I usually make sure I am in a dark dress for funerals.
Suzi et als- someone just posted about ADHD and decision making on Jezebel's Groupthink [link]
This made me think of myself- I am so bad with this:
In my personal life this manifests itself in several ways, an example being: an inability to order from a menu. If I've been to a restaurant before, I always order the same thing. If I've been to a similar type of restaurant, for example Mexican food, I always order green enchiladas. If a simple option is unavailable I could spend hours looking at the menu if it was an option. Instead, I usually choose what someone else at the table is ordering.
No regulatory requirements for that portion of the job (I mean, "identifying problems" is a requirement by law, but not the specifics of how they're reported to the client or whatever). It just irks when different things are being done on different projects, and the the PM on this (who pisses me off to no end) refers to nonexistent teleconferences all "well we discussed this on the April 7th call" implying I'm not listening or should be with the program...THERE WAS NO CALL ON APRIL 7th! And the last time I remember hearing about it was when I argued it and they tabled it for further internal discussion. Ugh.)
One of my coping mechanisms is a concentration fierce enough to shut out stimuli which have nothing to do with the task at hand. Developing that ability got me blasted on evaluations as "rigid" and "unable to multitask", and even nudged me toward a diagnosis of somewhat autistic. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Actually, extreme hyperfocus is a characteristic of some types of AD/HD. Not everyone has it, but it's pretty common. Tim's hyperfocus easily tunes out things I didn't think it was possible to tune out. (I think -- MAYBE -- he would react to our house blowing up, but I don't want to test that hypothesis.)
someone just posted about ADHD and decision making
Oh, Jesus. Tim is constitutionally incapable of deciding things. If I ask him the open-ended "what do you want for dinner?" he responds with a totally blank look, like I just started speaking Swahili. So I tend to either offer 2 choices ("Do you want stir-fry or tamales for dinner?"), or I ask if my choice is okay ("Is stir-fry okay for dinner?") And that generally works.
(It is frustrating to me, though, on the occasions when I don't want to fucking decide what to eat. Because if *I* don't, we literally won't eat. It's happened several times. Tim just gets a handful of pretzels after work and then will putter around until bedtime, while I get angrier and angrier. And it's not a deliberate passive-aggressive thing; he just can't decide. So I have to remind myself that for all the years I lived alone, *I* did decide what to have for dinner, every time, so in the face of Tim's inability to decide, I can damn well do it again. Those are generally cereal-for-dinner-at-11-pm nights.)
That's why I have dice I can resort to to tell me what to eat. Or the old reliable what-goes-bad-first algorithm.
Oh, fuck me sideways, I think something's going wrong with the house sale. We are never going to sell this fucking thing.
NOOOOOO. Not gonna happen, Dana. It is just a bump. (I hope, I hope, I hope)
I have decided to work my cooking by cooking a meat/main meal for four three times every other week. This seemed like a great idea week 1, but it's week 3, and I don't wanna pick food from now.
I also really like cereal at 11.
Just a bump-ma, Dana. All hopes things smooth out and go forward.
extreme hyperfocus is a characteristic of some types of AD/HD.
::nods:: Two things I could let StY do that would give me a break from watching him every.damn.minute were A. bathtub. We timed him one day, and he stayed in there, playing with his toys, for two and a half hours. And probably would still be there if I hadn't let out the long-gone-cold water and made him get out.
And B. Modeling clay. Pre-walking, he would take paper from the wastebaskets if we were foolish enough not to empty them immediately, chew it to paste and make recognizeable objects out of his chewed papier mache. So we bought him Play-doh, suitable for eating. But soon switched him to actual modeling clay, as he *never* ate it, and the texture was much more satisfying.
I put a piece of shower curtain down on the kitchen floor and gave him toy baking pans, molds, and tools, wooden thread spools, Fisher Price little people, and other oddments, and he spent literal *hours* creating things, happy as clams. It was the place where I knew where he was and what he was doing, and he was *happy*. It became a reward he had to earn, though, and stopped being a refuge for him when things got overwhelming and his behavior deteriorated. In hindsight, that was a bad call.
He's never done anything with that particular talent as an adult, which is somewhat disappointing.
Or the old reliable what-goes-bad-first algorithm.
That's how I decided to make quiche Monday (the cream was rapidly approaching its "best by" date, we had leftover grape tomatoes from Easter's salad, and leftover quinoa cooked in vegetable broth [which is EXCELLENT in quiche, BTW]). Basically, it was a clean-out-the-fridge quiche.
