It's the third house on the right...

So much about us is hard wired into our person. The debate is always at foot with respect to how much of our personality is learned versus inherited behaviour. In fact, even though a great deal of research has been conducted and volumes of articles have been written addressing this particular subject, the door is still wide open on the decision of whether many mental illnesses are caused by the subjects upbringing or not. Not that it really matters, but to me, as for many others, the answer is probably in between a combination of both nature and nurture.

I don't ever remember my father volunteering to stop the car and ask for directions when he was lost. On the other hand, I do remember my mother insisting that he do so. The male inability or unwillingness to stop in the middle of his journey to ask for directions is most definitely one of the most common complaints from the opposite sex. I for one am no exception to the rule. In fact, I am probably worse than most as this does not only carry into my vehicle wandering mode, but it also enters my behaviour while shopping. I find myself many times going aisle by aisle searching for something while sometimes even walking past a store employee without asking where the location of the elusive product might be, and in the meantime covering the entire square footage of the store. I am not an extremist, if the employee is cute, I'll probably stop and ask just to hear what the tone of her voice sounds like, another typical male quirk. With time and age I have gotten a little better in my unwillingness to stop and ask for help, but if I was to quantify it I would probably give myself less than a five percent improvement. Obviously, this behaviour is much worse when I am all alone and can get away with it without being challenged by anyone else.

Leave it to most of us men and I promise you that talking would be a thing of the past. Most of us are terrible at communicating. If it were not because we have to get to know you in order to be able to get in bed with you, our longest sentence would probably be "What's for dinner?" So I give ninety percent of the credit for most men's ability to speak to the opposite gender, mostly because you possess things that are extremely dear to us and have learned the power of negotiation for us to get them. I say "most" men because there is, as their will always be, in every situation exceptions to every rule. So men, please do not send me a comment saying that you do not fit this stereotype, yes, we all know how perfect "you" are...hahaha! And to the beautiful ladies that might be reading, don't for one second imagine that we are not aware of your mystical powers to get what you want from us, in fact, we are counting on them. If it were not because there might be something that you need or want from us, we would have such a small chance to probably even get to know you. OK, so that we are all clear, this is not a complaint, just a statement of fact.

I am not big on re-sending emails that at the bottom tell you that you're probably going to be bald in the next 24 hours if you do not forward what you just read. In fact, no offense to any of my readers that throughout the past have included me in their list of chain replies emails because you need to know that I do read most of them. If the message is not so long that it will take me half a day to read it, I will read it. However, unless by the end of all the reading I am squirming on my chair in laughter (which might be more common than you think), or I have emptied a box of Kleenex (much less common than you think), I simply delete the message. So no, this does not mean that I don't especially love you, all it means is that I don't see the point in returning it to you because you obviously already read it!

My favorite non personal emails are the ones that either make fun of my own culture, or my own or opposite gender. I love the ones that remind me of silly words we say in Puerto Rico that mean absolutely nothing to anyone else in the world. I also love the ones that have to do with men and women interacting in a humorous way. Maybe in one of my posts I will dig to see if I can find a few of my favorites and I will share them with you, but most likely you have already heard them anyway. I think that it is wonderful that we are able to laugh at each other and ourselves. I consider myself to be a fairly smart person, yet I do so many dumb things throughout the day that most of the time I just can't help but laugh at myself.

Recently I noticed that my mature brain is having a bit of difficulty getting the right words out through speech. I find myself thinking of something, but then saying it all mixed up with something else that I obviously have filed deep in my head. For example, instead of saying "Facebook", I will say something dumb like "Spacebook", which is obviously a combination of Facebook and MySpace. This is truly not on purpose and sometimes even embarrassing depending to whom I am talking to. I need to start writing them down to share with you because it is happening almost everyday, and it is hilarious. It might stop being hilarious the day I can't say a complete sentence without doing this mental jigsaw puzzle of words, but until then I will simply laugh it off.

OK, I admit, this post has lost it's original purpose so I will try to get a little bit back on track. What I have been reading more about and researching on my own is what might gender have to do with some of the behaviour of my son. How much of it is learned behaviour, which I probably have a chance to influence, and how much of it might be genetics, to which I most likely have very little influence at all. I know and understand that the only reason that I am more of a neat freak is because my mother's influence in my upbringing with respect to cleanliness. I was not always this orderly, so outside influences have made me this way. Does this mean that I might have some kind of positive influence on my son's apparent disorderly behaviour?

Something that is very interesting to me is that when I took my oldest son to have a Neurological Evaluation performed at the age of 13 by the Loma Linda University Children's Hospital, the results were enlightening yet confusing. A battery of testing was conducted throughout a period of two months. All of these tests were eventually scored on what is described as a percentile scale, in which the value that you obtain shows where the individual tested scored in comparison with other individuals that have taken the same test. In other words, a score of 97th percentile does not mean that the individual got 97 percent of the answers write, instead what it means is that on average the individual scored 97 percent higher than the other individuals that took the same test. It was obvious to me when the final report was given to us that this process at least told me two very clear thing about my son, that he has an amazing mind, and that whenever he scored low, it must mean something important. Of a list of 39 tests conducted the following is a summary of results:

• 11 tests scored above the 90th percentile
• 9 tests scored between the 80th and 89th precentile range
• 7 tests scored between the 70th and 79th percentile range
• 4 tests scored between the 60th and 69th percentile range
• 6 tests scored between the 50th and 59th percentile range
• 1 test scored at 16th percentile
• 1 test scored at 5th percentile

It should be obvious to just about anyone that the bottom two scores have to mean something important. On the Processing Speed Index Test my son scored 85, which placed him on the 16th percentile range and it also means that out of every 100 other children that have taken this test, at least 84 of them scored higher than him. This particular test determines the speed in which an individual can mentally process simple or routine information without making errors. Even though my son is able to process very complex information at very fast speeds, his mind basically slows down to a crawl when he does the opposite of processing simple and routine information.

A total of four subtests were conducted in a battery of tests called Color-Word Interface Test. On three of the four subtests my son scored between the 50th and 63rd percentile. However, on the subtest called Inhibition Switching Test, my son scored 5, which placed him on the 5th percentile. The comment attached to this score read "In every day life, this may lead him to have difficulty adapting to changing situations and may say things impulsively without considering consequences." A major understatement in my humble opinion considering the current situation with my son.

The total assessment made some of what I interpreted as "light recommendations" at the end of the report. They suggested a sleep study because of his history of insomnia, family therapy because of our divorce in progress, and individual therapy to help him cope with both the divorce and his academic demands. They also suggested that we allow him to not have to change between households too frequently, and try to maintain consistency in his living arrangements, and that we use consistent discipline strategies so that he would be clear about boundaries.

Not once did this 60 day process try to understand the why of any of the results. Why is my son's processing speed of simple and routine information so much slower than 84% of most other kids? Why is his inhibition switching ability only comparable to 5% of the rest of the children population? To me this is obviously about how he is wired. Can anything be done to improve the parts of his brain that slows down so dramatically when it comes time to adapt to changing situations and control his impulsivity? Why is it that so little is known and that the experts in these areas are so unwilling to find real solutions to some extremely real problems. At the time of the testing only a few of the consequences for these deficiencies where noticeable. Today it is written all over everything he does, he says, and most likely thinks. These dramatic changes in his personality and behaviour, are they an indication that things are going to get worse, or that eventually they will improve?

More than anything I would love to know if there is anything that I, as a parent, as his father, his male figure, can do to help him improve and get better? Is there any power on my end to influence the outcome of his mental development? At this moment, I fear that even though we are sometimes able to communicate, share, and still learn from each other, the dominance of the effects of taking certain drugs might be out of my reach to compete against. We all know that at his age we did not value so much the opinion of our parents, mostly because we knew they would probably tell us to stop and decease our desire to taste life, and the taste was so good! Is there a way to taste it without damaging ourselves? Most of us survived it. Me, being more of a nerdy type, it was a given I would survive it all. However, not all survived, some went down deep into places that they were never able to come out of. What a shame, there is so much more to life than tasting what seems so important in those early days. I pray that God will show me the way to be part of his healing process and allow me the chance to see him through it all.

Dad