The Republic of T.

Well, you won’t find it among the characteristics listed on the Scout Law. But, yeah, in my case a scout is queer.

A few weeks ago, I got an email from the National Eagle Scout Association. (Yes, I’m an Eagle Scout.) I either ignored it or forgot about. But they didn’t forget about me. I got this in my inbox this afternoon.

Do you have fond memories of all those camping trips on your Trail to Eagle? Or do you ever wonder where the other Eagles from your troop are now? Have you considered how being an Eagle Scout shapes your life even today?

The National Eagle Scout Association recently authorized the National Eagle Scout Search Project which will culminate in the publication of the Eagle Scout Roll of Honor. Roll of Honor will be the first-ever registration and publication of its kind - capturing nearly 100 years of Eagle Scout history, tradition, service and achievement.

Oh geez. Now I’ve got a dilemma.

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Nothing like a blog meme to get you back into gear when you’re recovering from a huge conference, like the one I worked at earlier this week. So I have Dana to thank for getting me back to blogging, by tagging me for this rather interesting meme.

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Does anyone else grind their teeth at night? How about during the day?

It started sometime last year, around the end of the summer, but I didn’t notice it until September. I’d started waking up with inexplicable headaches that didn’t dissipate during the day. I’d take pain medications, sinus medications, thinking one or the other would fix it.

Then I realized that not only did I have a headache, but my face hurt too, especially my cheeks and my jaw muscles. I realized I was probably clenching or grinding my teeth at night, something called bruxism.

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That I turned 19. I’m celebrating the anniversary of that birthday. Do the math and you’ll figure out that today I inch ever closer to aging out of yet another demographic. No special plans today, other than doing some writing, treating myself to lunch, and maybe getting to bed early and squeezing in a little extra sleep.

I did fire up the iPod on the way to work today and try to find something that spoke to where I find myself on this, my thirty-ninth, birthday.

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Ed. Note: This started out as a response to Marissa’s thoughtful comment on a previous post, related to the one before it I decided to let it stand on it’s own, as a post.

The thing is, I’m a late bloomer.

A late bloomer is a person who does not discover their talents and abilities until later than normally expected. In certain cases, the individual may be as old as 60, and retirement may lead to this discovery.

Maybe it’s due to my 30-plus years of untreated ADD. Maybe it’s just because I have a late blooming brain.

Indeed, until quite recently most researchers believed the human brain followed a fairly predictable developmental arc. It started out protean, gained shape and intellectual muscle as it matured, and reached its peak of power and nimbleness by age 40. After that, the brain began a slow decline, clouding up little by little until, by age 60 or 70, it had lost much of its ability to retain new information and was fumbling with what it had. But that was all right because late-life crankiness had by then made us largely resistant to new ideas anyway.

That, as it turns out, is hooey. More and more, neurologists and psychologists are coming to the conclusion that the brain at midlife–a period increasingly defined as the years from 35 to 65 and even beyond–is a much more elastic, much more supple thing than anyone ever realized.

Far from slowly powering down, the brain as it ages begins bringing new cognitive systems on line and cross-indexing existing ones in ways it never did before. You may not pack so much raw data into memory as you could when you were cramming for college finals, and your short-term memory may not be what it was, but you manage information and parse meanings that were entirely beyond you when you were younger. What’s more, your temperament changes to suit those new skills, growing more comfortable with ambiguity and less susceptible to frustration or irritation.

Sounds nice. But it doesn’t quite resolve some

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Is there anybody still out there listening? Just thought I’d ask. It’s been four days or so since I’ve done any actual writing, or at least what I’d call doing my own writing, and it’s been making me a little crazy. That’s partly because I’m always a little concerned that falling silent in the blogosphere for too long is the same as disappearing altogether.

Granted, with a new baby in the house, I might be forgiven for blogging less than I usually do. It’s definitely not easy. I suppose I could take a leave of absence for a while, at least until Dylan starts sleeping through the night, because it’s mighty difficult to keep yo with what’s going on and to string together even a coherent thought or two when you’re suffering from lack of sleep.

And when I do get around to writing, I’m just catching up and writing about stuff that was news four days earlier. I’ve got about three posts in various stages of completion, and as I sit writing this post on Sunday night, to be posted on Monday, Dylan is here in the office with me, sleeping. Before to long, I’ll “top him off” with a diaper change and a bottle before heading to bed myself, in hopes that he’ll sleep a little longer before it’s time for another bottle, etc. In the meantime, I’m sitting here trying to decide which of my unfinished posts is even worth finishing. All the while, I’m trying to keep from nodding off.

And it’s brought to a realization that kind of alluded to in an earlier post.
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Lemme get this straight. This may be the lack of sleep talking, but did these folks really go to school for years and years, and all they can tell me is something that I already know? Like, I need to sleep?

After a few restless nights, most of us can’t even think straight. We are less able to make sense of problems, make competent moral judgments or retain what we learn, even though studies show our brain cells fire more frenetically to overcome the lack of sleep. Lose too much sleep and we become reckless, emotionally fragile, and more vulnerable to infections and to diabetes, heart disease and obesity, recent research suggests.

…The consequences of too little sleep can be dire. Almost half of all heavy-truck accidents can be traced to driver fatigue, while decisions leading to the Challenger space-shuttle disaster, the Chernobyl nuclear-reactor meltdown and the Exxon Valdez oil spill can be partly linked to people drained of rest by round-the-clock work schedules. Weary doctors make more serious medical errors, while sleepy airport baggage screeners make more security mistakes, researchers reported at the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.

All told, the frayed tempers, short attention spans and fuzzy thinking caused by sleep deprivation may cost $15 billion a year in reduced productivity, the National Commission on Sleep Disorders Research estimated.

I have an excuse for not getting any sleep in the next couple of months. What’s keeping everybody else awake?

What I have learned as an adult with ADD and a working parent.

I have to become my mother.

I have to become my father.

I have to learn what they learned.

It does not matter what I want.

It does not matter how I feel.

It does not matter if I am happy.

It does not matter that I am unhappy.

It matters that it does not show.

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I’ve hinted at it a few times, but hesitated to say anything about it until. Given what happened last time, I’m somewhat reluctant to say much about it even now. But there’s a limit to how long one can keep quiet about major life events.

Over the past month, my blogging has noticeably slowed down. Granted, December is a pretty slow month for blogging in general. There’s the holidays. And then there’s family. In my case balancing family, work, and blogging in the past month has meant that blogging took a lower priority and family took a higher priority. That’s because a month ago today, our family was growing, and we didn’t even know it yet.

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Your Holiday Personality is Social

For you, the holidays are all about spending time with people you love - and even those you kind of like. Host your own party - maybe even a few. Get people together for baking cookies, watching movies, and playing holiday charades.

Sounds about right. I’m busy making baked good and other stuff to give as gifts. This year it’s either White Chocolate Hazelnut and Cranberry Fudge or Milk Chocolate and Peppermint Fudge Topped with Candy Cane Pieces. In a pinch, I might whip up some Semi-Sweet Chocolate Orange and Hazelnut Fudge. If necessary.

Well, if my own life serves as any indication, the answer to the above question for some kids with ADD/ADHD is no. Some kids won’t outgrow ADHD.

New findings that attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder may stem from a developmental delay that children could outgrow, rather than a cognitive deficit, have raised questions for parents of the 4.4 million children diagnosed with the disorder.

The findings from a National Institute of Mental Health study, published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, compared brain scans of 446 children with and without the disorder. The brains of children with ADHD appeared to develop normally but more slowly, lagging on average about three years behind other children.

We spoke with several experts about what the findings might mean for parents.

It means that a certain percentage of their kids will grow up with ADD and that the condition (I so hate the word “disorder” applied here) will persist into adulthood.

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Come the revolution, we will all live in “The Gayborhood.” It’s nothing new. In fact I’ve written about it before, and now the The New York Times has printed yet another article lamenting the loss of “the gayborhood.”

The article opens with the famed Halloween party in San Francisco’s Castro district, which was cancelled this year.

The once-exuberant street party, a symbol of sexual liberation since 1979 has in recent years become a Nightmare on Castro Street, drawing as many as 200,000 people, many of them costumeless outsiders, and there has been talk of moving it outside the district because of increasing violence. Last year, nine people were wounded when a gunman opened fire at the celebration.

For many in the Castro District, the cancellation is a blow that strikes at the heart of neighborhood identity, and it has brought soul-searching that goes beyond concerns about crime.

…There has been a notable shift of gravity from the Castro, with young gay men and lesbians fanning out into less-expensive neighborhoods like Mission Dolores and the Outer Sunset, and farther away to Marin and Alameda Counties, “mirroring national trends where you are seeing same-sex couples becoming less urban, even as the population become slightly more urban,” said Gary J. Gates, a demographer and senior research fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles.

At the same time, cities not widely considered gay meccas have seen a sharp increase in same-sex couples. Among them: Fort Worth; El Paso; Albuquerque; Louisville, Ky.; and Virginia Beach, according to census figures and extrapolations by Dr. Gates for The New York Times. “Twenty years ago, if you were gay and lived in rural Kansas, you went to San Francisco or New York,” he said. “Now you can just go to Kansas City.”

After taking Parker trick-or-treating in our neighborhood last night, I think what we’re seeing is really a shift, one that reminds me of something I wrote a while back. Neighborhoods just change. And as they change, people change with them. The interesting thing to me is how much that change frightens people at both extremes.

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Chase in linking to my post about Popular Mechanics list of “25 Skills Every Man Should Know”, has come up with his own list of “must have” skills.

Here’s how I did.

1. Know basic nutritional needs & how to plan balanced meals
2. Hone your sense of direction & navigation so you don’t need step-by-step turns to find a location
3. Understand types of health insurance & terminology such as OOP max & co-insurance percentage
4. Maintenance of a personal computer
5. In-depth knowledge of your employment benefits
6. Change a flat tire
7. Wash & iron clothes
8. Balance a checkbook & manage your finances
9. Patch holes in walls
10. Fix a clogged toilet
11. Jump start a car
12. Use public transportation to get around
13. Write an effective resume cover letter
14. Professional oral & written communication
15. Basic math
16. Stay calm in emergencies
17. Know when to ask for help
18. Personal hygiene
19. Do your own taxes
20. Use internet search engines strategically (if you know how to do good searches, you can find any information you need on the web)

Not bad. Better than I did on the Popular Mechanics list.

Technorati Tags: blogs, masculinity, adhd

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