Wednesday, August 22, 2012

REALITY CHECK! Romney and Obama, sittin' in a tree....

Breaking news! Romney, the traitor to all Conservative right wing kind, has admitted he thinks all abortion shouldn't be banned....

Breaking news! Obama pasted another add smearing Romney, that oddly liberal oddity. 

Breaking news!....uh....we forgot what we were talking about with our ridiculous wing parties and sensationalism....

Breaking news! 17% of teens use drugs and alcohol during the schoolday.....

Breaking news! ..... people thought the day's youth were going to hell in a handbasket since Ancient Rome.

Breaking news!.... people were convinced the world was imminently ending....IN 1100 AD. 

Breaking news! ... Not all teens are good-for-nothing druggies....

Breaking news! .... obesity rates spike to an alltime high....

Breaking news! ....half the world is still below the poverty level and starving...

The real news?  Humanity is still imperfect, society still struggles with sloth, extravagance, wastefulness, extremism, lack of compromise, and intollerance.  There's still morons among us.  There's still upright citizens among us.  It's how we've always been.  We're just more aware...correction, HYPERaware of it now days. With sensationalized news and pop-science and statistics  creating a buzz that outlives the usefulness of 99.999999% of the information we receive in the so-called news.

Take it all with a grain of salt.  Do what you feel makes the most sense.  Be respectful even if you don't agree with somebody's opinion.  You don't have to agree that gays can marry, but you should agree that it's their right to their opinion. You don't have to agree with regulations on abortion, but you should agree it's pro-life's activists right to their opinion.

The party system goes both ways. It's time for the networks to GET REAL.  I'm from a pro-life family, that disagrees with gay marraige....yet I don't have a problem with gay marraige, if the state passed a law legalizing it tomorrow, I'd be happy for my friends who are gay.  I may or may not agree with their homosexuality, but what happens behind closed doors isn't the government's right or the majority's right to dictate peoples' personal lives, so long as it doesn't harm others. (Gay marraige would hurt no one. If it's a sin to be gay, then it's between them and God, not between me and them.)


Wednesday, December 7, 2011

my Brain is Mad at Me...

....for me at least.  Wake up: 6AM....  Get ready for one heck of a day at school.  Get dressed, brush teeth--etc, then get my buddy out of his crate.  Let him out to bathroom, brush his teeth, fur, feed him, then put his vest, leash, and harness on.  Grab my 40 lb bookbag crammed with notes and textbooks, and head out the door, get my buddy, Mack, buckled in the car, and eat an energy bar on the way to school. 
Wonder: Did I take my morning medicine?  Y/N 

If the answer is No, then I'm probably in trouble.  By midmorning, a vague, persistent, dull pain will take root behind my eyes, and will refuse to budge.  A few hours more, and the pain will seem to increase marginally, but other, bigger problems will take root--the problems walking, the involuntary movements will pick up into high gear, and with those, the vocalizatoins.  

If I did take my meds, my first couple hours of classtime usually goes OK, plus or minus my stress levels rising due to my noise sensitivity.  And even in IB classrooms, there is  noise.  Noise translates somewhere between my cochlea and the auditory processing areas of the brain as TIME FOR BIG RUSH OF STRESS.   And when that begins, there's only 2 things to do: escape (ipod, leave the vicinty of the noises) or grin and bear it (refocus, pet Mack some...hope and pray I don't lose it until after I've gotten my notes down.)  Lose what?  My concentration.  Lose what else?  Control of most of my movements.  What else?  The ability to focus long enough between losing control of my movements to actually comprehend what gibberish my teacher is spouting and be able to ask intelligent, relevant questions on the topic. 

So what is this losing concentration and control of most movements about?  It is, of course, about my brain.  And as an aside, the movements of my body and their effects on my academic work. 

I have a cluster of neurological disorders, which affect my ability to concentrate on what I need to do, and control my movements and utterances. The chief two of my disorders are Attention Deficit Disorder (which is actually quite common) and Tourette Syndrome.  Tourette's is much less common, although if someone has Tourette's, theyre quite likely to have AD(H)D.   For me, the sum of what these two do to me is mentioned above, although very vaguely.  


Tourette is my main source of impairment right now.  Without having to worry about having tics, when I'm being too disruptive, etc, etc, I am btter at focusing...

My ADHD is double-edged; I love daydreaming, and daydream a lot, owing to the weird flights of fancy my mind takes...yet at the same time, my absent-minded nature makes focusing and organizaing and prioritizing things that I need to do rather difficult.  It's pretty difficult to focus on one thing, an unforgiving math problem in my book, when 50 far more interesting topics keep popping in and out of my thoughts.  Part of my distractability is normal teenage responsiblity-shirking, the other part is due to the bonafide neurological disorders I have.