A List of Things That Waste My Time.

There was this one time, when I spent about 2 hours trying to write a post about old people and basically how they are living too long and blah blah blah and frankly, the more I wrote, the more it sounded really crappy and fickle and I really hate fickle.  So I'm going to pick a topic that I by no means can be fickle about.


Some things that waste my time:


1) Facebook: I recently reactivated it.  Deactivating it was the best thing that's ever happened to me because now I really couldn't care less if it's there or not.  It wasted hours of my time which is just sad and pathetic.  Hopefully, this hypocrite doesn't go right back to where she was before and use it constantly.  Because honestly, it's a waste of your time.

^^^Meet Kayba. Trying to teach her anything is a waste of time.
I think she was oxygen deprived as a puppy; dumber than
a box of rocks.  A really large, lovable, happy box of rocks.

2) Celebrity news.  Please look at this.  I'm not kidding. Look at it.  I don't even have to say anything else. I don't think I've ever felt so compelled to shoot a writer so much in my entire life.  I've never wanted to destroy an entire website so badly. Ever. I wish I could convey the sheer stupidity, the amount of anger this induces.  I'm not kidding. I'm going to punch someone. Oh my gosh I looked past this article.  I literally think my blood pressure just went through the roof.


3) Saving already dead people.  I'm not saying don't save dying people.  I'm all for getting someone with no pulse back.  Its wonderful.  But sometimes, I have to wonder.  You're 96 years old, miserable, half conscious, and you eat, sleep, poop, and breathe out of a tube.  I'm currently breaking half your ribs while the doctor is intubating and the nurses are faithfully shoving in the epinephrine and the atropine.  Your children don't care enough to get a DNR. I mean I hate to just say oh saving lives is a waste of my time. It's not. At all. But saving really elderly already completely dead people and putting them on life support is incredibly sad.  For crying out loud it's flat out unethical.


4) Stupid people.  I'm serious.  Stupid people are just a waste of time in general.  Like I've said, a trillion times, you come in to the ER and we ask you what your EMERGENCY is and you say "I need a pregnancy test."  You waste my time, we're going to waste yours.  Plan on spending 4 hours in the ER chica.  Think I'm kidding? I'm not.  It's called an EMERGENCY department for a reason. Do NOT waste my time.  And no, I will not get you your 7th little thing of orange juice.  I love taking care of sick people, people that really need my help.  I will clean up any mess you make, I will make your bed, I will get you whatever you need. But if you're going to be that selfish and stupid. No.


5) Beating around the bush.  PEOPLE.  BE BLUNT. For crying out loud.  I could go on forever about this.  All this does is put off the inevitable.  Things aren't going to magically disappear or tell themselves.  Save yourself some time, save other people some time, and just SAY it.  Let's take relationships for example.  If you are a man, and you like a girl, tell her.  If you don't like her anymore, tell her.  If you've been talking with said girl for awhile, but then you meet someone else you like more, tell her.  No big deal, it happens.  If you stop talking to a girl, cold turkey without blatantly stating why, she will think she did something horrifically wrong.  Why don't you spare her the pain and over thinking by telling her exactly what you're thinking. Much, much, much easier.  Same goes vice versa.  Tell the man what you're thinking because frankly women are so emotional and flighty its impossible for a guy to tell when a woman is infatuated and when she really wants to date you.  Don't lead 'em on and then beat 'em upside the head with a sack of truth bricks later.  Life is too short to beat around the bush. It sucks telling people stuff they really don't want to hear.  But ya know what?  That's life. Life isn't fair. Don't make it any more unfair than it has to be.  People can't read minds; SPEAK YOURS.


6) Deer tags.  Seriously? I mean.. seriously? They are so overpopulated I don't think not having a tag for these people-killing-car-crushing creatures is going to hurt anybody.  Let the hunters hunt.  When the deer population gets dangerously low, go ahead and throw in the tags.  But when a deer is running through the middle of a busy city and smashes into the ER waiting room windows like a bird, there's a problem.  Don't give me that 'we're in their territory' crap.  God put us above animals.  God owns the Earth, he put us in charge of it, not the deer.  Don't get me wrong. I love wildlife.  I hate the city with a passion.  I would rather my backyard be filled with a dozen deer than not.  But we've shot all the cougars, all the wolves, and frankly there are no longer any natural predators for deer. The only natural predator is humans.  Does the government regulate how many mice cats eat? Do they tell them they can only hunt those mice during this month for this long?  I can understand not having open season all year for human safety, I mean lets face it, some people are idiots with guns.  But at the same time.. seriously...let us shoot the freaking deer.


7) Writer's block.  Seriously.  You would think my severe ADHD would help with that.  It doesn't.  Instead, I sit at the computer for 4 hours typing something and then deleting it. And then typing it. And then deleting it.  Repeat x24 until I get fed up with it and walk away.


8) Taylor Swift.  The woman is ridiculous.  I've loathed her from the second I heard her on the radio.  She's not country. Get out of my genre.  She sings songs for tweenies and grade school relationships, as well as..wait. nope. That is literally all she writes about.  I have the pleasure of hearing "Oh. my. gosh. You look exactly like Taylor Swift." at least twice every shift I work, which most people would take as a complement. Yeah...no. She looks like she's just sucked on a bad lemon and is trying to look through closed blinds.  I have long, blonde curly hair. That does not mean I look like Taylor Swift. She's arrogant. She's writes songs about people being "Mean" because they wrote a bad review.  Hey sweetheart, that's life. Constructive criticism.  Take it, use it, don't sit and cry like the 15 year olds you write to.  Also, they say you can't sing because..uhm. You can't. At all.


9) My inability to focus.  My semester is thankfully over as of today.  Worst semester I have ever had as long as I've been in school.  However let me run through my typical day of studying.  I wake up at 11am and look around my room to see my textbooks laying on the floor.  Oh geez, my room is dirty.  Let's get all the clothes up off the floor and put them in the..oh geez.. I need to do an entire load of laundry.  I go to put the dish soap in the washer and see that it's getting low so I then think to myself, I should probably make a shopping list.  I go to the fridge and look through it and think..man..I really need to eat healthier.  I'm going to go to Walmart.  So off to Walmart I go, look through most of the aisles just in case I need something.  I check out about 80 dollars worth of groceries, but forget to get the ONE thing I went in there for to begin with.  *shrugs* Oh well, gotta get home to study! 3:00pm??? Where does that time go. Silly time.  Get home, put the groceries away.. Look there's dishes. I should probably do those.  Welp. Off to my computer to, you know, get the study guide off of it.  Well I deleted Facebook, but wait, there's the Drudge Report. Let's check out what's.. .OH my gosh Obama is RETARDED.  I need to write a blog about this.  I need music.  Open up Pandora.  I 'm going to make this station perfect. Who is this artist? I'm going to read the bio. Very interesting. I want to buy this song.  Amazon.  Oh shoot that reminds me I needed to look for a space heater. But this price isn't exactly what I want so I'm going to go Google space heaters.  Glance at the clock.. oh goodness. It's 7pm.  Ha.. oh time. Alright. We're focusing now.  I get up to get my book bag and see that I have a pile of papers and shoot. I better sort those.  I find my binder and open it up.   I look at my study guide and I just don't feel like reading.  Oh I'm hungry. I better make dinner... I'll make some hamburger helper. I better not get too focused while it's cooking so I don't forget about it.  You know what, I'm going to go get an energy drink. Off to the gas station I go.  I may as well get gas while I'm here.  Get back home, eat my hamburger helper, then get back to my computer.  OH I was going to write that blog. RIGHT. Shoot. 9pm.  I really need to study.  Ugh.. I dunno.  I'm tired. I think I'm just going to go to bed. Oh my friend is texting me. I'm going to tell them about this one time at band camp.  Well cheese and crackers its 11pm. I better just go to sleep and wake up in the morning and do it.  Hello 4am. Ahem.
 Most of the time, I get about 2 hours of studying in. If I'm lucky.

10) One way streets. Just. Stop. I mean really. I CAN SEE my destination. It's right there and yet I must drive a mile in a circle to reach my destination, which is, right in front of me.  Waste of gas. Waste of time.  As my dad said while he was driving up a short one way street: "One way = My way." <---Use with caution.


11) Graduation ceremonies.  No one is listening. No one really cares to see you grab a piece of paper and have your name read. HOLD THE APPLAUSE; save for the families that decide to yell anyway.  Not only do I have to sit through a 3 hour ceremony to have something given to me that could have just been MAILED, I have to listen to a bunch of stupid sappy speeches and a song or two.  I worked through this school, let me leave. I really, really don't care. Oh, I want to see my friends one last time!  Okay. Let's get realistic here: if they are your friends, they have your phone number.  They have your email.  The rest of your classmates, I mean seriously, seeing them one more time isn't going to make a darn bit of difference.  Don't act like these 4 years were super fun.  They sucked.  You know it, I know it.  School is NOT fun unless you're avoiding it.  Don't give me that "you're going to miss this" crap.  I left the second high school graduation was over.  Do I miss high school 4 years later? NO.  Not even SLIGHTLY.  Also, Jostens, your monopolizing school graduation crap needs to stop.  Whoever decided it was necessary to wear a stupid solid colored bathrobe and a cardboard hat needs to be shot.  Pointless. Waste. of. Time. and. Money.


12) This Entire Post.
In fact I'm cutting myself short. I could make a book. I'll just stop. 

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.