naughty

I might have had a more interesting childhood had I not come equipped with a slightly overly-constraining sense of propriety. Or maybe it was just timidity. On thought, I'm going to blame it on a congenital disinclination to be caught rocking the boat. I seem to recall that, among the notes recorded by my mother in my baby book, one says "You're a little bit 'sneaky.' We have to work at keeping you honest." Well, I guess the work paid off, but there are moments. In fact, I'm sure the only difference between me and an impulsive kid is that, while we'd get into the very same trouble, I'd wait 'til no one was looking, then put it all back the way it was.

Do you remember sitting in the dentist's chair, just after the hygienist left the room but before the dentist came in, wishing you were brave enough to pull out the water sprayer or the air blower and give them a try? I think I was in college before I was uninhibited enough to do it. (I also wanted to test the chair controls and open all the drawers, but there's only so much you can accomplish in a minute and a half. To an extent, I satisfied this urge later, by looking in all the cabinets at the pediatrician's office when my kids were babies.)

This kind of inborn behavior regulatory device never entirely goes away, which I guess is a good thing, and it certainly whirred into action as I considered taking one of Gabe's Concerta pills this morning. But I told it to shut up and switch off. I've been giving the kid the stuff on school mornings for years now. I'm probably the only person in the world who would hesitate to try it once in roughly a decade. Gabe says it helps him a bit with focus, and the wholistic approach is that judicious use of such things can help a brain wire itself for learning.

There was nothing special about today. If I'm being perfectly honest with myself, I'm going to have to blame my mental fogginess on too many squares of organic milk chocolate. I'm also fairly certain that there's no direct relationship between brain cloud and performance, but when--after removing about 5 clean glasses from a recently run dishwasher--I turned around and began loading the same dw with dirties (I mean, while it was still 3/4 of the way full of cleans,) it occurred to me. That I'm an absent-minded ditz whose frontal lobe might benefit from a wake up call.

So I took a Concerta. It's 27mg of extended-release ritalin. That was 6 hours ago. Report: I feel no better. No worse. No less foggy. No sharper. I am still performing adequately through the shroud of chocolate-induced mental vagueness, and I'm as certain as I need to be that I'll have no further use for that controlled substance. I may still look in cabinets at doctors' offices, but it will not be for neurostimulants, it will simply be because I like to look.