Eccentric Flower:199906/Listen to your brain honey

From Eccentric Flower

«June 1999 «Eccentric Flower

Listen to your brain, honey

The message board I briefly flirted with here is gone. It was a nice idea, but ... sometimes my brain is telling me things and I'm slow to catch on because I don't want to listen.

When I put the system up, I realized its design would need to be changed a little to accomodate the way I write things. The original system was meant for mouth organ, where one column equals one thread, and the threads are strongly tied to the column date. Here, that wouldn't work. Since I wasn't going to make a thread for every entry, the best thing to do would have been to make it so users could start threads on their own. That meant that I'd have to unlink the file names from the dates - as it was, if two people tried to make a thread on the same day, the system would get confused.

None of this is hard. I planned it all out. Then I didn't make the changes. For days and days I didn't make the changes.

Today I sat down to make the changes and my brain literally refused to focus on it. I'd think about anything else. Every time I tried to concentrate, my brain would sidestep.

That's when I realized what my mind was saying to me: A message board doesn't really belong here. It's not appropriate. It doesn't match.

And once I stopped trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, poof, my powers of concentration came back. I wrote a script to remove all traces of Bocca from these pages - the whole thing took less than ten minutes to excise.

And I feel like a weight has been lifted, which is really weird, because I didn't know my brain thought it was a problem in the first place.

My mind does that sometimes. I have to remember to step back and let my brain work in the manner it wants.

Yesterday I confirmed that the date for the NYC gathering of escribitionists was indeed set in stone, and I could therefore make definite plans. Now, I am not a planner by nature. When we go places, it's Nonelvis who shops for the plane fares obsessively (I'm not complaining, she gets great fares) and makes a thousand and one itineraries and buys travel guides and so forth. I don't plan. With one exception: I do sometimes buy maps. I like maps.

But for some reason my brain yesterday was telling me "You must go and book all your travel arrangements right this minute! They must be confirmed today!"

So before I knew it I had bought round-trip train tickets (yes - I like train rides) and was busily combing hotel web sites, shopping rates, and then suddenly I was all booked! For a trip in August!

Honestly, there are processes inside my head whose workings are wholly unbeknownst to me.