Twitter is Great for ADHDers. But Proceed with Caution
You can’t turn around these days without another journalist or blogger fulminating about the great blessing (or scourge, if that’s your persuasion) that is Twitter. It’s now transcended the blogosphere, and virally infected the hidebound world of newspaper journalism: The Globe and Mail, the grand old dame of Canadian papers and the nation’s self-proclaimed paper of record, has run at least half a dozen Twitter-related articles in the last fortnight. The New York Times had three articles on it yesterday alone (according to Lance Armstrong’s Twitter feed. I’m a retired bike racer; of course I follow him on Twitter!).
Twitter seems to have reached a tipping point.
As a coach who specializes in working with adults with ADHD, I am very conflicted about Twitter. Leaving aside the question of whether it’s the Social Network That Will Change Everything or merely a passing fad, there’s still a lot to think about. Overall, I think that Twitter has so much to recommend it that having ADHD is no reason to avoid it. I do have several concerns specific to ADHDers on Twitter, though, and I think it’s especially important to be aware of the very real challenges that Twitter presents to those who are easily distracted by technology. Read more
Battling the Raccoons
I want very much to be posting more on this blog, but I’m not a very good raccoon.
Some of the biggest and meanest raccoons in the world live in my garage. To be more accurate, they don’t actually live in the garage. They live in the walls of it. In a baffling fit of throwing good money after bad, the previous owners of my house decided to cover the wooden walls of the detached garage with vinyl siding. The raccoons, not to be put off by the depressing gray shade of the siding, found that they could burrow between the siding and the wooden walls, creating a nice, cozy abode for themselves. So far as I can tell, they only emerge from their comfortable subsidized housing to prowl the neighbourhood for tasty food waste.
Since Toronto has a municipal food waste collection program, almost every house in my neighbourhood has a green bin somewhere outside the house, expressly designed for food and organic waste –which includes diapers, by the way, in my house and many of those around me. And the raccoons love nothing better than to make sport of trying to pry them open. The latches on the green bins were not in any way designed to defeat raccoons, and those who fail to attach an aftermarket strap or lock run the risk of seeing a week’s worth of rotten veggies and meat scraps on the driveway in the morning. Like most people, I learned this the hard way.
So you’ll appreciate that I am no fan of raccoons. But the biggest raccoon of all lives right in my house, and he is me.
