A Splintered Mind

I was able to score one of the coveted invites to the beta site www.seesmic.com and started playing around with it today. I can't tell you yet if it is a fancy distraction or a useful communication tool. The best way to describe it is Twitter with video. It's not YouTube , however. Conversations are done entirely with video. Imagine hundreds of people using their webcams to reply to deep, philosophical questions while hanging out in their bathrobes. Isn't technology wonderful? I look like something the Irish Setter dragged in, but I was willing to give it a go. (Cat's are much smaller and couldn't drag me anywhere. It's all that good food I ate and apparently tucked away like a treasured keepsake onto my waistline over the holidays.) tags technorati : ADD ADHD AD/HD Distraction Seesmic Like reading The Splintered Mind ? Share articles with your friends, link from your blog, or subscribe !

My forty first birthday has come and gone and I survived. A few more of my hairs have grayed, my eyes are a bit more wizened, but otherwise I am no different than I was when I was forty. Or thirty, to be honest.   For all my talk about managing Depression with Cognitive Behavior Therapy , Positive Thinking , and a spicy stick of gum, my attempts to manage AD/HD have not been as impressive. I won't bore you with the details. Just peruse through any book on Adult ADD and you'll see me written all over the pages. People with AD/HD make so many mistakes they tend to have self-esteem that droops and drags. The trick to my sparkling self-image is that I learned to laugh at myself years ago. I make so many mistakes I keep myself in stitches all day. If you weren't already aware, people with AD/HD tend to be forgetful, much to the consternation of their friends and loved ones. I'm certainly no different. The list of important events I've forgotten to attend is longer than...

I wrote the following two Saturdays ago. I then became sidetracked by family responsibilities and was unable to finish working on the list I created. I also worried it was too self-indulgent to post. Today I decided "What the heck." Besides, I completely missed celebrating National Toilet Day last November 19th and I'm more than a little bummed about it. I could use a pick me up. 8 December 2007 I woke up depressed today. Here's how I dealt with it. First, I wallowed. I didn't mean to. It sort of snuck up on me. There I sat in my pajamas, poking at the internet, and wondering what was wrong with me. I tossed a few comments out into the Twitterverse and nobody echoed back. Then I noticed a girl who I had stopped following on Twitter had stopped following me. That made me sad for some reason. She had such foul mouthed posts, posted pictures of herself being drunk on Flickr.com, she was sixteen years younger than I, etc. We had so little in common, and yet there I ...

People. It's "I COULDN'T care less". I'm just saying. tags technorati : Gripe Quibble Pet Peeve Like reading The Splintered Mind ? Share articles with your friends, link from your blog, or subscribe !

In the aftermath following the tragedy in Nebraska, the media turns to mental illness for explanations again. Two days ago the world was introduced to Robert A. Hawkins when he entered Von Maur's department store in Omaha, Nebraska and indiscriminately slaughtered eight of his fellow Americans and wounded five others before turning the automatic rifle on himself. Apparently, he had recently lost his job at McDonald's, broke up with his girlfriend, and was no longer living with his family - a tough time for anybody. Unlike some other mass-murderers, however, Hawkin's left behind a note explaining himself. "Now I'll be famous" * These are the words found in 19 year old Hawkins' suicide note. Somehow, though, the media is hurrying to explain another senseless killing spree with Depression , something I've covered before in the case of Cho Seung-Hui and the Virginia Tech slayings . Hawkins also wrote that he now wouldn't be a burden on his family anym...