You know. . . with the typewriters and stuff. It's a metaphor. . . . or maybe an analogy. . . or is it allegory? Regardless, you can be certain there's a whole host of stuff being typed.

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Mid Morning Mumblings

When I say mid-morning I am referring to the chronological morning, as opposed to the actual rising of the sun. This would of course be because I have the joy of working nights a few days this week, tonight being the first such night. Nothing like a long night of minimal happenings to finally get me to post something.

About that - I've obviously been away for a while. I kind of took a step away from things for a while after recent events. I've certainly been around, and I've even had things to say, but just haven't really had the drive to put anything down on paper (in the purely digital sense). I think this was partially due to wanting to let my last post run its course for a little bit, and partially due to my general inability to coalesce my thoughts into any kind of cohesive form.

Honestly, that's always been a bit of my problem. I've never been able to type things in a 'stream of consciousness' fashion. This is something that has always been frustrating to me, especially when it comes to things like blogging. I'm good for a quick snippet of a thought, but any long or drawn out analysis usually takes a painstaking amount of time for me to complete. My blogger editing page is littered with numerous half finished posts for which I either ran out of time, or my train of thought derailed.

I sometimes wonder if it's a case of my brain being slightly miswired when compared with others. Things can make complete sense in my head, and I can explain things perfectly to myself, but I often have a horrible time explaining things to other people, and I sincerely doubt that it's anyone's fault but mine. The best I ever did in any class I have taken was 9th grade geometry: 102% was my final score for the class. The entire class was nothing but doing different geometric proofs, and the teacher was completely anal retentive about how they should be done, but it all came extremely easily to me. Conversely, it made almost no sense to other people in the class, including some of the most logically minded people I have ever met. This gave me the impression that something in the way my brain works is not quite right. However, trying to say that I'm somehow different from everyone else sounds elitist, and I really am not sure that it's true.

I feel kind of stuck in the middle sometimes. While I am well aware that I'm generally better at logical thought than I am at creative thought, I still don't think I'm an entirely logical person. I am not a good artist, I can't really sing, the only dance move I can do effectively is to skank (skank: A rhythmic dance performed to reggae or ska music, characterized by bending forward, raising the knees, and extending the hands), and any poetry I might try to write invariably ends up being Shel Silverstein in iambic pentameter. I'm good at debate, I'm good with math and science, I can pick up almost any piece of reasonably designed technology and start using it without any need for instruction, and I easily work my way through almost anything on a computer (especially if it's in Excel). By all signs I should be a 100% logically minded, follow the straight and narrow, set in stone type of person. . . but I'm not.

I'm good at debate because I can usually argue my opponents' points as well or better than they can, which IMO requires a certain bit of mental flexibility. I do my best work in math or science in coming up with new ways to approach a problem, often times using a creative method to simplify an overly complex task.

Then there's my sense of humor. Often times it's a little. . .well. . .off. I am most amused with myself when doing or saying things that are for the most part entirely non-sensical. Sometimes it's actually funny, sometimes it's downright weird, but it's pretty much always amusing to me. I have a degree of witty off the cuff humor that I'm happy with, and for the most part I don't think it's over the top or in any way intrusive. Bah, I'm starting to sound pretentious.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that I think my brain is way too fast for my fingers. By the time I've finished typing the first sentence in a paragraph, my brain had already moved on to the next paragraph. It's like I have A.D.D. with my own thoughts! Just look at the paragraphs above for reference. . . there's no obvious flow there. It's bad enough when I'm speaking, and it's probably why I often have a hard time explaining things to people. It gets significantly worse when I try to type it out. . . there's just no good way for me to maintain the flow of words in any kind of semblance of organized thought.

So does anyone out there have any special secrets to help with blogging? I'd love to update more regularly, it's not like I don't have any thoughts I want to put down. I just hate the length of time it generally takes me to complete any of my friggin posts. It takes me no time to think of it, why must it take so long to write it out?

Of course, it doesn't help that I'm trying to write this in the wee hours of the morning when running almost exclusively on Mt. Dew. I thought about responding to a DCR (document change request), but all I could think of as an effective response was "I hate you! I hate you! Die! Die! Die!" which is a little extreme, but not far from my honest thoughts regarding the individual who sent me the DCR in the first place.