.  In fact, it usually leads to that person ALSO getting a divorce later on in life.  Like I said, this is not everyone, but I see a very strong trend.  A child was meant to grow up with a mother to nurture and a father to be protected by.  Let's take these proud gay couples, with their "rights" (because homosexual is apparently a race now) and let them adopt children.  I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you want to live with your partner.  I'm not going to try to stop you, I really couldn't care less.  But do not adopt children.  There is a reason that God designed us to procreate with the opposite sex.  What are these children going to grow up learning? Exactly what their mommies or daddies taught them.  The kids raised by two people of the same sex will learn nothing about the opposite sex and how a marriage between a man and woman should be.  I would like to see that child have a successful marriage with the opposite sex 20 years in the future, after having never seen the likes of love between a man and a woman in the same house. What is that going to cause for America? More divorce, more broken families, more people with little to no common sense in human interaction.

3) Technology.  It's teaching us how to be lazy.  Instant gratification is becoming standard.  There is no patience, no hard work, no process to much of anything.  Not only that, but no one is learning how to interact with each other anymore.  Instead, we all text each other or use Facebook.  You don't have to actually go ask that girl for her phone number, just message her on Facebook and give her YOUR number.  Never have to talk face to face, never have to learn any real social skills.  The only social skills anyone is getting good at anymore is drinking, partying, and chatting it up online.  Watch as the ever so common phobia of public speaking will only continue to rise at an alarming rate.

4) Political correctness.  Oh, how I HATE hearing any sort of politically correct phrase.  Oh, no, don't have an opinion, you just might offend someone.  But don't think about it too hard, because your politically correct phrase will become politically incorrect for having been said to not offend someone.  Not to offend someone who is, by political standards, no different than anybody else.  Oh wait..did I just find circular reasoning in a liberal principle?  EUREKA.

5) Celebrities.  Taylor Swift.  Obama.  Miley Cyrus.  Kanye West.  I could go on.  But you get the point. Unhealthy, stupid, ignorant, cool.  It's all the rage.

6) Education.  It's being absolutely butchered to pieces.  American children are lazy.  Education is not a privilege to us, it's just something we have to BS our way through and get that degree so we can half-ass our job and complain about how our low income and lack of fulfillment is making us depressed.  I really want to say kids are stupid, but really, it's the parents, the politicians, and the adults teaching these kids that are stupid.  It's a vicious cycle that's only going to get worse.  All the classes are filled with liberal principles and ideas about global warming and evolution.  There's no opinion in it.  It's just taught as fact and nothing else said. No mind the fact that global warming has been completely disproved scientifically and that Darwin himself even said, AND I QUOTE: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." ..."To this day, the eye makes me shutter."

7) The medical field.  Everything has a medication or a disorder.  Everything.  I'm sad and life is not going the way I planned it. Here, take this antidepressant. The world is chalked full of Google Doctors, who have diagnosed, treated, or at least freaked themselves out with the extensive collection of symptom lists WebMD has to offer.  Everyone has SOMETHING wrong with them. Not to mention the abuse of the medical field, that you and I, my dear friends, are paying for.  I'm happy to inform you that we got to pay for 'Lashanda' coming in to get her pregnancy test in the EMERGENCY room because she was, and I quote, "too busy to get one from the dollar store."  Or the drunk comes in because the EMS personnel are required to take them in if they are intoxicated.  The guy takes up the last room, doing what... nothing. Just sleeping it off.  All while a woman is having a miscarriage in the waiting room. The world is full of injustice.. some of which we have no say in.  A lot of which, we do.

I could go on forever.  The way you're raised has everything to do with how you function as an adult, whether you want to admit or not.  We're in for a heck of a lot of trouble in the next couple generations... it's not going to get any better. Especially not with people like Obama running this country.

Memoirs of the Attention Deficit

A Super-Mega-Duper-Triple-Power-Long Post for my first one was probably a bad decision. I'm actually trying to fix that now, but instead of cutting it down I just keep adding to it. Like this.


First off, I want to give a gigantinormously huge thank you to my great friend Hack, I am so thankful to have him there to help me out, and for one of the very few times in my life encourage me to share what I’m thinking.  Hack, your help is very much appreciated!  Secondly, I’m going to apologize for my newbie-ish-ness in the way that I blog.  I will eventually get better at this, but the last time I made any sort of blog was back when I was ten and “Xanga” was all the rage.

I may as well make the first post about the subject that is closest to me personally, which is diagnosis of disorders such as ADHD.  This post is going to be long.  ADHD has more or less become a complete joke in society.  It’s either a joke, or you think everyone and their mother has it.  The truth is, as always, right in between that.  And if I hear another doctor say "it gets better, they often grow out of it" I will punch them square in the face.  You do not grow out of ADHD.  That is an absolute load of crap. Have you ever heard anyone say "I used to be bi-polar?"  If you 'used' to have it, you never had it to begin with. Your brain does not grow out of having a neurotransmitter imbalance that causes it to go into hyper-drive trying to make up for the lack of chemicals that it needs to balance its self out requiring a stimulant to replace those and slow the brain down.  Yes, that was a run on sentence with at least 4 grammatical errors. But you all get the point.

ADHD is not just fidgeting, acting out, or not being able to concentrate.  These are not grounds for medicating a child or an adult.  Yet at the same time, when you've got a teenager who struggles beyond what any study session can help, gets into trouble constantly, and self medicates with marijuana, ADHD could probably be looked into.  The line is incredibly fine, thus it requires a true understanding of the disorder, not hearsay. 

Here's an example. There was a six year old girl whose first grade teacher started to notice the fact that she could not sit still in her chair.  She could never pass the timed math quizzes, and she could never follow directions.  The teacher informed her parents, who ignored her for awhile, seeing as though they didn’t want to get caught up in this “ADHD hoax.”  Eventually, they gave in when she was failing the first grade.  They took her up to a clinic in Chicago to be tested because of her uncontrollable, violent temper (which they just assumed was overall bad behavior that persisted beyond punishment), and inability to function in school.  They tested to see what age level the girl was functioning at to make sure this wasn't an autism disorder or intelligence problem.  The team stopped, however, after she blew through the twelve year olds' test; they decided that was not the issue.  They realized where the real problem was when the instructor read her a simple story and asked her to repeat some of what she had just said.  She had the girl try to answer some very simple questions about it. She had no clue, so the girl was reading the book the instructor was using upside down across the table to get the answers.  Needless to say, they ended up prescribing Ritalin for her.  That ‘oh so terrible medication.’  Night and day.  She went from failing 1^st grade to getting straight A’s all the way through school without having to study at all.  

If you could look at me now, even as I’m unmedicated in writing this, I’m sitting perfectly still.  I was blessed with parents who did not allow me to use ADHD as an excuse for anything.  So I learned how to control myself to a degree.  I was able to learn, and am still learning how to use this gift of creativity and spontaneity to my advantage.  I still have to take medication every day to control it and function well at work and in school.  I always have and I always will.  About 15 years after having been first diagnosed in Chicago, I get retested with a new computerized testing mechanism to test the effectiveness of my medication.  I was to remain unmedicated for 36 hours prior to testing.  The AVERAGE score for someone without ADHD is 100.  That’s AVERAGE.. not the top score, not a great score, average.  It is based on visual, auditory, and sensory information gathered from 15 minutes of doing a repetitive task that requires your attention.  My score was a grand total of….ready?  …..2.  I got a 2.  My fine motor movement was off the scale and my visual score was almost nonexistent.  I retook the test after taking my fairly large dose of medication, and was able to get my score up to 75.  But that’s the best it has ever gotten, and probably ever will get.  The first thing the specialist said was, “you have been pushing the equivalent of a very large boulder up a very large hill your entire life.”  And he’s right.  I could write books on my experience growing up as a kid with severe ADHD.  I haven’t even touched on the hyperactive portion of it, which is the part that ends up messing with your self confidence and the way you view yourself.  This is why I get so upset when people act like ADHD doesn't exist, or that it's something that's completely in your control. 

I did a clinical at an undisclosed location where they were testing college students for ADHD.  I could have absolutely exploded on these people.  This doctor, an ADD guru in the surrounding city for over a decade, had put together a test that consisted of a self-survey of about 20 questions with a 1-5 scale that you circled after each question.  1 being not bad, 5 being the worst.  Questions like this:  “Do you have trouble sitting still?”  “Do you have trouble concentrating for long periods of time?”  “Do you have trouble multitasking?”  “Do you have problems with disorganization?”  Assuming that someone can set paper aflame with their eyes, I got incredibly close while reading this abomination. How many of you reading that have answered at least a 4 or 5 on those. Probably most.  That’s called being human.  People are getting diagnosed with a disorder that is profound enough to make people drop out of school based on a confounded piece-of-crap survey.  This is happening everywhere.  For awhile it was almost a fad.  Just type ADHD in google.  “Do you have ADHD??” quizzes here, there, everywhere.  Anyone can answer yes to those questions.  WAKE UP people.  Just because you space out in class does not mean you have ADD.  When you can stare at your phone that you just put down on the counter in a public bathroom and think to yourself, I’m going to probably forget about that in the next 2 minutes and then actually forget about it within a one minute time frame due to distraction and end up getting your $200 dollar phone that you bought for the sole purpose of having a reminder tool/calendar/homework organizer stolen in a God-forsaken ghetto town because you left it sitting in the bathroom for a grand total of fifteen minutes and go to call back and hearing the stupid manager say that the bathrooms just got cleaned and there was no phone in there.  I hate people. And Verizon Wireless.  And Taylor Swift. And cicadas. And Obama. And Oprah.

ANYWAY.  My goal wasn’t to tell my life story, frankly, we all have our own things we deal with, but its honestly the only way I can get my point across.  People are getting stupid.  Recess is being taken away from schools everywhere, hence the children that can’t sit still.  Self discipline no longer exists, everything is basically just handed to us, hence the inability to sit down and finish a task.  Spanking your kid is pretty much abuse now, so kids are out of control brats.  There are obviously exceptions, but you get the point.  ADHD exists alright, but it is NOT what America thinks it is.

What Can't I Say

Ahh...blogging! I never thought I'd actually do something of this nature... we shall see if I stick with it.  Instead of hacking up a load of word vomit to those who would rather not hear it, I will heave into the blog instead, seeing as though no one is forcing your eyes to read this.  Hmm.  Well as a first post I shall refrain from a rant... so here's a little about the author.  I'm obnoxious, in a good way most times, in a bad way some times.  I've grown up with moderate-severe ADHD, learned to leash it and make it into something of an entertainment factor, rather than a hindrance.  I find no reason to excuse any bad behavior on account of this disorder, such as drug seeking and dropping out of school.. I have made it through high school, college, and I am almost through with nursing school (and I do not plan on stopping there).  I'm a shutterbug by nature (my pictures are on the slideshow in the banner) and I will often use pictures to explain a point.  This blog will by no means be about my ADHD; I will bring it up, post on it a couple times.  However, mainly, this is for random thoughts, ideas, and debates.  I'm all for sharing my thoughts with the public..whether they're listening or not.  After all, half the time, I'm probably not paying attention either. So here's to the gift of randomness, the blessed curse in being void of attention, and the inability to sit still... physically and mentally.  Enjoy.