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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I have to also account for mania, too. I'm sure that the idea of having money in my hands, aside from the regular paycheck, would raise anyone's happiness level up; otherwise, no one would get a thrill from getting an income tax refund. In my case, that gets magnified quite a lot. I wonder if someone could be conditioned to not get a thrill from getting 'free' money (i.e. money not meant for any other use)? I would guess that, at the same time, one would also have to gain control of the desire to actually acquire all of the outstanding wants residing within one's head. That would actually accomplish the first item, since the former would not be seen as the means to acquire the latter, but would instead just exist with no extra purposes.
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