I'm not that good at small talk, I find it tiring and often don't know what to talk about, and so just lapse into silence, listen, watch, etc. If it's something I'm interested in, I can talk about/around it, or if I have nothing to say, can listen to someone burble on, and ask a question or two, or add something here or there (often surprising people, in the process, it seems). I'm learning to ask questions. I'm always much more comfortable with one or two other people, or in small groups rather than large ones, and definitely preferably people I know. I don't know about any men/women difference. But I am willing to let conversations pause.

Some people find this disconcerting, or think I'm boring, or (more likely) stupid. *shrugs*. It's lonely sometimes, but places like this are very good, and I think I've learned a great deal. Thanks.

[flerdle] I'm exactly the same, and I quite agree.

The "other one" out of the disorders that manifest themselves in compulsive menky collecting types of behaviour is Asperger Syndrome, believed in recent years to be a sort of autism-lite. It basically is intended to be an umbrella label for those with somewhat impaired social skills, a preoccupation with abstract hobbies on which they "perseverate" (e.g. focus on to the exclusion of all else for long periods of time, including when talking to someone else) and who find it difficult to empathise or instinctively understand other people's motivations. For a time I believed I was aspergic until I actually went out and met some people who really were and had the chance to compare. This was a painful exercise which involved listening politely to the full details of the history of South West trains. After years of neglect it has become an extremely fashionable diagnosis recently for children, and, it seems to me, is overapplied.

[Smalltalk] I'm exceptionally bad at smalltalk, and also don't respond well to it. I'm not one of these people who generally can talk to, say, a hairdresser, probably because I feel like I have no common reference points. That said, where I fall down is not being very good at the verbal parrying that establishes what the common reference points are. This is made worse by being a hopeless bloke, having no interested in cars, football and, to a certain extent, tits. So even the usual gambits just fail on me miserably. This probably marks me out as being 'boring', and would probably be confirmed if my interlocutors were to discover those subjects I do have an opinion about. New people can be problematic, too. I don't know if flerdle or penelope remember what I was like when I turned up at my first pilg...

[Aspergers] I have a friend who is like this, and his mum suggested he might have Aspergers. However a friendly medic who had met him immediately said "No, he's not got Aspergers"... I think there is a fashion to give everything a fancy label nowadays, and like Projoy, believe this is not a good thing. I would have thought it were obvious that different people approach things differently, and there's degrees of conformance to the "standard" way of doing things (known popularly as "normality").

In fact, drawing these two stands together, I find most "normal" people rather dull. Is this just me being an arrogant arse-wit?

[Aside] Am currently "working" at home, and the phone rang whilst composing the above. The caller hung up immediately. I hate that - why can't they just admit to having dialled a wrong number? I don't think it was a potential burglar...

[rab] I think you reminded me of me :-)

... and I was overcompensating out of sheer terror :-)

[flerdle] I didn't mean to scare you! Luckily I think the beer and Tim-Tams sorted everything out.

[rab] My last posting was just to explain why (perhaps??) I seemed rather boisterous at times, (I wasn't saying that you were or weren't) which is another way of "coping", but not my usual one, I think because of the complete novelty of it all, especially the Tim-Tams. And I was stone cold sober, so that wasn't any excuse either. You certainly didn't scare me, and am looking forward to hopefully visiting again next summer.

Which, in a way, brings us back to collecting junk: I have a small amount of "stuff", but mostly I have books (I've been very restrained, honest!!). I used to have a tendency to collect empty or hardly-used notebooks (mmmm stationery), but recently disposed of almost all of them. A lot of things will be farmed out to friends/relatives, and some stored, but I'm quite looking forward to starting again in January with little more than a suitcaseful. Should be interesting.

Wow, what a stream of revelations we have here. Bob is right to say that OCD is something quite different from "obsessiveness", and I get very angry when people talk about being "a bit obsessive-compulsive" and so on, when Goddammit! They haven't the faintest idea what it means. Sometimes I wish I could just turn my whole brain off and put it away in storage for a long, long, time. Someone asked earlier if OCD is related to autistic disorders, and there is evidence that it is. There is a greater overlap of occurrences of OCD and Asperger's than you would statistically expect, and indeed I have had my own brain photographed, rather excitingly, in an experiment to test this. Asperger's is the syndrome suffered by the narrator in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and one of the reasons I was so moved by that book was that, God help me, I identified with practically every aspect of him, except for being unable to read expressions, which is a defining characteristic of Aspergers. Many of the things that character does, such as counting, refusing to touch certain things, etc. are traits associated with OCD. Personally I think OCD, autism, and Asperger's are all somehow related, but people like me are very much on the "high-functioning" end of that spectrum, which means we can pass ourselves off as normal human beings. Well, most of the time.
By the way, it's true that some of these disorders are "over-diagnosed", but they are "under-diagnosed" as well. One in twenty adults in the UK has ADD, but the vast majority are never diagnosed.

rab] are you saying that you don't believe Projoy is a good thing ?
I can talk to anyone, but I hate listenintg. Ha ha.

Apologies, by the way, in case any of this is inappropriately confessional or too dull for anyone else! I've been thinking about it a lot recently (I do anyway, naturally) because someone at work actually guessed that I have OCD from watching my peculiar rituals, which rather shook me because, although I do peculiar rituals literally all the time, I normally hide them pretty well and people don't realise. Perhaps I'm getting worse.

I'm not sure whether things are over or under diagnoised. Does having a label help matters? I know that I've got many traits which are typical of many diseases (my thinking pattern is very common in people with schizophreina, I have depressive phases, I'm mildly dyslexic) and I'm sure if I was analysed fully I'd have all sorts of nasty disorders. But thankfully they don't affect my life much, and I consider myself to be fairly sane. So does diagnosing mild ADD, mild OCD or mild Aspbergers help? There's no definate treatment (although congitive therapy can help, but cognitive therapy can help a lot of people) so why the need to label it?

What Dunx describes above is almost exactly what happened to me but in reverse I think. The OCD arose because I was depressed and would obsess on tiny things, believing absolutely that those things were the cause of my depression and if only I could sort them out I'd be happy. When, of course, I didn't sort them out I became more depressed, and so on and so on.
I can quite strongly reccomend hypnotherapy for the treatment of OCD. I wouldn't call it a cure but it sure helped me.
As far as diagnosis goes I don't think with these things that it's that clear cut. It's simply what you might call a personality trait, and we all exhibit different personality traits in differring amounts. Some people are talkative, some are fly-by-night, some are obsessive. I think we assign the term 'disorder' when one of these traits goes to an extreme such that it interferes with the normal day-to-day running of our lives. If we had a sound scientific way of actually measuring the extent to which each trait applied to us, the the term 'disorder' would be redundant.

[Lib] I think the label does help. One of the things that helped me (and is still helping me) pull up out of the spiral of OCD was the fact that I could give it a name. I know now that I have an obsession, and that makes it less real so that I can actually control and sometimes ignore it. When you're in the depths of OCD you fully do not realise that you are obsessing, you just think that there is nothing else to life.

[st d] I can listen to anyone, but I hate talking.
[Lib] Naming a thing (and to some extent inventing the thing by the process of naming it) can cut both ways. The Asp/Aut/AD(H)D concept is now out there to a degree to which it wasn't, not many years ago. This lets people use it as a convenient club to beat people they can't deal with, but also lets others recognise themselves in it and make contact with each other. I've read alt.support.autism on and off, and there's a lot of very interesting, politically conscious stuff goes by. In fact, a lot of the politics is exactly the same as for being gay, black, deaf, or female. For pretty much any position that has ever been taken on any of these issues, change the specifics and it would be something that someone has said about any of the others.
[BM] Anyone who enjoyed "Curious Incident" might also be interested in Elizabeth Moon's Speed of Dark, an SF novel in which the central character is autistic. The characterisation is quite similar.

Having a label helped me a lot for similar reasons to FG - I could capture my demon. Looking back at my life and the way that things have gone, I can also recognise ADD behaviours there (indeed, recognising ADD behaviours in my school reports was a key element of the diagnosis). This gives me power to forgive myself: ADD is not an excuse for my poor performances in the past, but I've spent too much of my life thinking of myself as lazy and weak. I feel that I understand better why my education was so skewed towards things I liked, or why I flit from subject to subject, or why I will focus on interesting things to the exclusion of all else, or why I have such an appalling sense of the passage of time. Recognising these things (rather than blaming myself for them) has helped a lot.

they tried to label me as Bi-polar (it's all coming out isn't it ?) but I just smiled knowingly and carried on reading the numberplates.

I'm normal on the surface. Whatever demons I carry with me are my business, but I'm approaching 40, single, childless and seem to be attracted by, and attractive to, men 15 years my junior. Make your own conclusions, then keep them to yourself! ;o)

[Lib] Ah, but they're not just labels. They're objective realities. Saying that someone has ADD, for example, isn't just saying that they have a bunch of particular personality traits - it means that they have a particular genetically transmitted condition which causes those traits. As Fat German says, if you don't have the traits very badly, you probably don't have the condition with which those traits are sometimes associated. But if you know that someone does have that condition then you can treat it, if treatment is appropriate. Describing this kind of diagnosis as "applying labels" is as silly as talking of disgnosing a broken leg or lung cancer or any other illness or condition as "applying labels". Certainly I have found it enormously helpful to be properly diagnosed because it means I can recognise OCD things for what they are and deal with them accordingly. And this is true of many other people I have spoken to, with OCD and with ADD as well.

[BM] There is a crucial difference, though, between a broken leg and these mental conditions or constitutions. In the case of a broken leg, you can demonstrate the objective existence of a physical pathology, and there are treatments known to be effective in pretty much every individual case. For ADD and the like, no-one has demonstrated either an objective pathology, or an objectively effective treatment based on an understanding of the pathology. All we have is descriptions of symptoms that cluster together (although no individual need show all of them), vague genetic correlations, and supposed treatments of very variable effect. There may indeed be a definite thing wrong with the brains of OCD sufferers, and there may be possible treatments as effective as setting a broken bone and applying a cast, but currently, very little is actually known.

(simulposted by a much more succinct post from Raak, but...)
[BM] Well... yes and no. I'll take ADD as my example, since that is obviously what I know best.

It is clear that ADD behaviours can be severe enough to cause problems, and that there are a lot of people who carry these behaviours around with them, but it is not certain that ADD is an objectively definable disease. For instance, ADD has been described and recognised by the US psychiatric establishment for more than 30 years (although its name has been changed a few even times over that time), but the UK establishment only officially recognised ADD in the 1990s - this despite the first published work on ADD being in the UK a hundred years before. Even in the US, ADD has only recently (ie in the last ten years or so) been widely recognised as occurring in adults - it was considered a childhood affliction which was obliterated by adolescence.

Part of the problem is that labelled conditions such as ADD, OCD, etc are note discrete: a bone is broken or it is not broken, but ADD has more degrees than there are labels, and even then it is not clear that even someone whose collection of symptoms is technically pathological enough to be so labelled is actually displaying anything more than just a strong personality trait. There has been work to scan brains under ADD-expressing conditions, and there are apparently common factors to those scans, but ADD is at best a collection of possibly related symptoms. But then is personality just an expression of brain chemistry?

As I say, my belief is that those who are actually disadvantaged by their ADD behaviours are those who have been trying to use their brains in ways which don't mesh with their brain chemistry or personality, where "one size fits all" education systems teach the same learning mechanisms to everyone regardless of how they really learn best. This is one of the reasons that I talk about my having ADD behaviours; Idon't consider myself to be diseased¹.

[1] this is going in a footnote because it's not part of the core point, but one of the things which concerns me about statements that ADD is underdiagnosed is that it is then treated as a disease. At this point the children (and this is where I become most concerned - it is almost always children) are dosed up with psychostimulants in order to make them fit in rather than training them to use their brains to their best advantage: the problem is not solved, it is avoided.

Absol-bloodly-lutely. Extremely well put. It extends beyond education and learning mechanisms too, in my view.

[Dunx and Raak] Hear hear. Nicely expressed.

As Raak says, a leg is generally broken or not broken, and the difference is pretty clear and agreed upon, but you get members of any minority group into a room (ADD sufferers, autists, gays, black people) into a room and ask them to define "ADD", "autism" or, heaven help you, "gayness" or "blackness" and you will soon have a heated debate on your hands.

...just witness the endless controversies in the last few decades over the definition and meaning of "disabled".

I agree with Dunx that the problem is really one of society not being able to handle people who are different. It's terrible that children, in particular, who have a different way of learning, get straitjacketed into the traditional methods and classed as having a problem if they don't fit in. It's especially ridiculous given how much society actually prizes ADD traits in many ways - such as creativity and spontaneity - which is how people like Billy Connolly, Robin Williams, and Ozzy Osbourne got to where they are today. Bill Clinton, of course, is the classic ADD kid made good. But at the same time, I do think that there is good evidence that ADD, in particular, is a discrete and specific disorder, with specific physiological causes, rather than a handy name for a bunch of sometimes associated phenomena. Raak is wrong to say that the genetic correlations of ADD are vague: they are not vague at all, and there is very good evidence for a strictly physiological basis, although of course how that basis manifests itself will vary according to conditions. Certainly ADD behaviours do vary from person to person in type and degree, which is one of the things that make it hard to diagnose, but it doesn't follow that the underlying cause varies - at least where ADD is the correct diagnosis. We have a rather skewed view of it in the UK because, as he says, it hasn't been officially recognised here for very long, compared to the US; in fact, some of the newer treatments for it, such as Concerta (essentially slow-release Ritalin) are unheard of to many supposed experts in this country. Plus, of course, the media like to fixate on issues of medication and horror stories about it. By the same token, it would be better if society could change to accommodate those of us who are different, but given that it can't, medication is a whole lot better than nothing. I have known people whose lives have been utterly ruined by ADD as well as by OCD. If they had been diagnosed earlier and given the help they needed - medication as well as proper counselling and behavioural therapy - who knows how things might have been different.

Something happened to my paragraph marks. I do apologise - as if my tedious exhalations aren't bad enough as it is...

[BM] So what are the discrete physiological causes of ADD popularly supposed to be, then?

[Projoy] Primarily temporal lobe dysfunction, at least according to Dr Daniel Amens who was one of the first to use brain scans to try and figure out what is different in an ADD brain. I've read his book Amens' "Healing ADD" where he describes the different areas of brain activation in the six varieties of ADD which he identifies. All of them share some degree of temporal lobe dysfunction.

The temporal lobe controls your ability to concentrate, and is more active when a brain is concentrating on something. A typical pattern in an ADD brain is that when it is used to concentrate deliberately on something then the temporal lobe is actually deactivated (ie there is less neural activity). I say "deliberately" because a common ADD behaviour is 'hyperfocus' where the brain will concentrate on something novel¹ to the exclusion of all else, but this is rarely deliberate.

Note that there is another book called "Healing ADD" by Thom Hartmann, that I would also recommend, but which is entirely different. In particular, Mr Hartmann specifically attacks Amens' work in scanning brains. But there we are.

[1] another very annoying aspect of this is that I cannot go to sleep if there is speech in earshot. I'll be drifting off quite satisfactorily when my brain will latch on to the interesting noises and amplify them in my perception. Similarly, I need silence or at least white noise if I need to think about a task which I am not entirely involved in, because otherwise my mind will concentrate on the novel rather than what I'm supposed to be doing.

Right, but that still leaves Raak's point unchallenged, doesn't it? There's nothing to suggest that there's a single cause for that particular pattern of brain activity.

Quite right.

For instance, even the mechanisms by which ADD brain patterns arise in the individual are not certain. There is a high correlation between ADD in parents and in their offspring (a figure of 70% is often quoted) which might suggest a genetic link, but it could equally be due to upbringing: the brain is plastic enough that learning will change its structure (no specific references, I'm afraid - I read this recently but can't remember where), and if much of a child's early development is achieved through mimicry then it's quite possible to imagine that parental ADD behaviours might imprint on the child.

It may well be that the role of genetics in mental development is overstated. There is some work (this book, for instance) which puts forward the argument that:

1. there is a common perception that genetic factors are the largest causative agent in mental illness
2. there is almost no evidence of a correlation between mental illness in children and in their parents (the book linked to states that the strongest correlation is in schizophrenia where there is a 50% correlation; nothing about ADD though)
3. if hypothesis (1) is wrong, then it must be environmental
4. the most pervasive environmental influence on children is their parenting
5. therefore the way you are raised is why your head works the way it does.

So, ADD may be at least as much a social phenomenon as a genetic one, although I also think that any learning which has this effect would have been at such a young age that there is no element of choice to it .

I wonder if I could change the subject. Feel free to ignore me. A co-worker is driving me crazy. Her husband hit her and one of the kids and she got a court order that he stay away. Since then, she is trying to find ways to meet him or to justify meeting him. He is possibly suicidal and she thinks this means she should help him. I point out how these suicidal guys sometimes take the family with them (to death), but she still vacillates. She is obsessed and talks about it constantly: outside on breaks, at my workstation, on the phone, in e-mail. She also obsesses about how she wants sex with him and graphically tells me stuff. Oddly, she listens to my advice, which is quite blunt and includes telling her she is not rational now, but I have a law background, not a psychological one. What do I do to get her to get the help she needs? How do I keep her from putting herself in harm's way? How do I (a gazillion other things)?

Personally, apart from - as you mention - trying to convince her to get some professional assistance I'd stay well out, Tina. If she truly is irrational, heaven knows what affect any well meant advice may have on her. If you do attempt to convince her to get some help I think I'd leave the broken relationship out of any coaxing and simply concentrate on the fact that she is under stress at this time ... Then again, I'm no psychologist!

[cross-posted with Duj] How very difficult for you. Are you in the UK? Can you point her towards the Samaritans or even Relate? In my experience [I've been a voluntary counsellor for some years] you are doing the right thing, in that you are listening. If you are happy to be just a sounding-board, for that is all you are, try not be too disappointed if she fails to heed your warnings. By confiding in you, I'm afraid it looks as though she is seeking justification and perhaps your approval for her future actions, ie. she is likely to meet up with him. I would say, your main problem is that her irrationality appears to have transmuted into outrageously selfish and controlling behaviour [towards you] and you have to guage how much more you can cope with. When she's next in 'listening' mode, you might gently point out that you have a life aswell. But unless she admits she needs professional help, there is little you can do, short of frog-marching her into a doctor's surgery. [Blimey! Do I sound like an agony aunt or what?]

Yes, this is what my sister says as well. I'm in the US and our employer has a counseling plan. My sister says, make excues when she comes to my cubicle. Yes, she is always seeking my approval. She will announce some awful plan, come to my desk, and ask what I think. I say I disapprove, and so far that works. But it's not right really. I'm not the professional. And she is selfish now. There is nothing in her life except her crisis. She lost maybe 20 pounds. She writes me at 3 a.m. and is not sleeping. Thanks for all your help. I just don't want to open the paper and find her dead.

I cannot put myself in your position and therefore cannot really understand, but it sounds like you are in a most awkward position - particularly if you feel obligated to your co-worker. Chalky is undoubtedly correct when she mentions listening but this, long term, could interfere with your own work. In view of the fact that your employer has a counseling service, why don't you have a talk with their staff? Depending on legal contingencies you may have to keep the name of your fellow worker out of any discussion, but at least you may receive 'proper' advice (and by that please do not think that I am denigrating Chalky's input.)

Tina] If you are concerned for her life then she definitely needs professional help. I think you have demonstrated the characteristics of a good listener - but you are not responsible for her situation. She has to be, so it may help to explain this to her in a kindly and assertive way. She may thank you for it.

Thanks to you all for the good advice.

I would echo what Dujon said in his last post - counsellors can be extremely useful even if you aren't the one who is in direct need of their services. It allows one to perspectivise the situation. Obviously the best case scenario is if somehow your colleague manages to sort her situation out; the worst case scenario is if this doesn't happen and you get dragged down with it. I found a counsellor was enormously helpful in staving off the latter when I was in a tricky situation.

To keep the competitive daughter away from MY Daq account - I suggested she sign up herself. She thinks she can knock spots of the rest of us. What a challenge. Any chance of slipping her into our mini-league? [x_sugarbabe_x - 3509835]

Some people have to work you know, others sit around waiting for the server to get back up ... so in between this and that, I've added x_sugarbabe_x.

Well, I'm going to have to waste about £600,000 in my NI-capping. Feh!

Coincedentally, the R4 programme "All In The Mind" had a segment on OCD on the 28th October edition.

... or rather, I should say, about hoarding. Slight misadvertising there. It's the first segment after the intro.

I've nothing much to add to the above (having just caught up with the foregoing) except to wish Tina luck with her situation and to thank those who've talked about such personal issues so openly in the ADD/OCD debate.
My own feelings are that I feel myself to be somewhat... eccentric, particularly socially. Some days I seem to fire on all cylinders and participate on all levels with "the group" (meaning colleagues & students) - cracking jokes and fitting into the ongoing banter as we work, but other days it's like I'm out of sync or speaking a different language.
I don't feel this or any other of my eccentricities are anything like extreme enough to warrant labelling as a disorder - and my feeling has been reinforced by some of the above - it's seldom if ever a real interference in my life. As Projoy suggested, when you hear stories from people who have suffered it humbles your own pretentions to such things!
I've often remarked flippantly that no-one worth knowing is "normal" or 100% sane - and I do believe it's the oddnesses about people that make them interesting day-to-day. Not so much that these traits are odd perhaps as that they're different, new and interesting. They characterise people, and make them unique.

I was also struck by Dunx's comments about difficulty falling asleep if there's audible conversation going on - I find falling asleep very difficult generally, and any sort of distraction is a killer: conversation (especially other people in the house talking, but also just tv) light - especially ambient light through the window, strong wind & rain (although they're kind of nice to listen to...) I've found music helps, although it needs to be the right sort of music - usually but not always without lyrics, often ambient. Dead Can Dance, Brian Eno's ambient classic Music For Airports and William Orbit's Strange Cargo III are all favourites to drop off to. They help shut out the rest.
Hmmm - this has turned into an insomnia post really...
[Celebdaq] I'm flabbergasted that Keanu Reeves is still dropping despite the last Matrix films opening... I was doing so well with Arnie before that too... ho hum.

[bl] "The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."

Could it be because the last Matrix film is getting bad reviews, rather than good?

[blamelewis] I sympathise greatly. I have always suffered terribly from this. I have been known, on more than one occasion, to be kept awake by my own heartbeat. This is an example of how diagnosis helps, however: now that I know I have OCD, I recognise much of this as silly obsessiveness within my own head. I don't really need conditions to be perfect before I fall asleep, I just think I do, and it's the obsessing about it that actually keeps me awake. And that alone makes things much easier. However, I still cannot sleep through any kind of human-made noise. Those damn humans!

Dunx/Blame/Bread] Sleep is something I adore. I could easily (and and often have) fallen asleep within earshot of conversation - que joke about boring conversations. But to try and fall asleep to music, even Brian Eno, would be impossible for me. I'd be far too wrapped up in thinking about the music to let it lull me. I prefer natural darkness and scilence - as experienced on Shetland - where there is vitually no man-made background light or sound.

[Bob] I've noticed a big difference since moving out of Glasgow - there's no longer a streetlight glaring in my window, and only very occasionally do the sounds of drunken revelry intrude. {Bread] i feel sometimes it's the whirl of thoughts in my head keeping me awake - that and being insufficiently tired - I know part of the problem is my lack of regular exercise also. [JLE - Matrix] Bad press should count as much as good - look at Prince Charles this week!

I fall asleep listening to Radio 4 - I like the noise of voices as I doze off. If there are too many of my thoughts whirling around in my head, (and this is where I start to think I'm odd, after reading everyone else's confessions) I kind of 'take dictation' from the shipping forecast or the news or whatever is broadcast. I hear the words, then see them in my mind's eye on the page, the shape of the letters and the shape and length of the word. It leaves no room for other thoughts and I'm asleep within minutes. I can't listen to music to fall asleep - it has a stuimulant effect, no matter what kind of music it is.

Adult to small child who has just answered the door: "Is your Mummy in?"
Small child: "She's asleep listening to Woman's Hour."

I don't seem to have this trouble. Diet and preoccupation seem to be pretty much the only factors that affects whether I sleep. Thus I must not eat after 7 if I want to fall asleep by 11. And almost nothing wakes me. Someone was stabbed to death on my street once and I slept through the whole incident. Provided I have followed the eating rule, I can fall asleep to any music or stimulus, even violent atonal C20th music. I fully expect to die in a fire someday.

I am fortunate. I fall asleep when I want to, which means when I am tired. I sleep lightly but it never really bothers me if I wake in the night [or if I am woken] because a cup of tea usually sorts me out. I wake when I need to. How dull.

Not really - BUT - come on, Dr.Q+ - you are within sight of the line (or at least in line of site.) You can make it ... deep breath ... push ... push ... only a bit to go ...

I'm afraid that Doris_Newbold and ffiish are about to lose a bit of well earned dosh, Doris though having just made the finishing post.

[Chalky] not at all, sounds blissful! [celebdaq] That's it, I've sold Keanu, his usefulness offscreen clearly not in proportion to his arboresence on screen... it Prince Charles for me! (As the Butler said) (allegedly)

I like sleep but sleep doesn't like me. I can't do it properly at all. And following on another comment, I fully expect to die by being stabbed to death as I set fire to Projoy's house.

At the beginning of the week, when I have classes, I get about 3-5 hours of sleep a night. At the end of the week, I get 10-12. Plus, any night of the week, I might decide not to sleep at all. In this fashion, I am training my body not to expect any particular amount of sleep at any particular time. I'll never be jet-lagged again!
[noise] I can't handle TV or conversation when trying to sleep at all, but I can handle music if it doesn't have lyrics, and is very repetative. For instance, I've fallen asleep underneath tables in the middle of raves a couple of times. Of course, driving all day to get there and then having to unload all the speakers undoubtedly helped.

I used to have terrible trouble sleeping through other people's noise. My lodger used to have music on at night fairly quietly and it used to drive me mad, especially the fact that the bassline was audible more than the rest, to the point where we had a screaming row about it. She couldn't see my point of view and I was incensed that she couldn't see mine. Now that I know I'm obsessive about it I can sleep through it just fine. If it's me making the noise (my music, my radio, etc) I can sleep through practically anything.

FG] I couldn't stand any music at night either. I once shared a room in an International hostel with a guy who had an immense collection of pop music from Ghana. I had to move rooms to stay sane. The ex-roommate then started to make claims that I was racist (notes on the message board - complaints to the hostel management) because I didn't like being kept up till 4.00am every night. In an international setting, this was extremely hurtful.

This may seem funny, but it is really very sad. I someone who suffered from Tourette's syndrome recently. For some bizarre reason, he'd chosen to become a street performer - specialising in children’s entertainment. There must be a reason why he chose such an inappropriate career path.

I met someone

[Bob] Sounds interesting. Tell us more!