#410

Tempted to write one of those meta-posts that involve writing about the diffuse sensation of having to look around for something to write about. Ah, there we go.

Focusing on a topic may be difficult owing to how moving stuff around and making deep structural changes in how both the house and my office are laid out and arranged and used has left my books scrambled and disarranged, which makes me feel like my mind is in a dyadic state with this wavelength. Not necessarily scrambled and disarranged, but two other adjectives, which would be different adjectives if the original adjectives were modified.

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What is the maximum number of adjectives a phenomenon can be said to support, or contain, or reflect, or embody, or whatever? 

Thank you, pointless, idle curiosity. You have plagued my waking hours and denied me sleep since I was a toddler, but perhaps I have never in my life known true boredom. Who knows!

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It strikes me that what I call boredom is not precisely definition one as far as most people are concerned--as in, the problem is that there is nothing to do or that I am not drawn to my usual activities or new ones. Boredom, to me, is the oppressive sensation that I can't only do exactly what I want to do for uninterrupted stretches of timelessness. Boredom is the imposition of the knowledge that eventually I will be forced to stop what I'm doing in order to do something else I'd rather not do, rather than simply be involved infinitely in what I'm doing till I'm good and ready to stop and then do the next thing I want to do, and thus feeling unable to turn my mind or hand to anything in the interim, as well as a sense of being put upon. So I just sit there, frustrated, executive function arrested till I can find the key.

Maybe there is a better word, perhaps in German, for this feeling. 

Precognausea. I made it up. It's not quite right, but it's also useful in that it describes another of my strange mental habits, which is thinking through any given choice until every option looks bad to me because I have mapped out sufficient negative possibilities that inaction is prefferable. I do this quite a lot. It may be an activity designed to justify a certain laziness in my character, but more pointedly I think it is yet another method I employ in doing only what I want to do, not necessarily what has to get done. 

Thinking of the veritable blizzard of paperwork I've left undone till it was irrelevant in this lifetime. I'm basically smirking, I find. Ah, I just chuckled. Shameless.

"I should do that right now," I say, perhaps even out loud, and next second, I'm working on a short story and getting into some reading after that. Smash cut to three weeks later, thinking "Shoulda done that shit. I should do that and this other shit now," and next second, I am doing pushups before washing the dishes before I play some video games. It's not about my attention span--whatever I do instead, I'll probably do for hours at a time--it's that critical wherewithal required to do a made-up task for unrewarding reasons.

"Actually, why the fuck should I? Fucking bold of you to ask, when you think about it." Some of us are born or have been indelibly marked with the curse of lighting up with this avenue of inquiry, I guess. I don't want to think it. It is a synaptic function as natural and unavoidable as any other flash of brain lightning.

--JL