Complex Numbers

Squirrel!

What’s on your mind right now? Do you have any “brain worms” or current obsessions? If you didn’t have to blog right now, what would you be doing?

I'm sure some people would say that my brain is entirely worms.

But no, I'm mostly just alternating between casually playing video games, finding funny shit on the internet, honing my snark, and watching Season 3 of Stranger Things.

I can't seem to binge-watch like normal people. Even when I was working on catching up on Supernatural or Stargate, I couldn't usually do more than one or two episodes a day. Sometimes, I'd even get squirreled partway through one and shift to snark-honing or game-playing.

In short, my attention span is similar to that of a goldfish, even when it comes to things I nominally enjoy doing.



It's not like this is new for me. No matter what I'm doing, there's always something I'd rather be doing. This was a problem when I had an office job; now, not so much.

Driving helps. It's not like I can split my attention while driving. By taking away the option of doing other things, I get in a focus zone. It's where I do my best thinking, at least if the traffic isn't too crazy.

This is probably why I have several unedited novels languishing on my flash drive (and here). While I can concentrate long enough to come up with short stories or poetry (and, on good days, blog entries), I get to working on the novels and my mind starts to worm around.



Maybe when the next Fallout or Elder Scrolls game comes out (do not speak to me of Fallout 76; as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't exist) I'll go back to being able to do one thing for more than 30 minutes. Not anything productive, mind you, but something.

So, basically, everything is either a) a distraction or b) an obsession. There doesn't seem to be much in between. If this caused me real problems in life, I'd probably try to do something about it. My main focus right now is on weight loss, though, and disturbing my hard-won equilibrium might have a negative (or, I guess, positive, as in the numbers on the scale going up instead of down) effect on that goal.

Fortunately, that's not something I need to concentrate on constantly. I just need to stop myself from ordering pizza or bingeing on Oreos, and in that regard, distractions help.