25 October, 2006

Where oh where has ADHD gone, oh where oh where can he be.

Screw you!
I've said it before, I have ADHD so you can't expect me to post...
ever!

Oh, I can't stay mad at you. Forgive me? I have been busy, honest. And I am saddened by my lack of blogular wisdom to my devoted fan base. I've been working on getting myself a masters degree. I've probably posted about it before, but it was a stupid idea, wrapped in a delusion, floating on a sea of WTF. And it got worse around July, when I had to do a compulsory accounting subject. Now, I haven't done maths since I was 16 so I wasn't looking forward to it. Plus my difficulty was compounded when I went off my medication for a month. You see the medication was never supposed to be a permanent thing. I like to think I am a functioning member of society even without it, it is just there to point me towards productivity on occasion for work and for study. So I had family visiting from the old dart and took several weeks off work (and study) to show them the local sights. Look, red dirt. Oh a red rock. Look a fat lizard. Look a thin lizard on a red sandhill.
All in all it was a lot of fun, I was self medicating with my Irish brother-in-law at various venues of liquid refreshment and it didn't matter to anyone if we thought we were going to look at a railway museum but I decided to take the long drive via a salt pan and along a dry riverbed.
After this little bit of R&R I went off to a conference (as you may have noticed) where I kept ignoring my chemical conscience and had myself a lot of fun, which isn't what most people would expect of an ADHD kiddie surrounded by librarians.
Then I went back to work and discovered that I had become unused to my chemical regimen. The stuff has always decreased my appetite and affected my sleeping habits but despite the high doses I had still managed to eat and sleep. Now however I have cut by dose to 1/3 of what it was, because otherwise I can't eat or sleep and both of those things are in my top ten of things I like to do at least once a day. The trouble is that 1/3 of the dose is about 1/8 of the benefit, so I have been living a life of quiet loud desperation. My uni work went to hell in a hand basket and work has also been suffering.
I am lucky in that I can work without it. There are huge areas of my job where ADHD is in fact a benefit, but there has been a lack of paperwork, a lack of telling the boss what I am doing, a decrease in my cataloguing output and I keep forgetting to give my assistant any meaningful work to do.
Still, over the last couple of days I have taken my full dose, forgone food or sleep and done the overdue (by at least six weeks) section of my subject. That's right folks, I did the second half of a masters level accounting subject in two days, including two of the three assignments. Now I'm sitting at work, having taken a slightly decreased morning dose but feeling more jumpy than a ferret on crystal meth. And in this situation my thoughts turned to my blog feeds and having sated my own desire to read the ranting of others out there I started to consider my own readers. Thus a post was born.
I'm happy enough in this situation, my boss is out of town visiting her real children so the ADHD librarian who tends to feel very angry about being treated like a child (there might be a post on that topic some time soon) can relax a bit. I also have a day today with no storytime, no school visits, no desk shift and no meetings. Sure I have a desk you can't see underneath piles of half complete paperwork and uncatalogued junior non-fiction, but paperwork and books won't be scared if I start gibbering incoherently at them.
Now all I need is for my uni to accept my excuse very good reason for my work being late. I'm lucky in that my doctor has given me a certificate stating
please excuse the lateness of John's work, but he and his brain chemistry aren't on the best of terms at the moment and the nearest private practice psychiatrist is 1500km away, so he's just hanging in there waiting for the public system to find a gap between the dangerous nutjobs so that they can look at having him rewired.

So, while my lecturer isn't going to mark my work, the associate head of the school has agreed to take a look at it for a pass/fail grade. I'm happy enough with that, I was sitting at 70% for the first half of the subject despite the fact that most of that was at least a week or two late and while I always feel good about credits and distinctions I'm often heard to loudly proclaim Ps get degrees. Sure my wife is averaging Ds and HDs in her postgrad work, but an addition to being a very clever person, she has a work ethic. As of last week though, she is finished her grad dip and as I don't have another subject until late January life might be quite relaxed for the next few months. Or as relaxed as it can be for her being as she chose to live with me.

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