"Attention Deficit Disor..."

Q: How many people with Attention Deficit Disorder does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Wanna ride bikes?!

The first time I realized I suffered from Adult ADD was when I lost the book about ADD I was reading. I later found it hanging on a towel rack in the bathroom. I can't remember if I finished the book or not, because the question of whether or not I had ADD seemed to be answered with that misplaced book.

Several times a week (I can't remember how many...) I put food in the microwave and heat it up for dinner. The next morning Juju takes the food out of the microwave for me and says, "did you enjoy your dinner last night?" Often, while cooking dinner (i.e., boiling mac & cheese from a box) I get distracted by a phone call or an interesting piece of mail or an urgent need to dig through my box of photos and find a picture of my family at our 1978 trip to Disney World.

One morning I took a coffee mug out of the cabinet, poured myself a cup of coffee and put the coffee pot into the cabinet. Fortunately, I found the coffee pot later when I was ready for my second cup of coffee.

If you come over and ask me for a drink, I will make you a cocktail. Then I will walk into the living room with your cocktail. After I put on some music, I will begin drinking your cocktail while you stand there watching me. Maybe it will seem incredibly rude to you, but I just forget what I'm doing. It isn't intentional.

Sometimes this "affliction" can be a gift. People with ADD can "hyperfocus", which is useful if you want me to repeat lines from Will & Grace word for word. See how gifted I am? I can complete an entire blog entry even if my friend is standing at my cubicle waiting to talk to me. I sometimes won't see my friend waiting to talk to me until I've completed and published my entry. If I'm watching an interesting commercial (interesting to me, anyway) I won't hear a word you are saying to me from your seat next to me on the couch. This useful ability means that I can still quote, verbatim, a BRIM (coffee) commercial from the 70s.

"Only half a cup? Don't you like my coffee? Love the rich taste. It's the caffeine I can do without..."

Anything that needs to be tended, watched closely or monitored is definitely a job for someone else. Well, unless it is a relationship. But we'll get to that in a moment.

Keep me away from anything that can burn down a house. Candles are my enemies. The stove is too dangerous for me to go near. I can't count how many burning pots have I found on the stove after letting ALL the water boil out of them.

So, how do I function in my relationships? I manage to incorporate all the worst parts of ADD into my relationships. I drive my friends/boyfriends/roommates/whatevers crazy.

If I like someone, I tend to hyperfocus on him. I can't think of anything else. I can't hear or see anything else going on around me. That's probably obvious to anybody who has read the past few months of Toaster Oven.

I haven't seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind yet, but sometimes I wonder if I would opt to erase memories from my mind if I could. Then I could move on so much more quickly. Would I be happier if I couldn't remember those days of being controlled in a cult? What if I could forget about CT and stop comparing guys I date to him? (If you spend more than $2.00 on me on our date, this will work to your advantage).

I still have receipts from my first dinner in 1995 with CT, and I still have the ticket stubs from the haunted house I went to with "J", with whom I went on a total of four dates. So, how long do you imagine I'll hang onto my empty ketchup bottle?

I warned you about my ADD, so don't say you didn't see this coming...

This started out as an entry about Attention Deficit Disorder and ended up being an entry about how hard it is for me to let go of memories.

And, somehow, that seems appropriate.