My brain is in overdrive mode again. I hate it. It makes me quite unproductive. I hate it when I’m unproductive. This post is a brain dump in bid to win my productivity back
I spent the early part of the day editing my books – pretty good effort with 1 chapter left to go for basic editing. Future edits can be done once the books have been published.
The rest of the day was spent with my brain in overdrive. No idea what caused it. Perhaps the increased sugar intake due to ingestion of carbohydrates. Either way I am overthinking the smallest of things.
The afternoon was spent evaluating a potential consulting gig. A yes/no thing took me more than 5 hours of deliberating. It was an astrophysics based statistics consulting, but I wanted more information. The domain specific knowledge usually helps me with decision making in any statistical analysis. I didn’t have enough trigonometry knowledge to take up the gig (well, I could do the statistics part, but not knowing the background of the problem makes me a poor problem solver). I should have rejected that outright. But I spent 5 hours deliberating on it.
I spent time brushing up on basic trigonometry, and then the ideas started flooding in. Maybe I could do this! Maybe I could do that! I could not calm my brain down. Maybe because it’s a Friday. I said no to the consulting job.
Then I had dinner. The food was okay. We had desserts. I recalled why I don’t actually have a food review blog – I could not stop mentally criticizing everything I ate. I deconstructed everything in my mind, down to its basic ingredients, and would be mentally telling myself how to improve textures, tastes and flavours.
One particularly sticky idea that I had was creating a milk that tasted like chocolate. By that I mean, normal looking white milk, except it was a chocolate milk. I felt like I had to go home to try. I didn’t get the chance to.
Brain on overdrive, I started overthinking everything. I went to the supermarket to pick up grapes and fruit. I thought about a joke about Abelian grapes and started chuckling to myself. Partner thought I went a little nuts, so I told her. She didn’t find it funny. Told the joke to 3 other people. Nobody found it funny. Told a number of other jokes that nobody found funny.
I started wondering about the concept and nature of humour and what makes people laugh. Clearly not me. Then I recalled the stereotype people laugh at. The Big Bang Theory was one of them. I used to like it a lot. Then I realized that you were supposed to laugh at the characters, not with the characters. Now I just watch it because I had followed it for 7 seasons so far – the sunk cost fallacy clearly affects even my currently hyperrational state of mind.
I cannot shut off. I am so tired. I know a few things will shut me off – movies, or drugs. Even with movies I don’t seem to enjoy them as much as I used to. I overanalyze every frame. I overanalyze story structure and see twists coming a mile away. I overanalyze cinematography and colour grading to get a sense of things. In the past this used to be subconsciously done. Now it’s active and conscious. It’s tiring.
So very tiring. Before writing this post, I sat in bed wondering how Superman would navigate given that he has just learned how to fly. Clearly navigating the skies by ground based landmark is one way, but then the vivid scene of Superman flying across the African savannah breaking up herds of zebras kept playing in my mind. It was a wonderful scene but it raises questions about how Superman navigates while flying. Birds can sense magnetic fields in their beaks. Can Supes do the same? Perhaps he goes home by doing the Christopher Reeve thing – flying to low earth orbit and re-entry. But how would he deal with the relativistic effect? Assuming he has a superior sense, he would definitely sense the difference.
By then it was obvious I needed a brain dump. My laptop is closest, so my blog is my tool. These things are running in my head all the time. I can’t sleep nor can I be productive. My thoughts branch out way too quickly and way too often now. I don’t really feel like sedating myself, and I don’t do trees alone, nor do I want to given my hyperactive state right now.
I’m just so tired.