The other day I was chatting on the phone with my sister, Barb about my recent blog about our Dad’s chickens when she asked me how I was able to come up with the connections I do. (She’d never realized the “thread” of chickens in our lives.) She asked, “What did you do before you began writing your blog? Did you just walk around with this stuff in your head?” After a brief conference with the voices in my head, I realized that yes, I had. Actually, I kidding about the plural, voices. There is only one voice and it is most certainly my own.
Anyone who spends time with me knows that I can talk a lot, and not always sticking to the current subject. I must have hyperactive neurons firing on overdrive, making connections faster than the speed of my mouth, that causes me to jump from topic to topic in a seemingly random fashion. But, if you asked me how I got from point A to point B, I could easily provide the process. My good friend Bruce used to say that my brain worked like a record with a scratch in it; playing one song and then abruptly jumping to another.
I know it seems like that to people, but my mind is really an ordered chaos. Blogging allows me to slow down and order my thoughts, providing a clear, navigable path for my listeners to follow. It also allows me to clear out some of my thoughts, freeing up more personal RAM. I enjoy playing with words, starting a conversation, and waiting for my readers to comment.
Yesterday afternoon I went shopping with my friend Carol. We both had a stellar combination of Kohl’s cash and discount coupons (30%!) which made the expedition worthwhile. My main goal was to find an acceptable undergarment to wear under my “mother-of-the-bride” dress to reduce any chance of resembling the Michelin Man. Once in the lingerie department, Carol and I gathered a couple of possibilities to take into the dressing room.
I had a little trouble getting into the first piece of feminine finery. I thought it should go on over my head but the harder I tried to stretch the thing down over my shoulders, the more confined I became until I had to give up lest I be rendered totally constrained with no hope of getting the damn thing off by myself. I let out an uncomfortable giggle as I wiggled out of the thing. Carol, who was standing ready outside the dressing room door asked what was wrong. I told her I couldn’t get the thing over my head. She laughed and told me to step into it instead. That did the trick. I was on the road to a lump free appearance.
Did you see what I did there? I jumped from a story about chickens and my thought processes to one about lingerie without so much as the nuance of a transitional sentence. That is how my mind works. Chickens, Barb and then ZIP on to foundation garments.
The idea came to me when I was vacuuming this morning. As Barb pointed out, I’d been holding in my thoughts and then through my blog, found a way to let them out. On the other hand, faced with the reality I would soon be in pictures that people would look at for generations to come, I went searching for a garment to hold my body in. I’m not saying it’s a good connection; just that in a weird way the two things do connect and the connection reveals a lot about me. I’m not sure which is more intimate; sharing the interior workings of my brain, or the exterior imperfections of my flesh.
Now that’s something I’ll have to think about!