Driven to Dist... Hey, Look! A Monkey!
I recently got around to reading most of Driven to Distraction, a book about attention deficit disorder that my aunt Sally loaned me when Stacey and I were in Tuscon late last year. (You remember the Tuscon trip; the relevant blog post mocked the passive-aggressive grammar of the little sign in our hotel room admonishing us to please not steal the bathrobes, or, if we were going to steal them anyway, the least we could do was pay for them.)
ADD is characterized by impulsively, distractibility, and hyperactivity. (Check, check, check.) Insofar as you can diagnose yourself with anything based on a New York Times bestseller — and the author of the book repeatedly warns against doing so, but what does he know? — I suppose I'm a borderline case. Borderline at worst, really, because it seems that any serious manifestation of ADD in adults is accompanied by a background litany of school-age inability to pull one's shit together in class, and I never really had any problems with that.
In any case, the interesting thing to me is not to accumulate labels but explain behavior. One described manifestation of ADD sensation-seeking behavior is irritation with the general discussion of things that have already happened. Re-hashing one's day, for example. One's day has already happened, man. What are we going to do now? It occurred to me in the shower that my frequent habit of firing up blogger only to type in a few sentences, become overwhelmed with the pointlessness of whatever, and shut the browser window to wander off and do something else was probably an internet-related manifestation of the same verbal recalcitrance.
Take this post, for example. I nearly gave up in the middle of the parenthetical in the first paragraph, in the middle of making reasonable grammar out of all the uses of the word "borderline" in the second paragraph, and in the middle of trying to make all the verbs in the sentence just before this one parallel with each other. I should quit now, I guess, before I get dist...
Comments