Halikar's Blarg

Imag­ine with me please.

You wake up, get out of bed and shuf­fle off to the bath­room. Throw­ing water on your face, you start a men­tal list of things you need to do today. You make sure the kids are get­ting out of bed, then walk through the kitchen and note that the sink is full of dishes.

You sit down at your desk in the liv­ing room and start writ­ing down your to do’s onto paper. In get­ting a blank piece of paper, you find your list from yes­ter­day and copy over the things you didn’t do or fin­ish. Your wife comes in and tells you her list of things she wants you to do along with her empha­sis of what has pri­or­ity. Your wife is rush­ing around to get ready for work so you have to pay full atten­tion to what she is say­ing so you don’t miss any­thing. How­ever, your mind keeps wan­der­ing back and forth between what she is say­ing and try­ing not to lose what you already had in your head. This makes it hard to focus and sev­eral things slip from your men­tal list and your wife’s list don’t make it to your paper list. You fig­ure it won’t mat­ter as you’re sure you will remem­ber them later. She never men­tions the dishes.

You turn on your com­puter. You check your email and see there are sev­eral things that you really need to do, some of them old that you’ve for­got­ten so far. They get added to the list. You get very focused on the list and don’t notice the bus­tle of morn­ing prepa­ra­tions every­one else is going though. Your kids ask if they can turn on the tele­vi­sion and you sud­denly real­ize what time it is. You get every­one out the door so you can drive them to their var­i­ous des­ti­na­tions. You don’t notice the dishes as you pass them.

In the car you can’t think. There’s traf­fic to pay atten­tion to, your daugh­ter is just chat­ting in gen­eral to no one in par­tic­u­lar, your wife will inter­ject things to you that you know you should pay atten­tion too but it’s all too much input at once. You can’t fil­ter it and frus­tra­tion sets in. You drop the kids off and can finally process some things men­tally. Your wife over reacts a bit to another car break­ing in front of yours which scat­ters your thoughts. You start con­vers­ing about some­thing on the radio and those thoughts don’t return. The dishes never cross your mind.

On your way back from drop­ping off your wife you rel­ish the quiet. You let your mind relax so you’ll be able to focus when you get home. Your thoughts bounce around, asso­ci­at­ing all kinds of things together, until you set­tle on a short story idea you’ve been kick­ing around for a while. When you park in the dri­ve­way at home, your mind has blocked out sev­eral scenes and some dia­log and you want to get in and type it up on the com­puter before you for­get it. You don’t notice the dishes as you pass them on the way in.

When you walk by the phone you notice there are 2 new mes­sages. You play them and find they are from bill col­lec­tors offer­ing you excit­ing new oppor­tu­ni­ties to pay them. You are now wor­ried about your lack of employ­ment and money issues, your story long for­got­ten. You look at your com­puter and think you should run some job searches but are so depressed you just want to crawl into bed in the dark. Instead you try and cheer up by read­ing a book. The dishes aren’t men­tioned in the book.

You real­ize you have to go to the bath­room again. On the way you notice the time and real­ize the entire morn­ing is gone. When you get done your stom­ach rum­bles and you remem­ber you haven’t eaten any­thing today. You nose around the kitchen look­ing for some­thing quick and don’t find any­thing. All the food you have requires prepa­ra­tion time because you can only buy cheap ingre­di­ents, and any­thing quick is already pre­pared and there­fore more expen­sive. Your brain locks because this requires a deci­sion, and any deci­sion is going to eat up time you don’t want to waste any more. You finally set­tle on scram­bled eggs and a micro-waved potato, but the deci­sion took you 30 min­utes to make. You don’t notice this because your mind is spacy. You cook and then eat the food, and stack the new dishes on top of the ones already in the sink. You real­ize your very tired, lay down to rest for a lit­tle bit and end up tak­ing a nap. You don’t dream about the dishes.

You wake up in a panic because you’ve just noticed you fell asleep. It’s after­noon, almost time to get the kids from school and you didn’t get the gas for the car your wife asked you to this morn­ing. You run out the door, get the gas, and make it to your kids school 10 min­utes late. The kids are chat­ting in the back seat of the car, but your mind can’t process any­thing because it’s in neu­tral. A small part of you does notice all the input com­ing in, the traf­fic, the radio, the chat­ter, but none of it impacts the auto­matic pro­gram tak­ing you back home. You zom­bie shuf­fle past the dishes and that small part notices they are there.

Your son goes over to a friends house. Your daugh­ter goes out to ride her bike but your mind remem­bers she has karate prac­tice in 90 min­utes. You reminder her to be back on time. Your more active mind drags you back to your com­puter and you try and get some­thing done. You remem­ber you needed to do the taxes and research tax soft­ware options. You find it dif­fi­cult to com­pare dif­fer­ent pro­grams so you try and exer­cise your brain with the daily sudoku and code-breaker puz­zles at thinks.com. You had no trou­ble with yes­ter­days code-breaker puz­zle, but today’s is dif­fi­cult even though many of the words end up being the same. It’s like try­ing to think through quick­sand, stuffed into a burlap sack, at night. After a forced strug­gle with the puz­zles your daugh­ter comes in 5 min­utes late and you have to run out the door to get her to karate. The dishes sparkle in the evening light as you rush past them.

Dri­ving to and from the dojo is halfway peace­ful and halfway frus­trat­ing. You alter­nate between upset over not hav­ing done much of any­thing today and try­ing to relax so you don’t end up depress­ing your­self more. It works by the time you get home. You call your wife to see if she’s on the bus on her way home and she says she is. You rush out the door again to get her from the sta­tion. The dishes lurk in the evening darkness.

Your wife tells you about her day, decom­press­ing and releas­ing her stress. You do your best to pay atten­tion, but your mind wan­ders. You see a bear sculp­ture in a park as you pass and you imag­ine what it would be like if it came to life. You think about it run­ning down the street after your car, then get derailed by the bill­board for a local radio sta­tion with Ryan Seacrest on it. You can’t stand him and stew about that before you real­ize your wife asked you a ques­tion. You replay the con­ver­sa­tion in your head real fast and answer cor­rectly. You won­der why that was so easy but instead try to focus on your wife talk­ing to you about din­ner options. You both agree that you need a cou­ple of things at the store so you swing by to pick them up. Your mind doesn’t spare a sin­gle thought about how tight money is or your lack of work while paying.

You get home with every­one, excited about hav­ing din­ner together and maybe watch­ing the prime time shows, and set the food down on the counter. You turn around to get a pot to start cook­ing and real­ize it’s in the sink. Under a pile of dishes. That you now have to do if any­one is going to eat. You are ashamed that you didn’t think about doing the dishes once today and don’t know why you didn’t. This depresses you for the rest of the night, even though you put a brave, happy face on for every­one. You do the dishes and din­ner takes an extra hour.

Your wife asks you about a cou­ple of things she asked you to do and you finally remem­ber your to do list, sit­ting on the cor­ner of your desk, unno­ticed but in plain sight. You can recall all the things on it eas­ily, know­ing you’d never have been able to get them all done in one day, but even more ashamed you didn’t get more than one or two things done on it. You didn’t think about it and you don’t know why.

You want to dis­tract your­self from the depres­sion with some­thing enter­tain­ing but you feel like you aren’t wor­thy of doing any­thing except star­ing blankly at the TV. You split your atten­tion between the TV and look­ing at games on your com­puter you’d love to play but don’t feel like you earned the right to. Your fam­ily goes to bed one by one at their bed times, you give them their good nights, and can’t find the moti­va­tion to go to bed your­self when you should. You finally sham­ble bleary eyed to bed at 2 AM, right past the new pile of dishes from din­ner. You look at them and think, “I’ll do those first  thing tomorrow.”

Which is exactly what you thought last night.

Tags: ADD, ADHD, Writing

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 27th, 2010 at 5:45 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.