Is It Illegal to Roll Craps with Squirrels?

Hey Reader Friends,

It’s your ADHD friend, Denise. This past week the stomach flu rolled through my household. (I know, I know, it’s a “virus,” but I’ve called it “flu” my whole life, so show me some grace.) As anyone who knows me well will tell you, I am not a good puker. Bulimia would never be my go-to for weight loss. Given the choice, I’d rather have pneumonia for a month than puke one time. I mentally willed myself to not puke. It worked. But I did give my ass permission to do so. That virus needed a clear exit strategy.

I laid in bed, stuck in that weird in-between phase where you are so tired from feeling like shit, but your brain is too wired to sleep, and despite your mental alertness, you still cannot concentrate long enough to read a good book, which are plentiful in my house. I still have my author friend Mike Baron’s latest manuscript waiting on me to finish. Laying there, my mind wandered into strange territories: “Do giraffes puke? How long does that take? What about flamingoes? Llamas? Do the pregnant ones get morning sickness?” My heart sinks whenever I hear that dreaded sound of my cat coughing up a hairball. I imagined the poor zoo keepers having to hear a giraffe do that, multiplying that “ick factor” by a thousand.

I kept myself busy scrolling through social media sites, as you do when you’re bored and don’t know what to do with yourself. I came across this public warning sign that confused me, so I took this screen grab to share with you:

You may recall, a few blogs back I shared with you how literal I can be at times. The example I gave was the new phrase my former SaaS boss learned and interjected into every conversation he could: “It’s table stakes!” Except, as you may recall, I heard him saying “It’s table steaks!” I couldn’t imagine what a delicious t-bone had to do with the success of our marketing team. Eventually, I researched this phrase, but to be honest, it was so uninteresting to me, — blah, blah, blah, something about gambling, blah, blah, blah — I still don’t exactly recall what it means, except the usage pattern indicates it’s something you exclaim when a situation is to your advantage.

So, given my literal thinking, it should be no surprise to you that my first thought when I saw this was, “Why am I being banned from rolling craps with squirrels?” Once you see the world through my AU-ADHD eyes, can you unsee it?

If I were designing this sign, what they apparently meant to be treats I would have made teardrop-shaped, like pumpkin seeds. Now that would make sense to me. Even the hand graphic seems off-putting. If I stare too long at it, I start to see the profile of a monkey’s head. And that squirrel? Not what I’d call perfect. I’ve never met a squirrel so tail-challenged.

This got me thinking about how we reframe ideas in cognitive behavioral therapy. That’s where we rewire our thinking to our advantage, creating new neural pathways in our brains. When I used to get anxiety about some upcoming event, my therapist would say “Reframe your thinking. You’re not anxious. You’re excited.” Reframing exercises remind me some of when I was a kid and my brother worked as a gas jockey at a full-service gas station, filling up people’s tanks. He identified as a “fuel-transfer engineer,” reframing the importance of his minimum-wage job like he was some grifting bullshitter on Linkedin, but this was pre-Linkedin (when full-service stations were still a thing — I miss that so much).

I’m in awe of people who can reframe everyday household tasks enough to make them sound more fun than they actually are. Reframes are designed to trick the brain to be motivated enough to initiate the “START Sequence.”

My friend Maura and I were chatting the other morning about how frustrated I get over the endless buildup of paperwork on my kitchen table. I never know what to do with my paperwork. I clear the mound from my kitchen table, to the chair beside me, and then it magically reassembles itself on the kitchen table within 24 hours. My filing cabinet is still not assembled yet from my Illinois-to-Florida move, so I have nowhere to file any of it. And then there’s my other ADHD issue: if I do file it away, I will forget it forever. Maura suggested I put it all in a basket. I now have two separate baskets adjacent to my kitchen table, nearly overflowing.

Maura suggested I try this clever acronym that described her paperwork filing system. This concept helped her avoid the perennial paperwork clutter. It semi-sounded like a workable idea. I tried retelling it to my husband Dave at brunch a few hours later, but I couldn’t remember the damned acronym.

Acronyms, along with remembering dates and times, are my nemeses. History class was not my forte’. One of my besties, another Denise, will email me every February to tell me she’s thinking of me on the day my adoptive dad died. I always feel like an asshole because I cannot reciprocate, and I hope she doesn’t think it’s because I don’t care or love her to the moon and back. I can vaguely remember the season it was when I went to her two parents’ funerals.

Trying to re-explain Maura’s idea to Dave, I could visualize the concept having something to do with handling papers, but no matter how hard I tried, that thought balloon over my head remained maddeningly blank. I could not get that acronym to download from the ether.

I got so frustrated, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I called Maura in the middle of her work day, which I never do unless it’s an emergency. I know she has an important job, but this mystery was tickling my brain so hard, I had to scratch the itch. Like, right now. Patience is never a strong suit for ADHDers when something is on our mind.

“What was that paperwork-handling acronym again?”

“O.H.I.O.” she said. “Only handle it once.”

I hung up the phone, determined to remember it.

Some time lapsed before Dave and I sat down to dinner.

“Remember that acronym I was trying to remember about paperwork?”

“Yeah. Did you find out what it was?”

“Yeah, I called Maura. It’s ‘O.H.I.O.’ — like the state.”

“What does it mean?”

“Uh . . . it was something like . . . (my eyes look up and to the left . . . the brain wheels creaking, slowly starting to churn the butter) . . . Obviously, Heave It Overboard.”

“But just the junk mail, okay?”

“I already do that.

And that’s when I realized: This acronym isn’t helpful. At. All.