2002-08-21 - 11:23 a.m.
Twice in 10 hours; a journal record for me?

My mother said an interesting thing to me Monday evening when I picked up the phone in desperation and asked if her boss had found any county jobs for me (he'd offered to check it out). "You know," she said, with a puzzled tone in her voice, "the happiest I've ever seen you working was when you had that cleaning job that summer."

149 IQ, and the most pleasant work I've ever done is clean toilets, scrub walls, and wipe tables ...?

Well, yeah. First of all, it was only four months; second, I was always, always in motion, and knew exactly what was expected of me; third, it indulged my perfectionistic tendencies; fourth, I was always partnered up with someone, and since our hands were busy but our brains were not, I got in some great conversations.

OK, so I could have done without the one where the guy I was swabbing down a dormitory bathroom with told me another male friend of mine had great lips and that Antonio Banderas was good-looking enough to make him question his sexuality. Or the part where he complained that guys who ... ah ... got in a bit of "solo entertainment" in the showers too often didn't clean up after themselves. I mean, TMI, I didn't want to know about his fantasy life, or exactly what he was scrubbing up!!! Aside from that, though, I was both busy and entertained.

These days ... not so much. I fetch a cup of coffee, spend twenty minutes or so being uber-productive. After that little by little my nerves go on the fritz and pretty soon I'm shifting in my chair, crossing and uncrossing my legs, popping up an internet window for 5 seconds to find out just which song it was that just sent its chorus dancing through my mind, plugging a couple things into a spreadsheet and then clicking up Outlook to check my email and then digging in my files for something else and then running down the hall to ask someone a question, before remembering that the spreadsheet really needs to get done ...

I still get things done, but if you plotted my activity on a curve there would be sharp peaks every time I get up and do something active interspersed with low valleys where I can't string two thoughts together without going off on a tangent.

The word "string" automatically makes me think "string theory", actually, which has nothing to do with mental tangents and everything to do with astrophysics, which makes me think of the Star Trek episode where Wesley Crusher mentioned it, which makes me think of Captain Picard and tea (Earl Grey, hot), which leads to an image Giles with that stern capable Watcher look on his face, which conjures up the singing sound of a sword wielded in strong hands, which makes me picture Methos with his face painted half-blue, which reminds me the plot of this interesting Highlander/SG-1 fic I read the other day, which makes me wonder how, exactly, Daniel Jackson could be believable as an Immortal even before the "Meridian" episode given that he's died half-a-dozen times or so in canon and required all sorts of interesting methods to be resurrected that had nothing to do with a Quickening, which makes me think of electricity under the skin and human energy fields (read: auras) ...

Hee. From "string" to "auras" in fifteen seconds flat by way of extensive TV references, the way it plays out in my head. I really ought to try and chronicle these tangents more often, it's kinda fun (and alarming!) to trace the way my mind works.

Mmm. Cubicle-mate's radio just started playing faintly through "You and me goin' fishin' in the dark ..." Ought to write that one down for future downloading. Not my usual style, but then, do I have one? Eclectic as my thoughts, I guess.

I'm gently happy right now. Strange. I guess because I'm being "me". In which case, "coming unglued" maybe doesn't have the negative connotations everyone attaches to it; if you're a butterfly with your feet stuck to a piece of cardboard, it might be a good thing for the glue to lose cohesion.

*reading back through this entry* ... God help me. No one else will.