Re: Examples of inattentativeness

[Anonymous]

i am constantly going from one room to the next to get or do something, and forget what I meant to do because the to-do list is another room (or online). I end up going back to the “scene of the crime” (where I was previously) and standing around looking stupid trying to remember what I was going to do. Sometimes I remember, sometimes I don’t. This also happens when I have a really GREAT idea, I get up to do something and the idea completely vanishes – I know I had a really GREAT idea, but I can’t remember what it was. For years I joked that I needed a velcro vest, that I could post notes to so I would always be reminded of what I wanted to do.

My horror story is back in university days (1975) when I was a music student living in a second floor apartment in an old house in London, Ontario. This was the first and last time I ever did this. I put a pot of oil on the stove to make french fries. But I am impatient so I put the burner on high heat. Then I went across the hall to my bedroom and started practicing on my violin. I only realized what I had been doing in the kitchen when I started to smell smoke. I returned to the kitchen quickly and the pot was smoking, the kitchen was filled with smoke. There was only a small window to open and no fan over the oven, so I figured the only thing to do was to get the smoking pot full of oil out of the house. I carefully walked it down an old flight of stairs and out the front door, across the street, and dumped it down a snowbank (there were no houses on the opposite side of the street, just a rail yard, and it was winter). I almost called the fire department to help get rid of the smoke in the house. I had no fire extinguisher (poor student). When I think about it, I could have spilled the oil on my body or down the stairs, causing a fire.

I remember this story as “Nero fiddling while Rome burned”. It was the first of my nine lives. The second was driving across Wonderland Bridge before it was completed and encountering someone who wanted to play chicken on the road with their car – they swerved into the other lane at the last minute – I was going to as well (we would have collided head-on) but my old car stalled and i could only sit there scared to death and do nothing. Is risk taking part of ADD?

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