Treating ADHD Blog

Archives: June 2008

Google Gadgets: Notebook

Google Notebook: In theory - a useful system. In practice - an unholy mess.

Around every silver lining, of course, lurks a dark, wet, malodorous cloud, and this holds true for some of the gadgets and tips I've been writing about. Google Notebook is a great tool.

Whatever is on your monitor can, with one click, be ensconced in the Notebook, within which reside as many folders and sub-folders as you care to label, or so I think. When you return to your notebooks, you'll find that the whole page has been saved, graphics and all. There's even a way to save all your bookmarks. Sounds super, right? Organized, easy to use, no-fuss, no-muss folders, with every random page you've seen right below your dancing digits.

The catch is in the phrase "every random page you've ever seen." I had some free time today, and decided to clean up the files I no longer wanted in my Notebook. Either the links were dead, or they were duplicates, or I'd lost interest (what was I thinking when I saved the page about mastering Sanskrit in three months?). So I waded in with my machete, deleting file after file.

An hour later, I had a stiff neck, sore fingers, a bad temper and, still, a lot of saved web pages of no conceivable use to me. It's as though I had clipped everything that interested me in the newspaper or in magazines and filed it away in a big accordion folder. In theory: a system. In practice: an unholy mess.

I don't have any good ideas about this, except that, like your lawn, it's easier to weed for ten minutes a couple of times a week than for two hours at a stretch every month.

Keep it Together

Why do I feel so desolate, so lost?

This has been a flat-out lousy two weeks. And you wouldn't imagine that it would have been so. We've had family triumphs, I've done some writing that pleases me, I've kept away from the beer and hero sandwiches, haven't given in to the tobacco demons (I don't count the two cigars). Forced myself to walk to and from my office. Made some reasonable plans for the short and the long term. Haven't kicked any little dogs or old ladies.

Why do I feel so desolate, so lost? [Note to self: start charting these depressive moods against the local tide tables. You never know.] Sometimes, when things seem to be going well, my brain rebels. My guardian angel, the woman who's been my therapist for a decade, used to tell me, back when the "real world" had overwhelmed me and I really had something to be depressed about, that she wondered whether, when I gained some control over my life, I'd find that success was almost equally difficult to deal with. I'd spent so many years slugging it out, trying to keep it together when it would have been so much easier to pull the ripcord. She wondered whether I'd be able to adjust to not having to face each day with a knife in one hand and a Glock in the other, figuratively.

I used to get very upset with her when she'd talk about this.

Now I'm sort of upset that she was right.

Time to channel Tiger and re-focus, I guess.

The Will of Woods

Tiger Woods is a superb example of the power of will. Every time you think you've seen his best effort, he knocks you over again.

I was wrong. It's no big deal to win the U.S. Open on a knee that's still sore from the arthroscopic surgery you had eight weeks earlier.

On the other hand, winning the U.S. Open on said post-surgical knee, which, post-victory, is revealed to be the least troublesome part of a trifecta including two stress fractures and a torn ligament is a pretty good weekend's work. This guy Tiger, every time you think you've seen his best effort, he knocks you over again. Remember in The Usual Suspects when Verbal Kint relates the story of how Keyser Söze had come home to find his child killed by the Hungarian mobsters? And the horrible lesson he teaches them? "He'd show them what 'will' was." That's Tiger.

The other image this brought up was the scene in Lawrence of Arabia, where Peter O'Toole lights a match and holds it until it burns out against his fingers. His line was, "The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts."

Twenty-one miles back and forth over the rolling hills of Torrey Pines with a broken leg.

Keep that image someplace in the back of your mind, and pull it out when things start to cloud over.

Eternal Spring

This form of tai chi does wonders to improve focus and concentration.

When I can muster enough self-discipline, I do something called Eternal Spring. It's a form of chi kung, or nei kung, devised by a brilliant tai chi master, C.K. Chu.

Master Chu, who taught college physics for many years (he's now in his 70s) came to realize that many of us... mature... individuals don't have the strength or flexibility to begin the study of tai chi. He designed Eternal Spring to combine the virtues of nei kung, specifically flexibility and proper breathing, with movements that are integral parts of Yang-style tai chi.

If you can't get to New York to take classes, you might consider buying the book] or the CD. I'm here to tell you that this stuff works (assuming that you do it, rather than talk about it). Given my propensity for exaggeration, I'm forgiving of those who think I'm overly excited about the form. I'll just tell you this: it's not fun for the first few weeks. It gets better. After a month or so of doing it two or three times a week, you'll believe me.

Benefits? You'll have more energy, guaranteed. You'll sleep better. Little pains, many of which you might not even have been aware of, will disappear. And you'll focus. Trust me, you'll focus. I don't know why. I'm not saying it's a cure for ADHD. But you'll feel better and think better and be healthier.

As far as figuring out why, if this makes me feel so much better, I tend to drop it after a few months, I'm at a loss. But doing it for six months a year is, clearly, better than not doing it at all. And if you can find the 90 minutes a week in your busy schedule, you should give it a shot.

Just take it easy on the Horse Stance and the Frog position until you've made some progress, or you'll learn, within millimeters, where all the tendons in your knees and groin are located.

Sink that Putt!

We, who fight the good fight, consider it a victory when we stay on point.

There's concentration and there's concentration. We, who fight the good fight, daily, hourly, minute by minute, consider it a victory when we stay on point, forcing ourselves to work methodically. And we're right. We recognize that we have a problem, and that in all probability it's a lifelong problem.

By way of perspective, and, as I hope should be obvious, not to be disparaging in any way (I like to work out my self-loathing in private) I thought I'd offer an example of hyperconcentration. I can't document the story, but it rings true.

Jack Nicklauswas on the eighteenth green of a big tournament, needing to sink a longish putt for a winning birdie. He read the green, brushed a few stray blades of grass out of the path of his putt and took his stance. The Golden Bear took a practice stroke, moved up to his ball, settled his feet and took a deep breath.

Just as he was about to bring start his backswing, a bee landed on the shaft of his putter and began to mosey up toward Jack's hands. So he screamed and threw the club into the lake... Not really. Actually, he kept his eyes on the ball, drew the putter back smoothly and finished his stroke. The ball sped across the green, following the path Jack had envisaged as though he'd dug a little trench for it.

Only as the ball made one last turn, and tipped into the hole, did Jack look down and brush the bumblebee away.

Do the best you can. Keep your goals foremost in your mind. You might never be able to sink a 40' putt, but you'll be a happier and more successful person in your own arena, and isn't that what it's all about?

The Mystery of the Heavy Eyelids

I started drifting off whenever I picked up a book. My head bobbed up and down so frequently you'd think I belonged on the rear window ledge of someone's '77 Grand Prix.

Looking back, I see that I've concentrated (concentrated — that's a joke, get it?) on the attention deficit area and almost completely ignored the hyperactivity. They say you should write about what you know, and that's what happened.

When my ADHD is really kicking up badly, the result is not hyperactivity. It's stupor. All of a sudden, I'm passing out in the middle of a page. My head is bobbing up and down so frequently you'd think I belonged on the rear window ledge of someone's '77 Grand Prix, and my eyelids are sliding southward in response.

This first manifested itself when I was in, I guess, tenth grade. I'd always been a precocious, rapid reader. In elementary school, I tore through books. But in high school I suddenly noticed that I was drifting off whenever I read. Had nothing to do with the subject matter, how much sleep I'd had or what the Yankees were up to. Open Book, look at pages, close eyes. It was getting to be a serious situation, and had reached the point of being self-fulfilling prophecy.

I'd been wearing glasses since I was a little kid, and I hadn't needed a new prescription in a couple of years, so vision wasn't a potential villain. Or so I thought.

What prompted my mother to take me to a new ophthalmologist is a question that, now, will never be answered, but something did, and a new word entered my vocabulary: Convergence.

It's a long story, but I'll begin to explain this whole mess, and some intriguing sidelights, over the next few postings.

Boustrophedon

I'm trying to get out of this ADHD maze by focusing on doing one thing at a time... no matter how long it takes.

Sometimes, no matter how candid we attempt to be with ourselves, it's difficult to evaluate the motives behind our actions. I've always been plagued by a compulsion to get to the very beginnings of a subject, to approach things ab ovo, so to speak.

If I'm interested in Gothic cathedrals, I feel as though I'm cheating, if only myself, by reading about Gothic cathedrals until I've read about Romanesque basilicas. Of course, this creates a compulsion to read about Roman architecture, which leads me to Greek architecture. Along the way I get totally sidetracked: I look something up in the dictionary. After that, all bets are off. I'll find a definition for "boustrophedon," (You look it up; I'm way behind schedule already.) a really cool word, and I'm done.

So this urge to start at the beginning, as admirable as it might be heuristically, creates nightmares for those of us with faulty impulse control and attenuated attention span. We, or at least I, wind up getting nothing done. All or nothing is a recipe for disaster.

I'm trying to get out of this maze by focusing on doing one thing at a time, no matter how long it takes.

I'll get back to you on this one. It'll take a while.

Tiger Woods... and Concentration Revisited

Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never

I guess we'll have to do the companion piece to the Jack Nicklaus paean.

Obviously, Eldrick Woods. belongs up there in the All-World, Forever concentration rankings. If you saw him limping around Torrey Pines this weekend, sometimes appearing to use his club as a cane to take the pressure off the knee he had surgery on two months ago, you probably saw the ESPN Father's Day commercial. The voice-over is a recording of Tiger's father Earl saying, "I'd say 'Tiger, I promise you, that you'll never meet another person as mentally tough as you in your entire life.' And he hasn't. And he never will."

And, of the handful of athletes on the same plane, one, Michael Jordan, is a close friend of Tiger's. Wouldn't you love to be a fly on the wall when these two hyper-competitive men square off in a "friendly" round of golf? The air must be crackling with intensity. Sure, they're both physical freaks — you gotta have the reaction time and coordination to play on that level. But what sets these two apart is their will. They refuse to lose, refuse to be distracted, refuse to be pushed off course.

I'm not, of course, suggesting that I could will myself to hit a five-iron 200 yards. Or, to be truthful, hit a driver that far on most days. But it's a good thing to have an exemplar to remind us that we can improve our lot to some degree, just by refusing to compromise.

As Winston Churchill, no stranger to depression and learning disabilities, once said, "Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never, Never, Never, Never give up."

What do you have to lose? Certainly not your self-respect.

Is Literacy Dead?

The worst thing to happen to ADHD readers is poorly-written prose.

I'd like to rant about the death of literacy, but this isn't the right venue.

If ever I get my website up and running, along with a collateral blog, you'll be able to see some bile. Anyway, I was sitting at my desk the other day, slogging through a dreadful manuscript, thinking about egos and entitlement. People write these unreadable, poorly plotted, typo-ridden "books" and send them off to publishers, who send them off to drudges like me for major surgery.

These things actually get published, and it makes me ill. If my eighth grade teacher, whose name I forget, the one who taught us to diagram sentences, ever saw some of this tripe, there'd be hell to pay and no pitch hot. (I'm not sure what that means, but it appeared numerous times in the Patrick O'Brien novels.)

Do kids still learn to diagram sentences? I blush to admit that I fought against acquiring that skill for a year. Never could understand the point. But I always had a good intuitive grasp, an ear, to mix metaphors rather brutally, for language, and it usually made sense without having to make those diagrams.

In reading these horrible books, however, sometimes I wish I could conjure up one of those graphics, because the sentences are so poorly crafted that it can take some real effort to sort them out.

You've seen these train wrecks: no proper nouns; no agreement of number and tense; confusing (or no) punctuation; mis-used words and, most of all, no sense that the author himself knew what he wanted to say.

It occurred to me that for ADHDans, a sentence like this can be a death sentence for the book he's reading. My particular downfall is remembering characters' names, to the point that when I'm editing I have to draw charts. Imagine how much worse it is when, halfway through one of these epics, it becomes clear that "Frances" and "Francis" are the same person, an epiphany that resolves a lot of plot issues. If I were reading for pleasure (a phrase I use advisedly) I'd have given up much earlier.

I have no hope that this situation will improve. All I can suggest for those of us who are afflicted is to concentrate on making our own language clearer and more precise, and to stop buying and reading the tripe.

If you want to get your head clear, go read some John McPhee or E.B. White, or, for the sports people among you, some Herbert Warren Wind (all of whom, and not by coincidence, wrote for The New Yorker in its palmier days). It's an enjoyable pursuit, and may help you to understand that the problem isn't entirely in your head, but in the morass of unfounded self-esteem, ignorance and poor judgment that allows some of these authors to allow their names to be attached to these horrid books.

Buridan's Ass

It is easy for ADHDans to get lost in the maze of indecision. Get into the habit of finishing one thing at a time.

Buridan's ass refers to the problem of a donkey that, midway between two piles of hay, starves to death from indecision. Apparently old Aristotle anticipated this, as he did almost everything else, although he presented the situation as that of a man who, exactly equidistant from water and food, dies, because he's exactly as hungry as he is thirsty.

We ADHDans frequently find ourselves in similar dilemmas. Actually, we don't find ourselves in these dilemmas so much as lose ourselves in these situations. We set out to do something, but just as we're about to take some positive step, another option pops up, and then another and another. We get lost in this mental crabgrass.

I'm convinced that the answer to this problem is to be brutal with yourself. Disallow ANY options. Once you start something, don't do anything else until you're finished. Make it a habit to complete tasks, and refuse to let yourself indulge in any other activities until you've finished the first one.

Someone out there is screaming, "But that's exactly the problem! I have ADHD! I'm always flitting from one thing to another." I know. But there's still some degree of free will, some extent to which we're in control. I'm not suggesting that if, following who knows what bizarre impulse, you pick up The Critique of Pure Reason, you don't even get up to eat until you've finished. Even the most focused individuals can't accomplish that, if only because they'd starve to death like Buridan's ass.

I'm talking about simple issues. You start to wash the dishes, pay your monthly bills or mow the lawn. Not exactly in a class with reading Kant.

Distractions will come up. Ignore them. Tell yourself that, for right now, this minute, you're going to keep at your task until the dishes are clean, or you've stamped and sealed the envelopes or cleaned and put away the lawnmower.

I'd be the last person to suggest that willpower is the cure for ADHD. But habit is a powerful force, and getting into the habit of finishing one thing at a time just might help.

Smokin'

Little did I know that tobacco would prove to be the most addictive indulgence of my life.

You've probably gathered that I've made an extraordinary number of bad decisions in my life. Some major — a couple of criminally ill-considered business decisions lead the pack, with choosing civil engineering as a major running hard for the show money — and thousands of bad ones. It would be much easier to enumerate the good decisions, but apart from a marriage proposal and the realization, back when I was more solvent, not to take up commodities investing, they're few and elusive.

One horrible choice was to start smoking, but I don't take all the blame for that. Look at any movie made, for the sake of argument, at any time up to and including the Eisenhower administrations. You can't go five minutes without someone lighting up.

Chesterfield used to run print ads touting their product as the one more doctors smoked. FDR - and, shut up, I never saw him in person — was rarely photographed without that ebony cigarette holder sticking rakishly out from his aristocratic visage. Everyone smoked. So I smoked. Little did I know that tobacco would prove to be the most addictive indulgence of my life.

What brings this to mind is that when I spend hours working at my computer, I inevitably get a craving for a pack of Marlboros. Coffee, cigarettes, typewriter: all I need is Rosalind Russell sitting on the corner of my desk. Apart from the addictive nature of my relationship with Nicotiana tabacum, I always felt that cigarettes helped me work. They broke up the day, little treats that I didn't have to get up and walk into the kitchen to get. And they seemed to help me concentrate.

Looking back on what I wrote about voluntary noise, I'd say that smoking was the ultimate example. They provided just enough ancillary, controllable distraction that the real demonic, internally-arising chaos was held at bay. And I loved them. Often forty or fifty times a day. If only I could have just one, right now. It's a shame they're so damn bad for you, but there's nothing ADHD-related that could possibly compensate for the ravages of smoking.

An Evil Spiral

Batting leadoff and playing second base for the ADHD Comorbids is ~Depression~.

Even if I'm correct in stating that bad memory isn't a direct function of having ADHD, but rather a function of one's memory never receiving the data in the first place due to inattention, the end result is the same. Bad retrieval. This can lead to all kinds of difficulties. The day-to-day issues - where'd I park the car, how'd I forget her birthday, why didn't I pay the utility bill — are obvious. Beyond those are some profound psychological issues.

Batting leadoff and playing second base for the Comorbids is depression. As always, I'm on a slippery slope here, so you'll have to take this as impressionistic rather than scientific.

Clinical depression can exist without any help from ADHD and vice-versa. I've got both, and I've lived in that miasma long enough to sense, with consistency, what's going on upstairs in the noisy, messy attic. But the memory problems associated with Da Deficit frequently provoke depressive moods of another, more readily catalogued nature.

If I can't remember parts of my life, ranging from what I did after work last Thursday to my entire eighth and ninth years, I get shaky. My very existence is brought into question, and since I have no answers, my reactions are to get scared and miserable. If I'm missing pieces of my life, how do I know I was there at all? And, even more upsetting, what's the point of it all if I can't look back on it?

This is getting into ontology, where I have no business at all. If I didn't read Descartes in college, when I was supposed to, you know I'm not going to start now, especially with six mysteries piled on my night table.

All I know is that missing all these connections messes me up something fierce. It undermines my sense of purpose and outflanks my intention to trample my ADHD and take control of my life. I'm aware of this, even as I watch myself starting to spiral down toward the pit. And the results ain't pretty.

The ADHD All-Star Lineup

The ADHDs, the bi-polars, the Aspergers, and the OCDs all lay claim to a cadre of famous folk.

If you're reading this, you probably have a pretty good idea of the burdens ADHD piles on your shoulders, which already bear the weight that is our birthright as humans. I don't think it's the worst possible handicap (and if you do, ask Steven Hawking) but at the very least it's a pain in the butt. So how hard would it be if you had two or three additional syndromes rerouting your synaptic atlas every day?

We all share, if only to a miniscule degree, all of the possible mental and emotional and intellectual conditions that any of us has. In other words, I'm guessing that if examined through the right microscopic lens, each of us carries traces of every form of human behavioral or perceptual modes that has been cataloged.

Those of us who view ourselves, and are viewed by those who know us, as "normal" might still have minute traces of any number of psychological quirks which if present in a larger proportion, might produce personalities that are problematic. Admittedly, this is a highly subjective, totally intuitive and completely unscientific presentation on my part, but if you'll accept that stipulation we can move along.

Here's what I, as a layman, find puzzling: Google "ADHD famous people." Hit some of the sites and look over the list. Then try it with "bi-polar famous people." And then with "Asperger's syndrome famous people." And then with "OCD famous people."

When you were a kid, choosing up sides for stickball, everybody wanted the same people on their teams. Same thing here. The ADHDs, the bi-polars, the Aspergers and the OCDs all lay claim to a cadre of famous folk.

This core comprises, inter alia, Newton, Michelangelo, Churchill, Hemingway, Einstein, Axl Rose, Beethoven, Leonardo, Henry Ford, Mozart, Michael Jordan, Edison, Michael Jackson and Yeats. (Why aren't there any women listed? Don't ask me. Please. I don't know, and no force on Earth will get me to speculate. I may be scatterbrained, but I'm not stupid.)

This is an all-time, all-star team of human achievement, a wide spectrum of personalities, some of the most creative, intellectually daring, driven men in history. I'd be surprised to find that a group of men who were so far above the norm in accomplishment didn't deviate from "normal" psychological profiles in some respect. But I can't imagine Churchill, however open he was about his battles with the "Black Dog" of depression, becoming a famous correspondent, a pillar of the British government for almost 40 years, a POW, a talented painter, a legendary drinker and a brilliant, prolific writer, simultaneously coping with Asperger's, OCD and ADHD.

Furthermore, some of these afflictions seem — SEEM: this is just my subjective observation, remember — to be mutually exclusive. I'm disorganized, forgetful, and perhaps even a little devil-may-care in my approach to life. Given this, could I also walk around like Monk, spending hours folding and re-folding my boxers? What am I missing here?

Maybe advocates for the sufferers of these varied syndromes could get together and have a draft, try to figure out who really had what and clear the air.

"And with the second pick of the first round, the Bi-Polars pick . . . Terrible Ted Turner!"

Just an idea.

Got Balls?

Baoding balls, a.k.a. "Chinese meditation balls," help strengthen your hands as well as your immune system while reducing stress.

If you've ever wandered through Chinatown and poked your head into any of the stores that sell melamine "porcelain," kung fu uniforms, lucky bamboo and similar schlock, you've probably noticed the little decorative boxes with two matching balls in them. They're usually known as "Chinese health balls" or "Chinese meditation balls," but the real name, in Mandarin (I assume) is Baoding balls, named for a city in northeastern China where these balls were supposedly first created during the Ming dynasty.

The balls come in matched pairs, and are available in a variety of sizes and materials. The most common ones are made of metal, either chrome-plated or covered in cloisonné. I dislike these because they feel unpleasant in my hand, they're very light and most of all because they tend to have some cheesy-sounding gong built into them which boings as you roll them around.

You can get them in different kinds of stone, from marble to jade. These have a nice heft and are cool and soothing in the hand. You can find them readily on eBay or elsewhere online. I got my best sets walking around in Chinatown. One shopkeeper sold me a pair of beautiful yellow jade balls for a buck apiece, and threw in a quick lesson.

The use couldn't be simpler, at least in theory. Hold both balls in one of your hands, palm facing upward. Manipulate your fingers so that the balls roll around in a circle. The idea is to keep the balls from touching each other, and to reverse the rotation from time to time. Strangely enough, for me the large ones are easier to use than the smaller ones.

Once you learn how to use the balls, you can really get jiggy with it. Go to YouTube. and look for videos. You can find clips in which some long-fingered gents can handle five balls at once.

But, you ask, why bother? Well, the Chinese believe that Baoding balls, in rolling around your palm and fingers, put pressure on some critical acupressure points, thereby strengthening your chi and, consequently, various internal organs. I can't vouch for this, but I can, as someone who spends a good deal of time nattering away on a keyboard, attest that regular use of Baoding balls will stretch your hands and strengthen your hands and forearms. They also seem to have an overall calming effect. That may be psychosomatic, but any kind of repetitive movement, as I've opined elsewhere, tends to be soothing.

If you can get into the habit of using them while you're watching T.V., you'll be very happy with the results within a few weeks. Spend a couple of bucks and a few minutes practicing with the Baoding balls while you watch toothpaste commercials. It actually makes you feel better.

What could be bad about that?

Music for the Attention Challenged

How long a piece of music can you listen to without drifting off? I've got a few suggestions for ADHD music lovers.

I used to visit all the very gay places
Those come-what-may places
Where one relaxes on the axis of the wheel of life—
To get the feel of life
From jazz and cocktails.

- lyrics by William Thomas Strayhorn

OK. I'm restless; I'm drinking a little, looking forward to a rainy weekend when I can catch up on all my work. Meanwhile, I have a question. Those of you who haven't officially been diagnosed with Da Deficit, go play outside.

So here's the question, Spanky: How long a piece of music can you listen to without drifting off?

I love music. Not all music. Listening to classical music isn't as bad as a colonoscopy, but it's close. And why? Partly because the lingo makes me kack, much like the gobbledy-gook the wine people speak. I know, I know. If I understood it, it wouldn't be gobbledy-gook, it would be a contrapuntal sonata grown in gravelly soil on the south bank of the Gironde. But I don't, and at this point in my life I'm not likely to get it. And partly because I just can't follow what's going on.

My brain is conditioned to a three-minute, big spindle, 45-rpm song. Maybe longer if it was written by Johnny Mercer, or Cole Porter, or Steven Sondheim. But a long piece? Some Mahler? I Vespri Siciliani? I'm done, Jack. My feets keep tappin', but I'm on another planet.

It's only the lyrics listed above that keep me hanging in there. Words like these, written by an alcoholic, gay, African American genius who, when he indited them, while he was still in high school, had never left Pittsburgh. Words so cynical, heartbreaking, world-wise that I can't drift away. The music, also by Mr. William Thomas Strayhorn, is gorgeous and evocative (although I've heard many musicians curse the difficulties of playing this piece); but it is the verbal images that keep me tuned in. So, in the interest of providing a distraction-resistant moment of relief, here's Lush Life five versions, courtesy of NPR.

Lagniappe: One of the five renditions on the NPR site is Nancy Wilson's. I have the feeling that Nancy — who's still singing, and if you get the chance, run, don't walk — isn't as well known as she should be. Gorgeous, elegant, without, as far as I know, any of the drama that seems to go hand in glove with jazz singers, maybe too effortless, whatever. But some very hip jazz musicians put her right up there at the top, after Billie, Ella and the Divine Sarah. Check her out.

If your idea of singing is Beyoncé or Celine or, heaven forfend, Amy Winehouse: listen to Nancy. I'd love to hear comments.

Let's Talk Baseball

Even when I watch every minute of a game, I still can't tell you who pitched or what the final score was. It's enough to make a sports fan crazy!

Forget the symphony. Forget War and Peace. Let's talk baseball for a minute.

I'm a hereditary Yankee fan. When I was born, my folks lived on 156th Street and the Grand Concourse. If Tiger Woods teed up in front of our old building, whipped out his driver and hit a nice draw, he could catch the downslope at 161st Street and if his Titleist missed the entrance to the IRT it would run downhill and wind up at the season-ticket holders entrance, a little wedge shot away from home plate.

I can remember going to games with my father. One weekend in April, when I was about nine and bedridden with a stomach virus, listening to every inning of a five-game series with the Tigers: Bunning, Lary, Kaline, Kuenn. (No, wise guy, I didn't see Greenberg or Cobb.) But I can't remember what happened in the Yankee game last week. It drives me crazy.

You mention something to the average fan and he squinches up his eyes and says, "Oh, yeah! Remember, like in Game 3 of the '99 Series when Knoblauch - little Knoblauch, can you believe it? Takes Glavine out of the park in the eighth."

Shut UP! Of course I don't remember. I watched every pitch of that game, and in my database there's nothing. And it's not the intervening nine years. I watched most of the Yankee-Mariner game last Sunday and can't even tell you who pitched, or what the final score was.

It happens that I know a guy who's a big-time lawyer. Guaranteed you never heard of him; he's not one of those slickyboys who's seen too much Law and Order, and stands outside the Criminal Court mugging for the cameramen. He looks more like the third baseman on your keg-league softball team. But he's the head honcho at a huge international firm, a heavy hitter in the world of New York corporate law. You can almost see his mind humming along calmly and methodically sorting, classifying, analyzing everything that comes into his consciousness. Busy? You try keeping track of a couple of thousand attorneys, and get back to me next week.

Anyway, he's a huge baseball fan. Ask him about the '73 Indians, and he'll start reciting batting orders, pitching rotations, and then, after he gets warmed up, will give you a play-by-play of an August game between the Tribe and another losing team when there were, nationally, about six people who cared about the outcome. His lawyerly voice purrs along, "So it's the bottom of the eighth and it's old Gaylord Perry against this kid, what's his name, Clyde, David Clyde, never amounted to much after all the commotion, and this guy comes up — Jeez, I can't remember his name, I must be getting old — so whatever his name was, Perry goes to a full count, and he throws this guy a hellacious spitter and the guy misses by a mile and actually hits himself in the head with his own bat."

This SOB remembers how bad some nonentity got fooled by a Gaylord Perry spitball in a no-account game twenty-six years ago, a season when Cleveland finished dead last, and he's annoyed because he can't immediately retrieve the bozo's name. All this while he's running one of the biggest law firms in the world. True story. Sad, if you can't remember where you parked the car last night, but true nonetheless.

As ol' Casey used to say, "You could look it up."

Farming for Focus

Gardening is not amenable to helter-skelter thinking. You have to plan and focus. And I love it.

Q: What is the opposite of an ADHDan?
A: A farmer.

Ah, you say to yourself, poor Willie, he’s finally gone over the edge, the blitherer. Not so fast, Bunky.

Granted, I’m not a really a farmer. It would be remarkable if I were, considering that the area of Manhattan in which I live probably hasn’t seen a farm since the Van Buren administration. But this year I finally made up my mind and hit the garden center at Lowe's, hard.

So the sills of all of the nice south- and west-facing windows in my apartment are crowded with Red Robin cherry tomatoes, three kinds of chilies, two kinds of basil, two varieties of lavender, dill, parsley, and a bunch of miscellaneous houseplants (Note to self: no more of those sweet peas that smell like a factory in Mindanao making the world's cheapest knockoff perfume.)

Here's what I found out from growing this stuff: farming is not amenable to helter-skelter thinking. You have to plan (how many days from germination to flowering; which variety will be compact enough for the kitchen window; will the early jalapenos be done and in the pickling jars before the Serranos that share their bed begin to bust loose).

You have to keep records (which varieties did you get from your buddy in Pound Ridge). You have to look at the crops daily, checking for fungus gnats, white scale, aphids — yep, New York is a great place; we even have aphids. Water. Not too much water. Turn the plants (the sun only comes into the apartment from one direction, right?).

I love it. My wife just shakes her head (see if she gets any of the world's best Caprese when I harvest my goodies and make some fresh mozzarella next month!). It's soothing. Lots of visual and olfactory clues.

Farmers, even farmers on First Avenue, don't have to deal with many abstractions. And think how calm and focused I'll be next year when I turn the spare bedroom into a greenhouse. Eggplants. Nasturtiums. A couple of Meyer lemon trees. Maybe a little pool, with some Nymphaea, in the dark corner.

How much do you figure a couple of those Koi fish would cost?

My Views on Booze

Is there a relationship between ADHD and drinking? Probably. Is it a good idea to drink at work? Probably not.

Alcohol is unpredictable. Paradoxical. Dangerous. Exciting. Destructive. Medicinal. You never know if it's going to give you a lift, or send you spiraling down.

Or if it will give you a lift and then, when you're feeling more optimistic, throw you into the Slough of Despond (which is from Spenser, with an "S," like the detective). At what point will this sudden reversal take place? After four beers? Ten? Three six-packs? A case? Who knows?

What I do know is that, under certain circumstances, alcohol counteracts the symptoms of ADHD better than anything else. Before you start screaming, I'm not suggesting Martinis with breakfast. I know that when I was a working chef, and my daily routine involved unremitting pressure and enough distraction to disrupt anyone's thought processes, a couple of beers would help me narrow my focus appreciably. I'm not clear why.

I've been writing about the idea of noise lately, and this is one of the clearest examples. Two or three cans of beer over the course of a five-hour dinner service would, without any question, help keep me concentrating on what I was doing. I could also keep an eye on my crew, without getting distracted.

All the other garbage in my life got off stage, as it were, leaving me to knock out seven different scallopine dishes, a couple of pastas, three zuppa di pesce and four steak pizzaiolas, all cooked to different temperatures, naturally. I was also, in one part of my brain, listening to incoming orders and, out of the corner of my eye, watching to see that the servers grabbed the correct orders. The more frenzied the action got, the more I could drink and still stay on top of things.

I must admit, at this point, that if I'd stepped over the line, and gotten mildly hammered, my work began to suffer. And frequently, I'd finish my shift, feeling good about the night's work, run down and change, and head home, only to feel the cumulative effects of the alcohol hit me right behind the ear, leaving me to wobble down the street. Once the pressure was off, there was nothing to counterbalance the beer sloshing around my brain, and I was toast.

I've got more to say on this subject, but I think I'll wrap this up for now.

I'm thirsty.

Solitaire

People with ADD tend to overrate the importance of solitude as an essential condition for close concentration.

There's a story about Bill Clinton that fits in here nicely. From all accounts, he's a devoted, perhaps compulsive, solitaire player.

There are stories of the President standing at a breakfront during a National Security briefing, with his back to the table, playing solitaire while the analysts laid out subtle and complex scenarios, the myriad possible responses and the likely fallout from each. Enormously complicated, demanding stuff, to understand which most of us — and in this case I don't restrict "us" to ADHDans, but to the public at large — would need several repetitions and extensive note-taking.

According to the story, at the end of the discussion, the President would give the cards one last riffle, turn around, and proceed to question his advisors in such depth that no one could doubt that he completely understood every nuance of the briefings.

Even the most vituperative Clinton-haters, while condemning his morals, his politics and anything else the President touched, always seemed to mention, grudgingly, his extraordinary intelligence. I know a few people who've met him at cocktail parties or dined with him, and by all reports his intellectual abilities and personal charm are dazzling. So what's with the solitaire, Bill?

I've read several psychological analyses of this behavior, none of which led me anywhere. But I believe that many of us, and I'm speaking of our particular community now, overrate the importance of solitude as an essential condition for close concentration.

Last week I wrote about noise, unwanted, extraneous signals that distract us from our tasks. Bill Clinton's solitaire playing seems to work in a contrary manner. It's as though the card playing occupies just enough of his attention that the balance of his focus cannot be devoted to more than one subject.

In other words, the solitaire playing is "noise" but it's voluntary, purposeful noise. People exhibit all kinds of tics when they're attempting to concentrate: drumming on a table with their fingers, twisting a ring or a bracelet, tapping a pencil, scratching their chins. These minor, uncomplicated, usually repetitive movements act to insulate the part of the mind that's involved with solving the larger, critical problem; processing two streams of information, one of which is requires no real thought, allows one to consider the original question in a relatively steady, unpressured frame of mind.

Perhaps President Clinton's use of the more complicated actions of playing solitaire, compared to tapping one's fingers, is merely an indication of how much smarter he is than most of us.

Lost... (and Found?)

I don't have a problem asking for directions; it's remembering directions that's the problem.

A guy gets lost in rural New Hampshire. He's driving around, making random turns, hoping to find someone who can give him directions. Finally he notices a farmer sitting on the top rail of a fence, watching his sheep, and the driver stops.

"Pardon me, can you tell me where North Xenophobia Crossing is?"

"Yep."

Pause.

"Would you mind telling me where North Xenophobia Crossing is?"

"Nope. It's a skootch more than two c's down the road."

"It's what?"

"It's a skootch more than two c's down the road."

Patient pause.

"OK. I give up. What do you mean, two c's down the road'?"

"Not too bright, are you, Sonny? Well, you go back to that fancy little car of yours, and get in, and look down the road. When you get to what you saw, that's one see. Then you look down the road as far as you can again, and when you get there, that's two sees. Then make a left and you'll run right into it."

There are a lot of old gags like this about guys getting lost. And it's part of the lore of the male animal that we get lost because we're either too dumb or two proud to ask for directions. It's like we see ourselves as the spiritual heirs of Natty Bumpo or Marco Polo. But that's only half the problem.

Once you've given in and gotten the directions, how likely is it that you'll remember anything after the first landmark? Or if you've downloaded a route from Google Maps, what are the odds you won't leave it in the printer?

Wax On, Wax Off

By repeating a simple, rhythmic motion a student can access levels of concentration and perception not otherwise available to him.

There's a famous scene in the movie The Karate Kid in which Mr. Miyagi begins teaching Daniel karate by having him wash and wax all of his cars. "Wax on, wax off, wax on, wax off," is the mantra to this exercise, which can be viewed on several levels.

The obvious purpose of this silliness is to teach Daniel dedication to the art of karate while building up his strength. Beyond that, he is learning some fundamental hand movements, rhythmic clockwise and counterclockwise circles, which apparently underlie karate blocking techniques. The subtext of the scene, for our present purposes, is that the washing and waxing provide a physical counterpart to an abstraction.

By repeating a simple, rhythmic motion the student gains access to levels of concentration and perception not otherwise available to him. I've done some simple martial arts, and I would agree that mental conditioning counts as much as physical development. In fact, I base my advocacy of martial arts as a defense against ADHD largely upon this perception.

Pure abstraction has always presented problems for me, and I'm sure that my oblique, metaphoric approach to the world derives from this difficulty. If I can put my hands on it, literally or figuratively, I can usually understand it. Arithmetic wasn't hard, and algebra made sense, and geometry was intuitive. I hit trig, on the other hand, like the Titanic.

Sines, co-secants, tangents? I could go through the motions. But what in the name of Euler did the damn things mean? And why did they keep showing up in non-trig courses? Co-sines in my chemistry course? Come on.

Years later, I finally began to accept the idea that the trig functions were just... there. Even if I can't touch them, or see them except as a ratio. We've made peace. Or maybe it's just an armed truce. And I'm probably not designing any bridges in the future.

Morning Coffee... Revisited

Customize your Firefox web browser for a more civilized Internet experience.

One of the best things about using Firefox instead of Internet Explorer as a web browser is the extent to which you can customize it. There are add-ons for almost anything you can imagine, from dictionaries in languages I've never even heard of, to computer functions I didn't even know existed.

On a less abstruse level, there are nice functions like Morning Coffee.

When you find a website or a blog that changes content regularly, just click the Morning Coffee icon on your Firefox browser and it gets added to your list. Now, every morning, while you're drinking your... right... you'll have the latest page right there, in front of you.

Before you smarty-pants out there start telling me about RSS: I know about RSS. But not every site or blog has a feed, or at least a feed that I can find, and my RSS reader, if I don't keep up with it, gets to be a snarling beast full of unread links. Morning Coffee is more, well, civilized.

And while I'm at it, here's a bonus: there's a little program called Cool Ruler. When you open it, a ruler appears on screen. You can move it, turn it 90º, stretch it, put marks on it and it has a calculator. I use it when I'm doing some design work and don't trust my eyes. Just thought you'd like to know about it.