Our kitchen has been plagued by fruit flies this year.  Maybe it’s because it’s been warm and sunny.  I’m [...]]]> I’ve had success witha fruit fly hack that I want to share with y’all (which means my lamotrigine must be doing something, since I haven’t had the energy to blog about housekeeping and organizing hacks in forever).

Our kitchen has been plagued by fruit flies this year.  Maybe it’s because it’s been warm and sunny.  I’m certainly not gonna complain about that.

Whatever the reason, the compost bin has gotten downright gross.  I couldn’t toss a peach pit away without a cloud of fruit flies erupting in my face.  If I brought a bowl of cherries into the living room to nibble on while I watched TV, a swarm of the bastards would follow me.

My sister suggested the following page at the University of Kentucky’s entomology program.  What you do is:

1. Take a piece of paper
2. Make a cone out of it such that there is a very small hole at the bottom
3. Tape the cone in place
4. Pour a few ounces of cider vinegar into a jar or glass
5. Place the cone in the glass so the tip of the cone isn’t touching the liquid
6. Wait for the fruit flies to seal their doom

Since I didn’t have cider vinegar or a bit of banana on hand, I used some cheap Trader Joe’s “balsamic” vinegar.  I figured it would be sweet enough to attract the fruit flies.  I also removed any fruit that was roaming freely about the kitchen and put it in the fridge so they had no alternate source of food or breeding grounds.  I placed the trap on the counter above the compost bin.

The trap started working within an hour.  The UK website says to “kill them or release them outdoors”.  Yeah, right.  There aren’t any screens on the windows in San Francisco, so if I try to give them their freedom they’ll come right back.  I think I’m just going to let them drown themselves.

OK, maybe that’s not fair.  Maybe you have ADHD and Lexapro treats you just fine.  But for me, it was a complete disaster.  I spent most of March and all of April sitting on the couch, staring at the wall.  I’d say [...]]]> I learned something important during my bout with psychotic depression: Lexapro is the antichrist.

OK, maybe that’s not fair.  Maybe you have ADHD and Lexapro treats you just fine.  But for me, it was a complete disaster.  I spent most of March and all of April sitting on the couch, staring at the wall.  I’d say that it made me a zombie, except that zombies at least are motivated to eat brains.  I wouldn’t have been motivated to eat anything except the damn drug made me crave carbs.  As it was, making myself go to the store to buy frozen food, and then making myself put it in the microwave, was agonizingly difficult.  All this while on 70 mgs of Vyvanse.

Anyway, that’s my excuse for not blogging in forever.  I hope to be back soon, but in the mean time, I’ll be keeping a blog of my experiences with Lamictal (lamotrigine).  It’s one of those drugs that can be great for treatment-resistant depression, as long as you titrate up slowly and avoid The Dreaded Rash.  Since so many other meds have been disastrous for me, I’m keeping a diary of my moods, cognition, attention, etc, as well as any side effects I experience.  It’s called The Lamictal Diaries.  See you there.

This is just the kind of thing that tends to stump adults with ADD.  It’s one of those social [...]]]> As a job searcher, I’ve joined a lot of jobs boards and employment sites.  One of them recently sent an e-mail with a link to an article “The Seven Stupidest Interview Questions and What They Really Mean.”

This is just the kind of thing that tends to stump adults with ADD.  It’s one of those social situations with unwritten rules, where everyone else seems to know what’s going on, and we don’t.  Interviewing for a job can be like navigating a mine field for someone like me — I need to accurately parse the question, and the subtext of the question, and THEN I need to answer it without going off on a tangent.

It turns out that there are reasons why interviewers ask seemingly dumb questions.  For instance, according to this article, “tell me about yourself” is often about testing your ability to interact with others (*gulp*).  “What’s your greatest weakness” is not about determining what your weaknesses are, but whether you can overcome them.

So now I know why they ask all those stupid questions … but how do I answer them?  Before my last interview I looked for advice in that area, and I felt like this article from the aptly-named “jobinterviewquestions.org” provided some useful advice — specific answers to 50 questions you might encounter in an interview.  For example, to answer the question “what qualities do you look for in a boss”, they advise: “Be generic and positive. Safe qualities are knowledgeable, a sense of humor, fair, loyal to subordinates and holder of high standards. All bosses think they have these traits.”

Yup.  That’s straight talk.

Sigh.

Since I didn’t get the job, I’m going back to my Job [...]]]> Well, I didn’t get the job I interviewed for last week.  But that means that my ADHD job search series will be all the more real!  It will be an honest, up-to-the-minute look at what I’m actually doing for my actual job search!  Yay!

Sigh.

Since I didn’t get the job, I’m going back to my Job Search Plan.  After a few months of job search frustration, it’s occurred to me that I should follow my own advice about coping with ADHD: Get help.  Ask for advice.  Don’t try to go it alone. I didn’t get organized by myself — I had a clutter buddy to give me advice and support.  I didn’t learn time management by myself — I worked with an ADD coach.  Since I don’t know jack about finding a decent job, why the heck would I think I should rely solely on my own resources?

So while I’m trying to settle on the sort of work I’m looking for, I’m also fixing up my LinkedIn profile.  If you haven’t heard of LinkedIn, it’s a professional networking site where you can create a profile based on your resume, and by importing your e-mail address book, you can figure out who you know, where those people work, and who they know.  This is a great way to figure out who you can network with in various industries, or even at specific companies.  It’s completely free, which is always a good thing when you’re unemployed.

Ever since I looked for my first job, I’ve been told that only a tiny number of job seekers find work through ads.  According to this site, the actual figure is 5%, and only 15 or 20% of jobs are even advertised in the first place.  This is why networking is so important.  You’re much more likely to find a job through someone you know than through any other means.  And so, I am finally putting myself out there, talking to people I know, asking them for advice and assistance.

This is a hard thing for someone with my history.  Like a lot of learning disabled or ADHD adults, I was blamed for my own problems from an early age.  When I asked my teachers for help I was scolded and ridiculed, told that I didn’t “really need” help, because I wouldn’t be having trouble if I’d “paid attention the first time”.   This is why I’ve never been able to network effectively before now — I’m only just now getting to a point where I have the confidence not to see myself as a troublesome, needy nine-year-old child.

Even though I was turned down for the job I interviewed for last week, it turned out to be a valuable experience in one important way.  I realized that I was incredibly excited about the company I was applying to — and that’s valuable information, especially to an ADD adult who’s too overwhelmed to figure out what sort of work even to look for.  The things that attracted me to the company are that it’s small, it’s a creative environment, and it’s built around a really innovative idea.  Now, at least, I know that those are the things I should be asking my network about.

After spending much of June in the pit of blackest unemployment despair, I wound up with a job interview early this week.  I think it went well, but the company is interviewing a few other candidates, so I just have to wait and hope that they’re not as awesome as me.  But that’s not what [...]]]>

After spending much of June in the pit of blackest unemployment despair, I wound up with a job interview early this week.  I think it went well, but the company is interviewing a few other candidates, so I just have to wait and hope that they’re not as awesome as me.  But that’s not what I want to write about.  I want to write about the fact that if I hadn’t followed up on my application, I never would have had the interview at all.

When I applied for this particular job, I was answering an ad on Craigslist.  I followed the instructions and sent my resume and cover letter to the Craigslist-generated anonymizing email address at the top of the listing.  The listing said that not everyone would receive a response.  A week went by — no response.

Nonetheless, I took the precaution of sending a follow up email to the anonymizing Craigslist-generated email address.  I wrote that I had applied the previous week, and wanted to confirm that my resume had been received, and reiterated my interest in the position and the company.

I was expecting yet another rejection — but it turned out that my resume had gotten eaten somewhere along the line, and the company had never received it.  They asked me to send it again, and within 24 hours I had an interview!

Following up is something a lot of job seekers slack off about, and I suspect those numbers are higher among job seekers with ADD.  When you’re sending out a lot of resumes, it’s hard to keep track of where you sent them and when, and it’s easy to get bogged down in just sending out more resumes and cover letters instead of tracking down the ones you’ve already written.  It can also be hard to follow up, knowing that you might get rejected — and that this time it’s final and official.  In the long run, though, I’ve found that it’s best to know one way or another, so you can put your energy into finding new opportunities.

The culprit, it turned out, was my Vyvanse.  My dentist assured me [...]]]> About six months ago I wrote here and at AddaptAbilities about a very nasty shock I received at the dentist: a whopping SEVEN $#%^&@ING CAVITIES.  Twice as many cavities as I’d had in my adult life thus far.  All of them between my teeth.

The culprit, it turned out, was my Vyvanse.  My dentist assured me that he’d seen this kind of thing before, due to all types of medication, and if I followed his instructions — floss EVERY night, use a prescription-strength high-fluoride toothpaste, and chew high-strength xylitol gum and mints — my teeth would be fine.

And they are!  YAY!