My brain won't shut up.

I mean, it's never quiet. I'm literally not capable, as some people claim to be, of "thinking about nothing." When someone asks me what I'm thinking about and I answer, "nothing," that's sort of a shorthand for, "Well, I was looking at that spot on the wall and then I remembered the time I was in second grade and I told that girl about the boy I had a crush on and she told him about it the very next day and I wondered what things I'd go back and change if I could and I might start with just about six months ago and get the stuff for this audit lined up a little more neatly but now we're going to have to redo about two-thirds of our stuff and have to revisit the whole plan-versus-process issue and I really don't want to get into an argument with CJ about it but maybe our boss will take my side and it won't be my problem and hey, I wonder if the Computer Services guys brought Random's computer back to him yesterday like they promised and oh, crap, I need to find out about that software waiver and then something moved in my peripheral vision and I looked to see if it was a spider but it was just a fly and I've always wondered what it would be like to have wings and then I remembered being about six and being incredibly impressed with my dad because he killed three flies at once and I'm still kind of impressed, actually, because I think I might've managed to kill three flies in my whole life and I really ought to do the dishes tonight because they're kind of piling up in the sink but then what if someone logs in that I want to chat with and I wish K.T. would post the writing she's been doing lately so I can read it and Circle really really needs to be rewritten but man, that's just too much work to contemplate right now and if we actually got it published would Penny think that was really cool or kind of dorky and I wonder how old she'd have to be before I was willing to let her read it, anyway and oh heck, does she need to take another spare outfit to daycare tomorrow and just what the heck am I going to make for dinner because I forgot to take any meat out of the freezer last night to thaw but I guess I'll figure something out with that sausage and-"

I didn't stop to think about any of that, and it's actually only about a quarter of what went through my brain while I was typing, because the brain, it's much faster than the fingers, and it also is capable of very limited multitasking. There's always something going on in there. But sometimes I can chain it to a sort of background hum by locking the train of thought into something relatively slow, or something that goes in circles (but isn't upsetting).

Or by reading. If I get really sucked into a book, the brain focuses entirely on the story at hand, and even if it isn't quiet, it's not bouncing from subject to subject. Which is why Matt has had to learn to make eye contact with me before talking to me when I'm reading, because otherwise the brain will just take whatever he says and stuff it in a corner to process later because it's really busy with something else right now, and then it disintegrates before I can get to it. (Well, that and my hearing isn't all it should be.)

And this is why I hated James Joyce's writing. I mean, I'm willing to admit that it's technically neat that he actually managed to capture the feel of the babbling and randomly-firing brain, but... When I pick up a book, it's at least partly an attempt to escape that sensation. If I really wanted to experience stream-of-consciousness, I'd just listen to my brain.

--Liz