INTRODUCTION

I decided to do what I should have done to begin with and transfer and compartmentalize my weirdness into different places so it all doesn't become like the verbal trail-mix from hell. I have just moved all of my scattered thoughts from LJ and other places to this blog, where hopefully I can keep it all in quarantine. My regular blog of collected (and better organized) essays can be found here: Mirth and Matter.


As for why... read on.

I really can't come up with a better word for the thousand little inconsequential and mostly totally unconnected thoughts that zip through my head in any given hour. I don't know that this happens to other people or what but my brain NEVER, EVER shuts up. When I say that I have a non-stop running commentary going on in my mind, I really am not kidding--it's part sportscast, part movie commentary, part narration, part self-evaluation, and part scathingly sarcastic social commentary and when I say it is constant I mean it NEVER STOPS. I'm doing it right now, even as I write this. I've done it so long that I don't really even notice I'm doing it anymore--most of the time it's all in one ear and out the other and I rarely remember any particular talking points or specific comments for longer than a few minutes. There aren't any pauses or breaks or segues anywhere, either--thoughts just blend one into the next without stopping, even when they're (as they usually are) complete non-sequiturs. I'm a horribly disorganized kind of person and my head is no exception. Sometimes I think that having fuzzy hair is like a visual metaphor for what goes on underneath it.

People who write professionally (or think they should) like to offer a lot of 'record your thoughts' advice and suggest keeping a small notebook or a tape recorder or, more recently, using some kind of notepad program on your phone if you happen to have one and using it to quickly jot down your thoughts so you don't forget them. There's nothing wrong with that advice, and I'm sure it works well for many people and I made a good many serious, hopeful, enthusiastic attempts over the years to do it, but eventually I had to concede defeat. Recording the things that go on in my head is just plain exhausting. The sheer amount of completely pointless but long-winded drivel I publish on a daily basis suggests there's an awful lot going on up there and to be frank it's barely the tip of the iceberg. It's only because I can't be bothered to commit most of it to memory and almost immediately forget everything that these entries are not longer and significantly more numerous.

'Scattershot' does it no justice at all but I can't think of another word to usurp and I'm definitely not the sort of person capable of contributing a new word to the English language. For one thing, how would I spell it? I don't imagine many people notice unless they are, like me, the kind of anal-retentive asshole who notices stupid tiny things like this, but I am fairly inconsistent with my spelling conventions. I freely pick between British English and American English spellings (and pronunciations, as well, though you don't get that through text) depending on how comfortable I feel with either. Even when I generally stick with one set of spelling conventions over the other, I still have no problems using the other for certain words in the same spelling family. So while I end words like 'theatre' with the British -re ending, I also write 'meter' and 'liter' (actually, there seems to be a pattern to this--I use the -re ending for everything except units of measurement, where for some reason I feel more comfortable using -er). Even worse, sometimes I'll actually use both spellings of THE SAME WORD interchangeably--like with 'anaesthesia/anesthesia'--and completely at random. Sometimes I'll use both spellings in the same freaking paragraph, though I make an effort to go back and make them all match.

See that? That up there? That is how my mind works all the time. I am not capable of quieting it down, or turning it off. This is the kind of stuff that goes through my head all day, every day. I've gotten good at ignoring a lot of it but it's still there in the periphery, juuuuust invasive enough that I always know it's there even though I'm not listening to it--like a television in another room or neighbouring apartment that's JUST loud enough to be heard but not loud enough to be particularly disruptive.

So this is going to become my sounding board for all of the unconnected thoughts and half-thoughts that my mind collects throughout the day. Don't expect too terribly much insightful, inspiring stuff here because that isn't how my brain works--if it was I'd've had a job in the greeting card business years ago. All entries prior to this one have been coped from my old Livejournal, which was intended to be a fanfiction archive but quickly degenerated into a chronicle of madness just shy of criminally insane. Everything else is new, and will be updated as I see fit--which, as you will soon learn, is just as unpredictable as the contents themselves.

As for the scattershot I've managed to remember today:

Seriously, at what point have you stayed up too late to be entitled to go to bed? When are you basically required to go take a shower and rejoin the living instead of sleeping? I don't actually have a night shift that justifies being able to sleep all day long, but I still stay up late until it turns from 'late' to 'early'. Sometimes I'll actually debate with myself whether or not I'm still allowed to go to bed and will argue so long that eventually I HAVE to get on with my day and don't go to bed at all. I've started calling this 'overshooting the bedtime threshold'.

I really don't like red light cameras, though not for the obvious reasons. I won't say anything regarding their ethical or constitutional validity because frankly no matter what I say I will deeply and terribly offend a whole lot of people. Obviously, though, habitually ignoring traffic signals is not only illegal and dangerous, it's also incredibly rude. My beef with the cameras has nothing to do with whether or not I agree with their very existence, but rather the horrible BLINDING flash that completely bleaches out my vision every time one of them goes off. This isn't a problem during the day because you barely even notice a camera flash in daylight, even one bright enough to flood an entire four-lane intersection with enough light to take a photograph. At night, though, when your eyes are adjusted to a lower light level, the flash is just blinding. It never lasts long,but the fact that my vision is temporarily dangerously impaired is worrisome. I never actually had experience like this with red light cameras before I moved here. Maryland and Virginia had them, of course, but they never used a flash to illuminate the license plate (this is how they send you your ticket)--instead they employed night-vision and very sensitive light-sensing equipment and utilized the ambient light as well as the reflective surface of license plates (the law is, your plate has to be reflective and you face huge fines if it isn't) to read the plate number. This is a much safer system than blinding drivers every time some jerkoff decides he's too important to stop for red lights.

I really need to stop believing that the few minutes I save in the shower every day by NOT shaving for almost three months in any way balances out the inevitable time-consuming and extremely annoying battle that eventually takes place when I DO eventually decide to tackle my body hair.

When I called work today to ask if we had our checks in (we don't, and I am pissed--we're supposed to get them every two weeks but haven't been paid in over a month), I realized that without exception every woman who works there does the same thing. Even Shanon and I, graduates of the Bea Arthur School of Female Baritones, do it. When addressing customers and answering the phones, we automatically adopt a high-pitched, girlish, almost sing-songy way of speaking. Like when you talk to a baby or an animal. When we talk amongst ourselves, we use our normal pitch and tone--but for some reason we ratchet it up an octave to talk to customers. Maybe we're instinctively trying to appear softer, sweeter, more approachable, and less threatening? I've no idea. The guys don't do this but they'd all sound pretty fucking creepy if they did. I'm sure there have been gender-study papers and research done on this.

The compact all my glittery eyeshadows are in is exactly the same size and shape and looks remarkably like a smart phone. (Have a look.)

Of the eight and a half months I've lived in New York, school has been in session for about six and a half of them. Granted my own personal schedule is inconsistent and rarely coincides with local schools, nonetheless I noticed something. This entire time I have not seen a single school bus that wasn't a 'short bus'.

Finding money in pants pockets while sorting laundry is a bit like god rewarding me for actually doing it like a big girl instead of just spraying my dirty clothes with Febreeze and hoping for the best.


Chinese takeout is urban comfort food.