Brain mush

Oh brain, how helpful and yet totally distracting you can be. I often end up thinking about things that are totally irrelevant to what I need to be focusing on. The jerk (I’m allowed to say this b/c of recent events…whole other blog…) lecturing to me about something to do with hormones (perhaps I should have been listening) doesn’t care about my plans for dinner or that I need new socks, but my brain wants to think about both of those things in great detail.

In high school, I had a friend who it seemed would say something totally out of left field at the most random times. We gave her a hard time about it, but she always had a train of thought leading her there. I do the same thing now. Example: someone says they want mushrooms on their pizza at lunch, I think: mushrooms are in my fridge. I need to cook them. How do I want to cook them? I wanted to use them for the nachos at one point so, who do I want to eat nachos with? What night would be best to cook and eat these nachos? And before I know if I’m asking my neighbor is they have a pound of ground beef to bring over or if they would rather be in charge of chips. This typically gets some puzzled looks since I haven’t spoken aloud anything that was happening in my brain. The discussion went from mushrooms to chips on Thursday night and that jump at least makes sense.

Some days it seems my brain was set on overdrive but my body never made it past the start button. I can over analyze a situation faster than I like to admit. One might think this could be very useful in high stress situations….yeah? Well, it’s not. Quite the opposite actually. For example, during a test if I get hung up on choosing between answer a and answer b, spending four minutes criticizing my choices for lunch isn’t very helpful. Staring at the teacher and contemplating about their wardrobe is also not helpful. Especially when the teacher than looks up and notices you staring and stares back like they are trying to figure out if you are cheating or about to have a seizure. Then of course there are the days when I am reading my notes and suddenly realized I’ve been looking at the same page for twenty minutes and day dreaming about places I want to visit. I would like to harness this ability and apply it to something useful. First, I need to figure out how to harness it…