Where There's A Pill There's A Way.

It’s Monday night and being slightly bored I decided to take an interactive Adult ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) test. However, only making it to question 15 of the 70 or so odd questions before I became bored and decided rather to review the gossip column of Eonline leads me to believe that I should maybe be on some form of medication because there’s a pill for everything these days, right?

You’ve seen them on TV. Strange adds with blatant innuendos, like the erectile dysfunction add where a guy throws a football though a tire swing. Everyone has something wrong with him or her, anxiety disorder, depression, dysfunction of all sorts, work allergies, you name it, they have a pill for it. I even saw an add claiming to have a solution in pill form for the “night shift worker”, it went something like this; “Are you always tired? Do you sleep all day only to wake up in the evening? Are you tired of going to go to bed when your family is just getting up? Well we have the solution for you!” Are you kidding me? I have a solution, it’s called get a new job so you can work during the day, spend time with your family, and quit complaining about stupid shit.

It is so easy to fall for the latest quick fix for all our problems, or children’s problems for that matter. Speaking of, what has happened to kids these days? I’ll tell you why everyone and their brother has this new fangled ADHD, it’s because they don’t actually experience life. When I was a kid I was always outside with my friends. There was a group of us neighborhood “hoodlums” and we would all get together, play games, and participate in your harmless everyday, run of the mill tom foolery. Sure we had our share of trouble, like the time Chris burned his eyebrows off trying to light a firecracker, but in the end we were together forming friendships and interacting with each other. It seems like now friendship has been replaced with video games, television, and the internet. What social skills does one need to play video games or watch Fear Factor, and what are we doing when watching these new reality shows? We’re watching other people experience life instead of doing it for ourselves.

I am glad I grew up when I did, everything was more carefree back then and we were never worried about the “what ifs”. Case in point: I never wore a helmet while I rode my bike. (insert obvious joke here). In fact, I learned how to use the breaks on my cute pink Huffy all by myself. I had this super smart lesson plan to take it down the hill into the cul-de-sac and crash it into the curb until I figured it out. The funny visual that has lasted me 24 years and still makes me laugh out loud to this day is when I once missed the curb and went flying into the garage door of my neighbors home (she had bicycle track marks up the middle of her garage door for months). I was fine, maybe suffered an injured ego, but fine nonetheless. Hell, what am I saying, I was 5 years old, there was no ego. There was just satisfaction that I was now able to wear a band-aid on my knee, elbow, and forehead, and all my friends would think I was cool and dangerous. These days it would probably be cause for some sort of lawsuit, “Your garage door injured my daughters ego.” Either that or “My daughter has gone off the deep end driving her bike into garage doors, is there a pill for that?”

Maybe it’s because parents don’t have the time they once did for their children. They’re off working to afford that god awful enormous SUV, or to pay for their children to have the latest video games or cell phones, or to pay for the drug that will give them four hour erections. Maybe it’s because we have become immune to fun and instead are looking for the horrible “what ifs” instead of the "why nots." It seems that risk and adventure have left us with caution and terror.

Who knows? Maybe things will go back to the way they once were. Maybe someday children will find themselves lighting bottle rockets at their neighbors house, and launching water balloons through a slingshot and not have to worry about their parents pumping them full of medications because that’s what kids do even though some doctors may label it as “abnormal.” Or maybe it would be a good idea to just quit with the whole self medication craze, step back, take a good look at yourself (or your children) and realize that not everything is exactly the way you would like it to be. You may not be satisfied with yourself, but taking pills to mask the problem isn’t doing the problem any good. So begins my pledge to refrain from asinine pill popping and take life as it is, one unique experience after another. If there ever comes a time in my life where my profile fits the questions on some obscure television advertisement I will turn the other cheek. I will figure it out in my own way, on my own terms and without a doctor’s prescription. I have come a long way from the girl that learned how to ride her bike the dangerous way to the woman who still manages to crash and burn every once in a while in other areas of her life, because that’s what life is all about; one big garage door, you just have to realize when to open it up or when to step on the brakes.