The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by PinkDreamPoppies:

Emily: With regard to controls on Ritalin prescriptions, my personal experience is that refills are not available; new prescriptions must be written every thirty days and delivered by hand from the doctor's office to the pharmacy.

Chuck: The thing of it is, problem children who are given Ritalin do not respond positively to the medication. It's a stimulant, not a sedative, and so will not calm those children down. My experience is that children who are given Ritalin whose behavior does not improve are taken off Ritalin.

Actually, to be more accurate, the teachers and staff members who work with the students encourage those students' parents to have their children taken off Ritalin. Educators, by and large, work with the children that are brought to them. They are not able to prescribe drugs to students (obviously) and have limited influence over parents in getting parents to have their children prescribed medications.

So far as start-and-end times are concerned, they could certainly use adjustment but, as was pointed out, there are so many competing interests at play in determining when children start and end their school days. There are extracurricular activities to consider, work schedules for students, work schedules for parents, and so forth. Unfortunately, older models for when students should attend school assume that there is a parent at home so that students aren't unsupervised; this is the case much less often today. It's a complicated situation that is difficult for school districts, students, and parents alike to navigate.

I'll tell you honestly that I don't know how to improve it.

Lila: those are common reactions to Ritalin and Adderall. I'm happy to hear, though, that your daughter has been able to live well after changes in her situation.

Some schools are, in effect, getting away with systematic child abuse.

Chuck, I'm curious as to what you mean by this. What are some schools doing that you would call systematic child abuse?

One of the problems with ADD is that it's very difficult to diagnose definitively. The way the disease works is that when a person who has ADD attempts to concentrate a part of his brain stops functioning and prevents him from holding focus on anything for very long. (There is a paradox here: the harder he attempts to concentrate on something, the less he'll be able to succeed.) This is why Ritalin, a stimulant, will help patients who suffer from ADHD: the stimulant keeps that part of the brain "awake" and so patients are able to hold focus and thus not be hyperactive.

Unfortunately, the only way to see this cessation of activity is with expensive and relatively risky brain imaging techniques. It's much easier and cost-effective in many cases to prescribe an ADD medication to a person to see if it has an effect on her; if she improves, she likely has ADD.

From the reading I've done, approximately 1 in 25 people has some form of ADD. This number is consistent across cultures and geographic regions. This statistic is slightly misleading, though, because it is for ADD as a whole and not just ADHD. In some people, ADD manifests itself as an inability to concentrate that results in a person decreasing their activity level. Unable to concentrate on anything they end up doing nothing. (These people usually end up being tagged as lazy instead of poorly behaved.)

Anecdotally, the number of children in the school where I work who are on some sort of ADD or ADHD medication is closer to 1 in 25 than the 1 in 10 mentioned upthread. I'm not sure what percentage of kids are prescribed Ritalin, but I suspect that it's much lower than the popular concept of every other kid being hopped up on something.

This conversation reminds me of Alfred Appel, Jr.'s introduction to his Annotated Lolita. He spends a paragraph or two attempting to reassure the reader that he is not, in fact, Nabokov's creation. I don't blame him for worrying about that.

Hiero for hire? Hiero Protagonist?

Flash #5 struck me as curiously, irrisistably, beautiful.

This is unrelated (ah, the wonders of an open thread). Perhaps someone could help me out here...

I'm looking for a story [fiction] that was published in the New Yorker, I think, about two years ago. The story's protagonist was a woman who was blind and deaf who was in love with her teacher. I'm looking for the story's title and author.

You don't have the life I wanted as a teenager. You have the life I want now... What a beautiful building.

The fat guy in the restaurant may have started out as one of the Seven Lucky Gods, but I think he's been incorporated into Buddhism at least as a boddhisatva, the way a lot of the pagan European gods became Catholic saints.

However, I don't recall any of those pagan European gods being sold in Barnes & Noble as Jesus...

[shrug] Maybe it's just me.

BTW, I would not class Buddhism as a religion in the same way as I'd class (e.g.) Catholicism -- it's much more a set of practices, with a "try this and see if it works for you" approach than I've seen in most of what I'd call religions. The closest in Christian terms would be UUs -- and many of them do not consider UU a Christian sect.

This depends largely on the type of Buddhism. Some traditions have a clear mythology and prescriptions for behavior largely descended from Hinduism. These forms of Buddhism don't seem to have become particularly popular in the West, I think largely because many people view Buddhism as a go-with-what-works alternative to highly prescriptive forms of Christianity.

An unrelated question: am I the only one who has a difficult time not becoming angry when faced with people referring to the Buddha as "that fat guy in the Chinese restaurants"? I try to view the mix-up as something of a cosmic joke---when I know that my reaction should be to not worry about it---but it bothers me in a very Americans-talking-too-loud kind of way.

Teresa: I guess I admire your patience because I've been in the same situation before (not with my meds; others') and am still fuming about it years after the fact. Once again, my admiration for you increases.

You have my long strings of emphatically unrepeatable words directed at this twist in your life.

I admire your resolution to not indulge your rage. I've had nightmares about someone or something messing with my medications and the very thought makes me apoplectic. How you can have it actually happen to you and still say that you won't indulge your anger but briefly . . . It's beyond me.

I think, Patrick, that you have on advantage over a number of writers: you've actually seen a slush pile. Most people who become discouraged by the prospect of editor's complaining about the slush pile usually haven't seen one and don't have a grasp on the types of compositions therein.

I, personally, and others I've known have at one point in time or another thought that the slush pile consisted almost entirely of stories that were perfectly spelled and punctuated but that simply lacked an engaging enough storyline or interesting enough character or whatever. The slush pile, in our minds, was filled with a staggering number of perfect, publishable books that were passed up because they weren't as good as This Other Book Over Here.

I'd venture that most of the people who pin their flags to the mast of the slush pile don't realize that, as OG pointed out, by being able to spell they already have a leg up on a sizable chunk of the competition.

User-friendliness is task dependent, not OS dependent.

I'll get to the rest of what you said later, but would it not make sense to call an OS more or less user-friendly based on the number and proportion of user-friendly tasks it performs? It would seem that you yourself follow this formulation as you go on to refer to the Mac OS and Windows both as "actively user hostile."

I am fully aware that PC != Windows, but it's a useful shorthand in the PC vs. Mac debacle. For what it's worth, my experience with *nix suggests that they are even easier to "get under the hood" than Windows but also staggeringly less intuitive and "user-friendly."

Spinning off onto another topic, it seems that which operating system is most "user-friendly" depends entirely on one's definition of that term. My position has always been that something is user-friendly when it has a small learning curve, fewer hoops to jump through to change common settings, and error messages that are relatively free of technical language that is of little to no use to non-geek users. (The ability to run programs without crashing I consider to be a basic feature of an operating system such that crash frequency is not part of user-friendliness so much as it is a measure of whether or not the operating system was or was not ready to be publicly available.) I've always felt that even though I may be able to program and use command lines and am not intimidated by acronyms and geek-speak, I don't want to be bothered with those things.

Others, meanwhile, might feel that user-friendliness is defined in terms of how accomodating the software is to customization on as many levels as possible and the presense of error messages that can give one specific, detailed information about the problem. There are people who think that a good operating system is one that allows them to change as many features as possible to the full extent of their ability and knowledge. In this view, I suspect, user-friendly means that it is friendly to "power users" rather than "average users." (I'm almost tempted to claim that rather than being user-friendly OS's, the ideal for this group would be an OS that provides for user freedom, but that would lead inevitably to the abusive phrase "user-free operating systems.")

There's something swirling in the deep recesses of my mind about how these opposing points of view remind me of differing views of the market and market forces, but it's incoherent enough that I'll spare myself the embarrassment of writing it.

Actually, in the Mac/PC war I'm more or less neutral. I have a Mac at home that I'm wildly in love with (a victim of Patrick's linked-to iProduct), but I make a living taking care of a few hundred PCs for a middle school. I joke about the inpenetrability of Windows, but I know that once you know the tools and the tricks there really isn't a whole lot that Windows does that's mystifying. Crash screens, memory dumps, and illegal operation errors are all extremely useful things that help me keep the computers at work up and running smoothly and efficiently; the Mac crash reports, meanwhile, are generally unhelpful insofar as diagnosing problems is concerned. My Mac crashes less, looks better, and is---to my mind---a hundred times more user-friendly in the way that preferences are set and tweaked, but it's harder to "get under the hood" of the operating system and this creates a certain degree of frustration: if you don't like something the way Apple has set it up, it's a bit harder to change it than in Windows.

So yes, as a confessed Apple geek I'm stating plainly that both systems have their strengths and weaknesses and I cannot fault, for a minute, anyone who chooses Windows because of its strengths. I'll now go back to work, complaining about how I have to work with so many freaking Windows computers when my Mac works just fine.

I have to admit that I'd much rather have the demented servant who insists on doing things for me than the flighty, unhinged servant that is Windows. While the Mac Servator will limp about whispering of all the things it will take care of for me, the Windows Servator will shuffle around asking me what it can do for me, not doing what I ask, inviting random guests into my house, randomly refusing to perform tasks, and eventually kicking the bucket such that I'm forced to cut it open in order to revive it so that it can . . . go back to not doing as I ask.

At the time, I ran through and repaired permissions and plist files to no avail. Also, a manual run of Software Update shows no new versions of iTunes, but iTunes is alerting me that a new version is available.

I'm not at all worried, though; compared to the crap that I have to fix on the computers at work, a bit of annoyance with Software Update is cake. I mean, it's not like I'm running the kernal debugger just so I can figure out which DLL file is killing all of the computers in a classroom.

If you have any luck getting the iPod Update to become inactive, let me know. I would make the update inactive, but it kept coming back until finally I said "hell with it" and installed it anyway.

Also, does anyone have any idea if iTunes will continue to be updated by Software Update or if I'm going to have to go to the iTunes website to download new versions?

(And yeah, my reaction to the miniMac, too, was so not PG-13.)

It's not Lamentations, but close.

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