Trying to Run a Non-Profit With ADD

I really need to write shit more often. Well, no time like right now.

As everybody knows, I guess, I work with a small school in Tela, Honduras. I have my own non-profit organization (if you can call anything somebody with ADD runs an “organization”) to raise money so I can pay English speaking teachers to work there. For every teacher I can pay, the school has that much money freed up to put toward other things. I’ve been through this before, I know.

Anyway, running things is something I have a hard time with. Asking people for money is something I have a hard time with. Anything other than dealing with the teachers and the school is hard for me. Handling money is hard for me. And, sad to say, running things, asking for money and handling money are big parts of having a non-profit organization.

All this has kept me from getting as far as I’d like to, and the underlying problem or problems are hard to put into words. I’ll try to begin by telling about something that happened when I was in graduate school. I came to Washington when I was 30 so I could get a degree in international affairs, specifically Latin America.

I knew already I wanted to do something in Tela, but I didn’t know what, and, though I knew a lot about Honduras from having lived there two years, it was all firsthand stuff, and only about Honduras. I knew little of the history or politics or economics or the sociology of the rest of Latin America. I didn’t even know much about the other Central American countries. So I went to graduate school, and hoped that I’d work out just what my calling was while I was there, or not long after.

The summer between my two years at school, I got an unpaid internship at the Organization of American States, the O.A.S. There was a department they’d set up called the Trust for the Americas, and it was set up to do anti-corruption work, and that’s where I was going to be working. I was thrilled. I thought I could do something to help.

It wasn’t long before I found out that I was wrong. I can kind of wrap up the whole experience of my time there with one story. Most of the other interns were undergraduates. I think I was the only graduate student, at least in the Trust. We would often go next door to the World Bank cafeteria for lunch, since our badges would get us in there, and they had good, cheap food.

One day, I went with about four other interns. We were working on setting up an anti corruption conference in Ecuador at the time, and everybody was talking about it. I’d already shown that pretty much all I could do was type in names and addresses and telephone numbers and e-mails of the people who were going to the conference into a spreadsheet.

The other interns were all 20, 21, 22 year old undergraduates, and they all sat there, talking about how they were going to do things, they were setting things up, they were going to call people, and talk to people, and make things happen, and I remember sitting there, listening to them, feeling like a loser, because these kids were all so much younger than I was, and they knew how to make things happen, and I couldn’t even really understand what the hell they were talking about.

That’s what it’s like for me with this non-profit. I know what I want to do with it; I know that this is a wonderful idea, that could help any school in Honduras, and that, if I could really get this thing working well, I could do wonders for the Kawas School, for other schools in Tela, for other schools in other Honduran towns, and I could even work with and help schools in other countries.

But I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to make things happen. It takes something that my brain just lacks to understand how to get things done.

Here’s something I saw on Facebook this evening:

It’s on a page called “facebook [sic] for nonprofits”. It has about ten links like the three above, telling how to put Facebook to work for your non-profit. So I read a bunch of the links, and I’m sure they make a lot of great points, but there’s something missing in my brain, and I read them, and I just don’t get it. I don’t understand. It doesn’t really mean anything. I don’t know how to make any of the shit they’re talking about—and I know the shit they’re talking about is great shit, and it would help me immeasurably—happen.

That’s my problem kind of wrapped up in a neat little box with a lovely bow on it: I can think of great ideas. To paraphrase Donald Trump, I have ideas, I have the best ideas; but I have no fucking clue how to make them happen. I don’t know how making things happen works. I don’t know how to get the ideas out of my head and into the world where they can happen.

If you know anybody who has ADD, and this is even more important if they’re young, believe me (as Donald Trump would also say), they have wonderful ideas. They can come up with crazy, amazing, sublime shit that nobody but one of us would ever think of. But they might not know how to make them happen. Their ideas might change the world, but they’ll never be worth anything unless they happen. So, I guess what I’m telling all of you here is that it’s up to you, the normals, to help these kids get these ideas out of their heads and into the world where they can do some good. Find out what these children are thinking, and help them do it. Be patient. Be understanding. Be willing to get frustrated when they can’t always find the words to tell you what they’ve come up with. But if you help them, they’ll help all of us, in ways we can’t even—well, you can’t ’cause you non-ADDled folk are all so much less awesome than we are—dream of.

This Accursed Name

This is going to be a long post, and it has little to do with ADD, so few of you may want to read it. That’s all right; I’ll be writing this as much for myself as for anyone else. As I said publicly for the first time not too long ago, I hate my name. I’ve always hated it, though until lately, I never admitted that, not even to myself. There are many reasons behind this, and I feel like it’s time to lay it all out; as I said, this is for me as much as for anybody else.

I know that there are people in the world who go through the day without food, and people living in the middle of wars, people living in fear of their own governments, or of organized bands of psychopaths who want to be the government. People living on the street. People on the edge of losing their housing and ending up on the street. People dying of all kinds of sicknesses or living with the pain of chronic sicknesses. And here I am, warm, happy, well fed, and bitching about a name. I know things could be worse. And yet, as trivial as this might be, standing next to what millions of others in the world deal with, it has dogged me as long as I can recall, so, what the hell, I’m going to write about it. I hope it doesn’t come off as too whiny or self pitying, but if it does, all I can do is ask you to let that slide.

So. The Name. I think the roots of this go back to 1899, when my grandfather was born. He grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, in a family that had been important in Virginia for almost 300 years by that time. Virginia was, and still is in many ways, an odd place. I’m not going to go into all the ways it’s out of step with much of what we think of as being definitively American; anybody who wants to know more would do well to take a look at Colin Woodard’s American Nations, and read the chapters about Tidewater.

Well, my grandfather grew up in a family that held itself in the highest esteem. It had taken a hand in running the state for two hundred years or more. A some-number-of-greats uncle had been the Secretary of the Navy and Secretary of State. Other forebears had been admirals almost since the Revolution. One of them had been the Superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy. Somebody in each generation had gone into the Navy, which they saw almost as a family business. My grandfather was the one in his generation to go.

He went to Annapolis and graduated, but when he was about 35 or 40, Navy doctors found some abnormality in his heart, apparently from a bout of scarlet fever when he was a child. He had to resign his commission, which was a blow to him, as it cost him his shot at commanding a ship someday, and kept him out of World War II. It was an irony, too, since, whatever might have been wrong with his heart, it didn’t keep him from living until 94.

By this time, he had two children, my mother and her brother. I think--and most of this is guesswork, patched together from a lifetime of listening to my family talk about a great many things; nobody ever explicitly laid any of this out for me--that he hoped his son would follow him into the Navy. That was a lost cause. My uncle had a rebellious streak, and he and my grandfather never really got along. I suspect my uncle chafed as his father tried to steer him into a life he didn’t want.

In the background was my mother. She was the older sister, and the good child. She never talked back, never rebelled, always did what was asked of her--and often more than was asked. If my grandfather had asked her to go to Annapolis, she would have done it without balking, even if she didn’t want to. Of course, she was a girl, so the Navy was shut off to her. It must have frustrated my grandfather beyond words: A girl who would have willingly done anything asked of her, but who couldn’t go into the family business; and a boy who could have, but wouldn’t do as he was asked.

This brings me now to my mother. I think she spent her whole life seeking her parents’ approval and love. Of course, the did love her, but my grandfather, at least, would have been happier if she had been born a boy. She never said anything like that to me, and she idolized, and idealized, her mother and father to such a degree that I don’t think she ever could have even thought such a thing; but I suspect that somehow, deep inside, she knew this was so.

But she always did what they asked of her. Well, almost always. The one time I know of when she went against what my grandfather, at least, would have asked of her was when she married my father. My father was as far from what my grandfather would have thought of as an ideal son in law as I can think. For one thing, he was from Pennsylvania, and my grandfather had grown up hearing tales of the unjust War of Northern Aggression. He was mild mannered and bookish. He was a liberal, and outspokenly so, in a mild, low-key kind of way, if that makes any sense.

He was successful, but not in a way my grandfather would have typically thought of the word. My father had almost graduated from medical school, but a fear of speaking in public had kept him from fulfilling one requirement: giving a speech before a class of students. I don’t know what the subject was to have been. But this was 1942, and back then, schools were less willing to accommodate things like my father’s awful stage fright. He didn’t get his M.D., but he got three M.A.s, and by the time he and my mother wed, he was the assistant librarian at the Welch Medical Library at Johns Hopkins. He would soon become the head librarian at the dental school library at the University of Pennsylvania. But this wasn’t the kind of guy my grandfather would have chosen for his daughter to marry.

And then I came along. I suspect that, for my grandfather, I was a last hope, a shot at having the kind of son he’d always wanted, but had never gotten. Only I didn’t have the family name. My uncle was married, but utterly uninterested in children, so my grandfather saw his line dying out. And there I was, only without the name.

Again, I’m guessing here, but I think my mother named me for my grandfather so the name would carry on. I think it was her almost desperate way to curry the favor with him that she had never quite gotten, as a daughter. My father was, if not appalled, most assuredly dubious. He did his best to head her off, but in the end, he couldn’t sway her, and I got saddled with what has been, all my life, this mild curse. I know it isn’t the same as growing up in a war zone, but it’s been my own kind of hell, even if it’s a low-key one.

You might have picked up on the fact that I haven’t yet written my name once throughout this post. That isn’t an accident. I avoid saying, or even writing, my name whenever I can. I’ve said that I feel like a little part of my soul shrivels and dies every time I speak it aloud. Early on, I learned the trick of spelling my name when asked for it. It works, since I end up having to spell it out anyway, as often as not. It only backfires when somebody asks me how I pronounce it.

All my life, my name has set me apart. Often it’s the first thing anybody knows about me, before they meet me, or even see me. And it marks me as a weirdo. As a child, I fantasized about having a name like everybody else. It was a big legacy for a little kid to tote around on small shoulders.

Early on, other kids began to make fun of my name. My parents had always told me that the best thing to do when people are making fun of you is to ignore them. So I did. When somebody twisted my name into some epithet, I’d sit there, not acknowledging it, seething inside. Most likely my lack of reaction just made me seem even weirder, but I didn’t know what else to do, so I stuck with it. This passivity had another effect, one I only lately came to see and understand, and I’ll get to that forthwith.

So, doubtless, many of you are asking, “Well, if you hate it so much, why don’t you change it?” And that is the other problem I have with my name: It isn’t really my name at all. I never felt, and still don’t feel, like I have any choice about it. As odd as that sounds, that’s how it feels to me, for many reasons. One reason is that it comes from my mother’s family, and was clearly important to her and to her father. It was a name given to me to honor my family, which seems to make it something bigger than I am. It isn’t only a name, it’s a legacy, a responsibility. I couldn’t change it without metaphorically spitting in their faces.

Beyond that, I name isn’t something that people choose themselves; it’s something bestowed upon them. We’re passively given our names. We’re at the mercy of other people as babies, sitting helplessly as somebody else chooses for us the name that we will bear all our lives. In essence, I don’t feel like I have any right to change my name. It would be wrong, immoral to arrogate to myself this power that I have no claim to. Some of this sounds irrational. A lot of it is, I know that. I don’t know how to overcome this in my own mind, though.

I think I wrote once on this blog that one of the ways I learned to deal with ADD, before I ever knew I had is, was to never be in control. I learned to be passive. As long as I wasn’t running things, that cut down the likelihood that I’d screw something up. But maybe I got too good at this. Being passive was natural for me already, since I’m fairly low-key and mild by nature. But it can get out of hand, and in my case, it did. So understanding this, feeling like I don’t even have any choice over my own name fits right in.

A few times I tried. When I was in about 6th grade, I wished I had a normal name. I even chose one I wanted to have. But I never did anything about it, since I felt like I had to come up with an excuse to use it, I had to have a defense if anybody asked me what the deal was. And I couldn’t come up with a good enough one that sounded believable. “I hate my name and want a new one,” never even crossed my mind. I had to find a way to claim that this new name was my name, that it was my middle name, or something. I even thought of saying that the new name was my real name, but that I had somehow never known it. That sounds crazy, but then, I was only 11 or 12 years old or so.

By high school, I worked up the guts to try it, and in 11th grade, I did. But I couldn’t stick with it. I told people it was my first name, and that my first name was my middle name. I gave up after a few months, feeling like a liar and a fraud. I never even told my parents what I was doing, either. After all, it was really their name, not mine. They had given it to me, and here I was, committing fraud behind their backs. I felt ashamed at the thought of changing my name, even as I dreamt of having one like other kids’ names.

In college, I tried it again. Here, after all, was a whole new life, with new people who didn’t know me as “the kid with the weird name.” But, again, I gave up after a few months, since I felt like a cheat and a fraud and a liar.

Oddly, even when other kids at school made fun of my name, I never just asked them to stop. I guess I never felt like it was up to me. It wasn’t my name, after all. It identified me, but somehow, it was the property of everybody else but me.

Maybe this sounds crazy. And maybe it is. But crazy or not, that’s how it feels to me. I can’t change my name. It isn’t really mine to change. I can’t even ask people not to make fun of me for it. It isn’t even really mine to do that. It belongs to all of you, to the world, to do with what you will. This seems fatalistic, and it is. I know that. But, right or wrong, that’s how things stand in my mind.

All this means I get to choose between three things. One of them is to change it, but I don’t foresee me ever feeling like I have any authority to do that. The next is to learn to like it, but, come on, if I haven’t yet learned to do that, it isn’t going to happen. That means I get to go with the last choice, which is to deal with this fucking thing and live with the unhappiness it brings. Not a happy ending, but, then, if this is the worst thing I have to deal with in life, I guess I should be fairly happy. And, well, not every tale has a happy ending anyway.

Have You Ever Wondered What Horrors Lurk Deep Within an ADDled Mind [sic]? Look No Further:

I know that I owe something more to you, my loyal reader. I know you come here looking for something deeper and with more meaning than the lighthearted rantings of an embittered crank with degenerative brain disease and low social skills. I humbly ask your forgiveness.

It’s time to give something back to society. And so, here I shall do my part, such as it is. I know how hard it is to come up with a really good alias to evade capture by law enforcement when committing petty fraud, grand larceny, scams, arson, murders, assaults and batteries, housebreakings, terrorism, home invasions, kidnappings and embezzlement. There just aren’t enough good, reliable aliases in the public domain. And who wants to pay royalties for a good alias? Nobody.

And so, to “pay it forward,” as it were, I hereby bequeath to humanity my trove of aliases for all & sundry to put to ill use. These aliases have been tested, time and again, and have proven themselves to be consistently ranked among the best in the business. Furthermore, all aliases named herein are free of all encumbrances, liens and mortgages, and all are free to use them for any purpose, so long as it is unethical, and, whenever feasible, unlawful. The list begins forthwith:

• MacBlunch D.G. Awltchbawmon
• Balfred Azzle
• Bibbelsnæð Bibbelsnæðsson
• Bibbelsnaga Bibbelsnæðsdottir
• Fordney McCumber Bilmfimble
• L. Çrampogne Bilmfimble
• Hon. Gorman Y. Binge
• Girtford Bleaves
• Henry Harrison Cleepstraw
• Morbidia Deathpuffs
• Duncan Dönitz
• Bowdler Figgles
• Shumway Fleeby
• Yosbert Yinklington Flinsterbolm
• Rynald K. Garbonzostein
• Wagbert Glöggnitz
• Wilber Hemphill Goke
• Archibald Greex
• Hamilton Groaker
• Isaac Lillington Hefflewhimp
• Waldorf Imvergampps
• Floyd P. Jamboree, Jr.
• Fast Eddie Krakatoa
• Hinton Dumberthon Kigg
• Philippa Knäkkerschnattz
• Dr. Ernst Lorp
• Zapruder F. Mashtots
• Gustav Ignatz Nalgas
• Dingwall Nodge
• Elmer Pitman Opuaper
• Otto, Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy
• Zachary Pottle
• Clambert Prunebanks
• Clambertine Prunebanks
• Smedley Darlington Prunebanks
• Vitort K. Puttna
• Olaf Qvality
• Edgar Lamb Scumblefield (For use in German-speaking jurisdictions, substitute: Ehdgardt Lömbe Zschgümbelfeld)
• Horrendo C. Slapp
• Glympia O. Smeech
• Nestor Smyrba
• Aurelio Snitball
• Habersham Snooting
• Vescoe P. Spurnwick
• Vomica Spurnwick
• Renfrew Squeevil
• Dixterton Twiggs
• Caerulia Valc
• Agnew Harrison Vampersand
• Josephus Vile
• Elburn Vinchpotts
• Purdy Jackson Weedflax
• Milledge B. Wreaxheaver
• Lathrop Sewell Yamm
• Mumphrey Oddison Yamm
• Shipstead Wilton Yamm
• Coronel Juan Lindo Domingo Pacífica Benedicto Trinidad de las Planetas Zefirino Bonifacio Santiago Vespasiano Zefrádio Sinibaldo Güibellino Septizoño Zerón y Omonita
• Jimperson Zibb
• Pope Zosimus, XI

This has nothing to do with ADD, but, what the hell...

I withhold the right to write about, or link to, any damned thing I want to. If you don’t like it, tough noogies to you.

Here’s a great piece about one of my hobby horses, namely, how and why SEPTA sucks so badly. This guy understands that an agency whose responsibilities--or one of them, anyway--is to run passenger trains in and around a big city ought to run the damned things, not cut back on branches for the hell of it, and even, though SEPTA seems not to grasp this bit here, to broaden the system. Philadelphia and its outlying counties have hundreds of miles of tracks that once had passenger trains running along them, some up until as lately as 1986. SEPTA needs to get off its collective ass and get trains running beyond where they’re doing it now.

What got me on this tangent was that we went up to Philadelphia this weekend to see my mother, and we stayed at one of those hotels out near the airport. To get from it to where she is, and back, we had to go through Essington, which lies along the old Chester Branch of the Reading Railroad. This is the branch that SEPTA, in a fit of atypical behavior, started running trains along to get to the airport, but the last bit, the fishhook to the airport, is a spur off the main branch. Anyway, the branch is still there, running along through Essington, through Eddystone, and into Chester, all the way to Marcus Hook.

Those of you who never lived in or near Philadelphia won’t know what the hell I’m talking about, but that’s all right. Feel free to bail out here.

Well, so, back to the topic at hand. The tracks run out beyond the airport, by a whole slew of airport hotels, right by a big Boeing plant, by all kinds of other industries, and by a casino. Think how great it would be if people could fly into the airport, and just hop on a train and be at their hotel in 15 minutes, or how great it would be if some of the hundreds of people who work at Boeing could take the train to work. I happen to think that the last thing a blighted city trying to come back (like Chester) needs is a fucking casino; but the damned thing is there now, and it isn’t going to be going anywhere, so as long as people are going to it, it would be nice if they all didn’t have to drive through Chester and clog all the streets up.

So, that’s my intemperate, and irrelevant screed for tonight. If you didn’t like it, I’m sorry, but, come on, you have nobody to blame for that but yourself. You didn’t have to read it. I even told you as much.

The Who Sell Out

O.K., yeah, so I’m not the Who.* But I am selling out. I saw a little thing on the page where I write my meandering musings, and it said if I let ads show up here, I could make some money. So, I’m selling out. I hope you’re still willing to read my screeds, even though I’m viciously exploiting you in the process. But, bear in mind, if you’d be so kind, that whatever I earn will go to my non profit, with which I work with the Blanca Jeanette Kawas Bilingual School in good ol’ Tela, Atlántida, Honduras, C.A., Western Hemisphere, Earth, Milky Way.

*All in all, I’m glad not to be the Who. If I were, I’d have a 25% chance of being deaf and a 50% chance of being dead.

I Lied

Yeah, I said I was going to spare you for a few days, but I changed my mind. Sue me. And I feel like writing some more about Tela. I know that Tela doesn’t, strictly speaking, have a whole hell of a lot to do with ADD, but, what the hell, as Mitch “Muscle Man” Sorrenstein once said, it’s my party, and I’ll fry if I want to. I also know what I’m writing about has nothing to do with frying anything, either. But, hey, as I said, this is my party. And, as I also said, sue me.

Mitch “Muscle Man” Sorrenstein

~~~

Some random & variegated thoughts about living in Tela, Atlántida, Honduras, C.A.

~~~

I once came home after a night out drinking beer with friends, stopped in the bathroom to tap a kidney, and was greeted by what I thought was a rat in the toilet. When I got a better look, it turned out it was a bat. Flailing, flopping, struggling fruitlessly, it looked like it was in pretty bad shape. So I went to the closet next to the bathroom, in which we kept tools and random junk, grabbed a ceiling fan blade, scooped the bat out, and laid it outside on the grass. I leaned in to see how it was doing, and it hissed at me. So I thought it was doing all right, and I left it. The next morning it was gone. So, either it was all right and flew off, or something came by and ate it. Either way, I like to think I did my part. I later went on to patent the Bat Extricator 4000™.

The Bat Extricator 4000: It Might Look Like an Old Ceiling Fan Blade, But It Does So Much More!®

~~~

Once a month, we had to get our passports stamped at the migración office in town. It was an upstairs office on a side street. I don’t think it was over the coffin shop, but I think it was on the same street. Anyway, the immigration guy must have worked out some kind of deal with the mayor, because I think he lived there. More than once I showed up when the office, went in, and had to knock on the guy’s private room door to wake him so he could stamp my passport.

Well, one afternoon, another teacher and I were reading in the front room in the teacher house, when another teacher came in. He had an odd, bewildered look on his face, like he’d seen something, and was still trying to work out what it was. We asked him what was going on, and he told us he’d been to get his passport stamped, and then said, “I’ve been to a lot of government offices in a lot of countries, but this is the first time I ever went into one on official business, and been served by a guy in his underwear!”

And it wasn’t until a long time later, years later, that I was telling somebody about this, and something I’d never thought of before popped into my head, and I said, “You know, now that I think of it, that guy stamped my passport more than once while he was in his underwear, but I never thought anything of it.” I guess it was just so typically Teleño that it never even registered. I mean, hey, if you wake up a guy from his nap to stamp your passport, why wouldn’t he be in his underwear?

~~~

One time I was riding the train, and a drunk guy fell right out of the mail car, the car right ahead of ours. A friend was riding with me, and I said, “Shit, did you see that guy fall off the train?” he didn’t believe me, but we were going slowly, since we were coming to a stop, so I just pointed out the door as we went by, and there he was, lying in the weeds on his back, looking dazed. When the train stopped, we jumped off and ran to the back to see what was going on, and the conductor and another guy who was riding the train were helping the drunk guy up onto the back platform. And he went up the stairs, and kept right on going across the platform and started down the stairs to the other side. The conductor grabbed him and steered him into the last car, and that’s the last we saw of him, since we weren’t going any farther.

~~~

One time I accidentally boiled a rat to death. I was brushing my teeth in the kitchen before bed, as I always did, since that’s where the jug of clean water was, and something ran over my foot. I jumped, and I saw a rat run under the refrigerator, which, for some reason, sat on a wooden pallet. The pallet had beams along each edge, so the only way in was between the slats on the top. I knew the rat wasn’t going to come out willingly, so I thought that if I boiled some water while I brushed my teeth, and then poured a little into the pallet, it would scare the rat, and it would come back out and I could shoo it out the door with a broom.

So I put a pot of water on, and by the time I was done brushing my teeth, it was boiling. I poured just a little under there, and nothing happened. So I poured a little more, and still nothing happened. I began to wonder if the rat had somehow snuck out, even though I’d been trying to keep an eye on the pallet, so I thought, what the hell, and poured the whole pot in. Still nothing happened, so I figured the rat must have indeed gotten out, and I gave up and went to bed.

When I woke up the next morning, the other teachers who lived in the house were milling around the refrigerator, which seemed to have somehow defrosted in the night. I though it would be wisest to just hang back and keep my mouth shut, so that’s what I did, as two of the others lifted the refrigerator off the pallet and lifted the pallet off the floor, revealing a stewed rat. While they were recoiling and swearing, I thought it best to be off, since I was taking a trip that day to El Salvador anyway. I never did tell them anything about the rat...

~~~

I guess that’s about enough for today. Sweet dreams.

One Last Thought for the Day...

I’ve been going on at some length now about my struggles with this condition, and I know that it might seem like I’ve had a rough time. But I don’t want to come across as bitter or whiny. I’ve had a great life. If I keeled over dead right now, I’d have had a far better life in my relatively few years than most people could ever dream of.

I did struggle in school, it’s true. My mother saddled me with a name I wouldn’t hand down as punishment for Josef Stalin. I had trouble early on fitting in. I’ve had trouble earning a living. But overall, I look at what I have and things I got to do, and the things I’ll get to do, and I know that I’m the luckiest person who ever lived. I really do believe that. I wouldn’t trade my life for anybody’s.

So if I go on about how hard this or that was, or how badly I did at thus and so, it’s less because I want to lay out my tale of woe for all of you to sympathize with; it’s more because a lot of children who deal with this condition haven’t been as lucky as I have. I could deal with all the shit I had to deal with, and come through it all right because I hit the lottery when they were handing out families, and countries and backgrounds. Most people have far fewer of the advantages I’ve had.

And because of those advantages, I’ve had the chance to turn this condition around and use it to help me, too. When I fell on my ass or my face, when I failed, when I got booted from college (twice), I had somebody nearby to help me get back up again. When I went off to live in a foreign country and earn $100 a month for two years, I had somebody to lean on when I came back. And when I was in Tela, I did get to use my ADD to my advantage, though I didn’t know it at the time.

I went down there in 1994, August 18, 1994, but I can see it like it happened this morning. I went there knowing nobody, never having been there before, never having been anywhere outside the U.S. other than Canada; I didn’t even speak Spanish. But I walked off the plane, down the stairs and across the runway, not even knowing how I’d get through immigration and customs without undertanding what anybody was saying to me, but I remember thinking, “I don’t know what’s going to come at over the next two years, but whatever it is, I’ll deal with it, and it’ll be fun.” And I did, and it was.

And, though some psychologists see ADD as something that only hurts, and has no advantages whatever, I lived through it, and I know that one reason I throve so there was that I did have it. Most people couldn’t walk off a plane in a country they’d never been to, where they didn’t know anybody and get by for a year or two. I could. I could because I’m used to not knowing what’s coming at me most of the time. I’m used to dealing with things that pop up out of nowhere that throw most people off their strides. That’s my life.

So, anyway... I only wanted to put it down here that I’m not bitter about this. There are things in my life I wish had gone otherwise, but I’ll say that if somebody came to me and gave me the chance to go back and do it all again without changing anything, I’d do it without another thought. It’s been fun.

Some Things I’ve Learned

Living with this condition my whole life, I’ve learned some ways to get by, or to get within eyeshot of getting by. A while back, at one of those meetings I go to once a month, somebody brought up “crutches”. Crutches are ways we learn to hobble along in spite of whatever weaknesses or failings (physical or mental or otherwise) that we might have.

I’d never thought about it, but I began to that evening. I wondered if maybe I hadn’t learned a few things to help me hobble a little faster or more easily through life. So I thought about it, and, as it happens, there are some things I’ve done to make life easier. I can’t speak for anybody else, so I won’t; these are only how I have gotten by, and there are three crutches I’ve leaned on. There might be others I use without knowing it, but these are the three I’ve picked up on.

~~~

The first one is Never Being In Control. I don’t like running things. Whenever I can, I’ll let somebody else take charge, and if there’s any planning or organizing to be done, I’ll make damned sure that somebody else does that. This only makes sense. I can’t plan anything. My brain just freezes up and I sit there, doing nothing. It sounds nuts, I guess, to somebody who doesn’t deal with ADD, but that’s what happens.

My first week at the school where I worked in Honduras, the headmaster gave me the keys to my room, told me to begin getting ready for the students to come the next week, and sent me on up. I went up there not really knowing what to do. I went in, and there were some books on a shelf under the windows, and a desk, and that was about it. That was it. A room with some desks and books. I didn’t know what to do, so I went down and asked what I should be doing to get ready. he told me, “We know you’ll do a great job this year, and you’ll figure it out. Everything you need is up there. Good luck.”

So I went back up. And I sat there. I sat there for hours, while all the other teachers were doing their teacher things. And while they were doing their teacher things, I sat there and my brain just kind of shut down. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t do anything but sit. So I sat. I sat there in that room every day, all day, for a week.

The Sunday night before the first day of school, I was panicking, because we had to turn in our weekly lesson plans the next morning, and I didn’t have any lesson plans. So, well, I dragged out the four books we were going to use that year for English grammar, science, math and something else I’d be teaching the fourth grade, but which I’ve forgotten, I wrote down some page numbers on a sheet of paper, and wrote out a lot of horseshit, and went in the next morning with my “lesson plans”.

And nobody ever said anything about them to me. Nobody asked me for them, or even asked whether I had any. So, naturally, I said to myself, “Pffft! The hell with this shit,” and I never wrote any lesson plans after that. Mostly I just followed the books. Sometimes, I’d walk in and pull something out of my ass and go with it. Sometimes it worked, but often it didn’t, but either way, walking in cold and going with whatever came into my head was what I felt best with. I was kind of in control, since I was the teacher, but I mostly just reacted to whatever whim came into my head, or to the class, and I felt a hell of a lot better doing that than agonizing over some crap lesson plan that I knew I couldn’t follow anyway.

And that’s how I get by. I only take the lead when things are up in the air, and we have to do things on the fly. And even then, I’m not really leading; I’m only reacting to whatever comes at us. And since I’m better at it than most people, it works out all right. But most of the time, and always if there’s foresight needed or planning to be done, I give the reins to somebody, anybody, else.

~~~

The next crutch I’ve learned to lean on is being nice. This wasn’t much of a stretch. I’ve always been fairly easygoing, and I have a knack for zeroing in on people’s good sides, and bringing them out. And I guess it’s plain to see why I’d have used this to my advantage. Bullies are marginally less likely to screw with nice kids, I guess, and people are more likely to give nice people a little slack when they screw up, which, as I have said before, I have a habit of doing.

Being has other advantages than making it easier to get by when you have ADD. People like nice people, and most of us want friends. And it makes life better. We all have good sides and bad sides. And life is much more fun if you see the good in people. Who wants to go around always being pissed off at everybody? Who wants to go around holding grudges?

And being nice has served me well. I don’t deny that it likely saved me from getting chewed out many times; it most likely kept me at jobs I might have otherwise lost if everybody else hadn’t liked me. So I took something that was kind of inborn, and I cultivated it, and turned it to my advantage.

~~~

And the last crutch is playing the clown. Again, people are less likely to yell at you, or fire you if they see you as the lovable goofball. So I made myself the lovable goofball. If something was going to go wrong, I’d most likely have something to do with it anyway, so if I could at least be the self-effacing, amiable clown, I could take some mistake and make it seem less like a harmful screwup, and more like a typically wacky misadventure.

The only risk I ran going down this road was that I’d come to see myself as the wacky, lovable goofball, the clown, the butt of jokes, the comic relief. And that indeed did happen. I do see myself that way. It’s hard, as I have said before, to unlearn a life’s worth of habits.

And this crutch, also has the disadvantage of being kind of a natural thing for me. I am silly. I am whimsical. I do like making people laugh, and I’m not bad at it. And this side of myself has been so much a defining feature of how people see me that I see myself that way, too. The problem arises when I find myself doing something where I need people to respect me, to take me seriously. It feels unnatural that anybody should respect me. Who the hell do I think I am, after all, to be putting on airs, to make myself out as anything other than a punchline?

This wasn’t a big problem at my first long term job, working at a law library. I began shelving books, but by the time I left, I was a kind of all-purpose guy who would do anything somebody needed. Need copying? I’ll do it. Need something taken to some other office, or picked up and brought back here? I’ll do it? Need lunch? I’ll go get it. maybe the best kind of person for such a jerry-rigged, slapdash kind of job is an amiable bonehead.

It wasn’t helpful when I was teaching, though, because I could never get the students to respect me. And if they don’t respect you, they won’t take you seriously when you ask them to do something. And, damn, if that isn’t just what happened. I stuck with it, and I got through two years, but, Lord, it was hard.

~~~

So that’s it for crutches. That’s how I’ve made it this far, or at least these are some of the ways I’ve found to keep my head above water. Maybe this might help others who deal with children who might have ADD. Maybe if they see them showing signs of behaving this way, they can keep these children from coming to define themselves by what they do to squeak by through life. After all, being nice isn’t a bad thing. We should foster that in children. But if children learn to be such people pleasers that they can’t stand up for themselves, as sometimes I find it hard to do, then that’s something to help them change.

This Is Bad

It’s kind of bad that I’ve now gone almost a month without writing anything. It might not be the worst thing I’ve ever done, but I was hoping to churn out far more wit [sic] and wisdom [sic] than I’ve churned out so far.

I have had lots of thoughts, which seen to bedevil me every waking hour, but many of them fall short of the high standards I’ve set for myself, and which you, my three loyal readers, have come to expect from me.

But, what the hell, sometimes one has to just let loose and spew whatever random and variegated shit comes flitting into one’s mind, so, here we go.

One of the big hurdles I’ve consistently tripped over from childhood is seeing that I have some worth. I grew up being ground down slowly. Failing to live up to my “potential”, and listening to my mother and father and teachers harp on me for not doing better, for not caring more, ground me down. Being the youngest kid on class, skinny and mild, with a weird name drew bullies toward me. I was a regular bully magnet. That ground me down. When most of the other kids made fun of me or just kind of, well, they didn’t exactly shun me, but, at best, most of them ignored me. That ground me down.

One of my earliest school memories is one of stopping at a fast food place for lunch on the way back from a field trip somewhere. I’ve forgotten where we went, but I remember the lunch. We stopped in Media at a fast food place, and I guess the teachers and parents who went along must have all gotten us our food, since we were in first through third grades, and we got our food and sat down to eat, and I ended up sitting alone. One of the parents came by and sat down at my table and asked why I was eating by myself, and I told her it was because “I’m no good.”

I answered it matter-of-factly, the way I’d have answered anything else she might have asked that was self evident, like, what color was my hair or something. It really set her back on her heels. I remember that, she had no clue what to say to something like that, and seemed to think I was saying it for effect, or at least that’s what it seems like looking back on it. But, no, I was only answering her. She asked me something and I answered her.

And it was like that my whole life. I guess it still is. It’s been better the last few years, since I now know why I am the way I am, and that, as the guy told me who told me what the tests I took showed, “This is not a character flaw.” But a lifetime of learning that you’re inadequate, that you’re “no good” takes a long time to unlearn, and It’s slow going.

~~~

I bring this up because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the children who don’t seem to have much going for them, or who might feel like they might not have much going for them, and I don’t want to see them struggle with this they way I have. Children with learning disabilities, I guess, deal with this. They stand out, they aren’t like the others. Poor children, too, might feel this way, children in third world countries.

I lived for two years in a small town in Honduras. That’s it’s own story. More than one story, really, too many stories to even set down, at least now. But I lived there, and fell in love with it, and now I work with a little school in the town I lived in, trying to help them find English speaking teachers, and with their expenses. I sometimes wonder whether children in a small town like that, in a poor country, might also feel worthless, as I did. The important people all come from America, or Europe. Not Honduras. I don’t know if the younger children fully understand how little they mean, and their country means, to the rest of the world. The only time the rest of the world hears about their country, or other countries like Honduras, is if there’s a civil war or an earthquake or a golpe or a hurricane or some other disaster.

I don’t know, but my guess is that they do. I know that by the time they’re in high school, they sometimes feel like they’re worth less, and their country is worth less, because I’ve heard them say that to me from time to time. And I feel a bond with them. I feel a bond with their country. This is the one place I’ve ever lived where I felt like I really fit in, I felt like I belonged. I was a gringo, and I didn’t speak Spanish, and I stuck out wherever I went, but it felt like home anyway.

Looking back, I see that it’s because, as I tell people often, “It’s like the whole country has ADD.” And that sounds like a joke, and in some ways it is, but it’s also true. That’s its own whole post, and maybe I’ll write that next. But lately, I’ve come to see that I also felt so home there because they, too, the country, and everybody who lives there, are kind of struggling. I guess I’ve learned to identify with underdogs, the outcasts, the misfits, with those who get overlooked or mocked or scorned. And it is a kind of overlooked, mocked, scorned place. It’s a joke, a punchline, as I so often have been.

There’s a scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where one character brings up the fact that Indiana Jones was run out of Honduras. I always took that as a way of pointing up his disreputableness. I mean, damn, if they didn’t want him back in Honduras, he must be some hell of a reprobate.

Honduras is the place O. Henry went when he wanted to flee the world. Honduras is the place where William Walker, the clown who tried to set himself up as dictator of Nicaragua ended up before a firing squad. It was the original banana republic. It’s a place that can fill in in any tale or movie or book to stand for nowhere, for some no ’count, jerkwater joke of a place, the place where the losers and clowns might end up when they can’t hack it in the real world.

And the people who live there are even more nondescript. In the stories and movies, Hondurans don’t figure into it at all, only the losers from elsewhere who end up there are worth bothering with, and only because they have the good luck to have at least started out in some “real” country.

Now, mind you, I’m not saying that that’s what Honduras is; I’m only saying that that’s what most Americans think of it--when they think of it at all. But, well, I identify with that. I guess I feel like that’s what a lot of the world always thought of me. As I said, I identify with the losers, the overlooked, the mocked, the ones who end up as punchlines to somebody else’s jokes. I do because I’m one of those, too.

Well, this has wandered farther afield than I had meant it to. And here I even said I wasn’t going to write about Honduras in this post, and I went and did it anyway. But I’ll try to drag this back to where I meant it to be going, and I’ll try to wrap it up.

So...

Those kids in the school I work with. I don’t want them to feel less worthy. I don’t want them to feel like they don’t have anything to give to the world. I don’t want children who struggle in school to feel that way. I don’t want anybody to grow up, as I did, thinking, “I’m no good.”

We all have something to do with our lives. Some of us will do great, big, spectacular things. Some will do things that are less showy, but no less worthy. Somebody who builds a water plant in some little Honduran town, so the people who live there can have clean water to drink for once, that’s a big deal. Nobody who does that will ever get any prize for it, but it’s important work, since it makes people’s lives better. And the person who goes to school to learn about water safety, and the engineering to make it work, and then goes out into the campo and does it for some little forgotten town, has done something great.

And some of those children at that school are going to do something like that. Who knows what else they might do? Someday, somebody, somewhere is going to cure cancer. I don’t know who. I do know that I won’t be the one, but I don’t know who will. And it’s just as likely that the person who could do it is sitting in one of those classrooms at the Jeanette Kawas School in Tela, Honduras as it is that it’s anybody else. It could be a child with ADD or some other learning disability, who might otherwise get written off.

I don’t want to see that happen, and not only because I don’t want the world to miss out on the cure for cancer; I don’t want to see it happen because these children have worth, whatever they end up doing with their lives, even if they end up doing nothing more notable than going on to live happy lives.

I’m still trying to learn that I have some worth. What I’d really like to see is a world in which nobody else ever has to learn it.

A Few Random Notes...

Random Note Number 1:
Somebody asked whether maybe I should choose a somewhat less derogatory name for this here undertaking. I can see the point, but the reason I’m writing this is to get across what living undiagnosed with this has meant for me. And it’s made me feel like an addled screwup. I don’t want to suggest that everybody who deals with this is an addled screwup. Hell, for all I know, I’m not even an addled screwup myself. But it sure has felt that way all my life, so I’m sticking with it.

Random Note Number 2:
I go to a meeting for people with ADD once a month. I like meeting the people, and, well, maybe this is less than charitable, but I like knowing that there are people who have failed at things that I haven’t failed at. I’ve never been able to earn enough to live on my own, which kind of eats away at my soul to even write, but it’s true. But I have been married for almost 14 years, happily so, and we have two wonderful little girls, and I seem to be doing all right bringing them up. So often I’ll hear somebody at a meeting who has a job and can earn enough to live on, often more than enough to live on, but they’re on their third marriage, and their children aren’t speaking to them. So, it isn’t that I like hearing that they have these problems; but it is kind of nice to hear that there’s at least one thing I seem to be doing all right.

Random Note Number 3:
This was going to be Random Note Number 2, but that one got away from me, so now it’s Random Note Number 3. At the meeting, the guy who runs it will often bring up that if you’re going to have a mental condition, this is the one to have, since there are some advantages that come with it. That is to say, there are some things we ADDled people seem to do better than the normals. I’ll go on more about that later, but one thing that struck me today, when I saw that some of the people had said that the last post was well written, is that when I write, I write one draft and that’s it, and it almost always comes out ready to run. Even in graduate school, I’d write one draft and hand it in. I might change a word here or there, or shift a paragraph up or down a little, but sometimes I didn’t even do that much. And I got complimented more than once on my style of writing, so I guess I was doing something right...

So, I don’t know if this has anything to do with ADD or whether it’s some other, unrelated gift I just happen to have. I did wonder about it, though, so if anybody who knows more about this than I do, especially any neurologists or psychiatrists (I’m thinking of you here, Dr. Kent) might have any thoughts.

Here end the Random Notes.