12 June 2008

Concentration, or the Lack Thereof


I have always been easily distracted. From an early age, I remember feeling like everything was more interesting than what I was already doing. For example, one December in my early childhood, I was microwaving cheese--cheese and bread, to be precise (I loved melted cheese sandwiches when I was a kid: how the spongy white bread turned to rubber, the processed cheese oozing with every bite). My attention shifted from what I was doing pretty much right after I pressed "start" on the microwave.

Older, and still distracted, I have the luxury of blaming coffee for my infinitesimal attention span. Sometimes, I go so far as to drink too much coffee so that I have the jitters to prove that I've had too much coffee. Then, when someone looks over my shoulder and sees that I have a dozen different program windows open on my computer, I can just point to my half-empty cup and say, "Yeah, that's my ninth."

The problem is, no matter how much or how little I consume, my focus remains the same. Three pots of coffee? ADHD. No coffee for a week? ADHD. Imagine, if you will, a consistent, steady ship cruising calm seas. Now imagine that ship captained by monkeys in electric underpants. That is my concentration.

Back to the melting cheese story. Do you know what pulled me away from watching Wonderbread and Velveeta fuse into an as-yet-undiscovered chemical compound? The corner. Yep. The corner. I walked into the den, squeezed behind a big blue chair in the corner, and peeked over the top for no other reason than to see what it was like from there.

I was about to go outside and put sand in my pockets when I heard my mother screaming from the kitchen. That's how I usually knew my lunch was done.

6 comments:

Pat said...

Oh, God. I am having visions of my future. Our child WILL fill his pockets with sand. He WILL microwave pretty much anything he can find. He WILL stand in corners to see the view. And, more than likely, he WILL break everything in our house at least once. What did I get myself into.

Phil Sueper said...

This helps to explain why we burned nearly everything imaginable in the fireplace in our apartment.

No one was ever adequately prepared for the smells they walked into when they stepped inside our front door.

Libby said...

Pat is right.

Scott said...

Yeah. Reminds me of when I used to walk around the house slowly and carefully while staring at the ceiling so I could imagine what the terrain would be like if I could walk there...

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