Umm...!

It's 3:25 AM. I spent the day in bed with this virus-y thing, and managed to watch my way through almost the entire 2006 series of Doctor Who today and tonight. Now I need to get my blog entry in, and I have no clue what to write about. What trouble can we get in together?

This blog has had a higher hit count than usual this week, presumably because of the post about John Scalzi in Scottsdale as well as the usual Round Robin Photo Challenges influx. To those of you who may have found your way here in the last week or two: welcome! I'll try to keep things interesting.

Umm....

As I sit here listening to my ears ring, I'm reminded of the sound of a conch shell held to the ear, the whistling roar of emptiness, of nothing. I know that my head is not, in fact, empty; it's full of all sorts of things: guilt for calling in sick, even though I was sick; a fan letter to David Tennant that I've been writing in my head; a whole list of things I should be reading or writing or doing. Most of it is under the surface, though, not strong enough or interesting enough or enough a part of my conscious mind to motivate me, especially when I'm not feeling well. And below all that is the stuff I don't even know about: fragments of dream or fever or nightmare, bits of story simmering (I hope!) for later synthesis, countless memories and concepts and emotions stored in synapses, needing only the right stimulus to bring them forth.

Karen's Fried Brain, February 2007

Our brains are full of all sorts of fascinating things, most of which hide from us, most of the time. Reason and emotion, sanity and madness are all there in the things we do and say, influenced by what our brains have stored away. Maybe this blog entry has its roots in something that happened when I was 6, or 16, or 46. I'll never really know, and in a sense it doesn't matter. We are all the product of our accumulated experience. I could call up a dozen memories right now, the gamut of love and rejection, joy and desolation, and they would still be only a tiny part of the enormous puzzle labeled Karen's Brain. It doesn't really matter which puzzle pieces I pull out first to build tonight's bit of sky. It's all part of the big picture, sooner or later. All we have to do is take the result, and make sure it all fits together in a way that makes sense.

Still, there is only one thing I required from my brain tonight: an idea for this blog entry. My brain essentially whistled back at me, revealing nothing. Instead we're stuck with this rather pointless musing about the human brain itself. Best I can do for tonight, I think.

Maybe it's because I've been sick. Maybe it's because I actually got some sleep today. Weird stuff tends to surface more often when I'm sleep deprived than when I'm well-rested, which is one factor in my bad habit of not sleeping enough. If I didn't have to work for a living, I would probably stay up all night, every night, and into the next day, until the barriers between conscious and subconscious would start to fail and I could harvest ideas for later use before going the heck to bed. As it is, though, even though now we're up to 4:22 AM, I'm not tired enough to produce such effects.

Gates Pass sunset, March 2005

On the old laptop, currently up and running just a few inches from this one, a slideshow screensaver is showing me all sorts of images that were stored on my computer as of two years ago. There are images of Gates Pass, and Disneyland and Las Vegas, trees and lamps, Scott Bakula and Anthony Stewart Head, Randy Johnson and Zorro, and even Sylvester McCoy standing in front of a fan-built TARDIS with Paul McGann. In a pinch, I could tap into these technology-assisted memories, and write about some of them. But not tonight.

And maybe by tomorrow, my brain will have something more interesting to say. Maybe I'll analyze what makes certain heroic characters more appealing to me than others, or report progress on the agent query front, or consider whether the Doctor is clinically depressed this season on Doctor Who. We'll just have to wait and see, won't we?

Karen

P.S. Apparently my listing of images on that screen saver has Google promising images of Scott Bakula in this entry. Let's see what I can rustle up! I'm pretty sure these are both Billie Mason's work, not mine, but here you go anyway. - KFB

Good Morning Peoria

Shock Theater

I'll follow up with a proper entry about this before the weekend is over. - KFB