Below is how you swiftly kill a little over two grand in a week’s time. Over $350.00 of it was on totally irrelevant shit – eating out, shoes, lotto tickets! – that absolutely did not need to be purchased in the past week. And there are a couple of things on the list that Duv gave me that didn’t get touched. As it is, I barely have enough to get the cats fixed tomorrow; no actually, I’m about three bucks short. I can cover that with the money I get from doing the coffee supply run tonight, however I still need to cover the money that goes to my mother for the PACE luncheon ticket, and my layaway at the shop in Quinlan.
Will I ever develop a dimmer switch? I either can’t spend because I’m broke – which is off – or I try to acquire any and everything that pops into my head – or on. I usually have some kind of list. However, while I’m going through the already-created shopping list, I am at the same time shopping for other things that catch my fancy, because I have money in my pocket and can cater to those fanciful things then and there. It’s very interesting how, in circumstances like these, I cannot hyper focus on the initial plans I had made and impatiently waited for, and not let eye candy deter me from the plans. I’ll bet that if I had been able to make all of the purchases at one time – such as if my list of things to accomplish could all be purchased online within a matter of moments – I might have accomplished the initial purchase plan. If I were to use the initial light switch analogy, then the following would probably apply:
· Light switch off equates to no focused plans
· Light switch on equates to focused goal has been planned and is probably underway
· Light switch being dimmed would equate to not sustaining the impulse control to continue to ‘see’ the ‘goal’ clearly and not detour from the objective.
I can’t go the rest of my life having to have someone else carry out the game plan because I am – at this time – unable to sustain myself while the light ( i.e. goal/plan) is currently dimmed. There have to be methods that can be used by a person to teach oneself to keep the goal bright enough in one’s mind so that eye candy will not deter one from the initial plans. Telling someone that teaching oneself a method more than likely could not be done is unacceptable. If I had an accountant taking care of my household bills and then giving me the spending money brings about the same risks: me not getting my list accomplished because I let some shiny get in my way and take all of my allocated money. If I handled all of the bills myself, the same outcome would result: some shiny flashing in front of my eyes could/would derail my plans.
I believe that I understand Dr. Barkley’s supposition that because we abstracts too slowly develop the ‘looking back at the past history of bad decisions’ thing. However, if even someone with short-term memory loss can conceivably have something transfer to long-term memory -- with lots and lots and lots of consecutive repetition – then it stands to reason that there has to be a way for an abstract to learn utilizing the same methods. One problem that I see for myself is that I don’t have anyone that I could work that closely on achieving that mission.
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