You Call This Summer?

Is there such thing as having too much man? In the manic way that I search for everything else in my life, I've been dating a flurry of men.

There's a dozen on the A list, a dozen more on the shit list. It sucks. I long for stability—a sense of peace—and yet it doesn't even jive with the ADD self. I am driven to crisis, insanity, anything that keeps the blood pumping. Give me a stable, sane man with a stable, sane job, and I'd be on a yawning marathon. I'm like Teflon; nothing sticks for long.

The sister has another albatross around her neck. She's had two kidney transplants and has been a cocktail of medications since she was five. Lately she's been having health flare ups. Her hips are misaligned from the meds, but she can't take too many pain killers because of the transplants. She's been in a depressive state, a pendulum between laughing and crying. I mean, what is the greater or lesser of these two evils? I have the same questions about ADD. There is no cure for this. It really hasn't gotten any better.

At times though, I can see signs of what seem like disorder in others. For example, with the ex lover, he compartmentalizes his life to the point where he won't answer the phone when he's focused on something. Is he ADD or way too rigid and selfish?

Then there's the date I went out with yesterday. The guy is always texting last minute and saying he will be late. Is he just lazy, being a jerk or is he ADD? I wonder about these things a lot. By the time he arrived, 30 minutes late, I wanted to walk off and say, "Have a nice dinner." It's ironic that it irks me when people are late because I am the same, if not worse. But since the guy was somewhat cute, I bit my lip and waited for him, waited and waited, fighting impulsiveness. I will not yell, I will not tell somebody off, I kept repeating.

The guy seemed very ADD, too. During the meal, he was chatting on the Treo, scrolling through it, repeatedly saying he felt like he was on speed. Cute, good career, Ivy League, but high maintenance. Too much like me.

The stepmother is convinced that I need to find a solid-as-a-rock fellow, one of those guys who stays at a job for his entire life, a family man with a lot of patience and who drives the same brand of car for his whole life. I need to find an arch opposite; otherwise, it won't work.

At the back of my head, I keep thinking I should look for the most high-flying ADDer out there and hook up with him. Richard Branson, he is married?

The noble and positive thing to do is to tackle the lemons in life and turn them into lemonade, but most of the time it's short lived. Like all else.