My Spacey Brain

(Not to be confused with my spacIOUS brain.)

Earlier I read a reference to one of Britney Spears’ songs on a friend’s Facebook status and instantly knew the next few lyrics. Somewhat ashamed, I started thinking about it and realized there must be a lot of wasted space in my brain. No wonder I can’t think of the answer super quickly when my psychotic teacher calls on me in class. My brain has to sift through all the pop lyrics and baseball stats and who knows what else I’ve built up to get to a clear place and think of the answer. Sheesh.
I am the type of person who gets really excited about things if I like them, and then I try to learn everything about them. Or at least, I start out learning about them, gather a bunch of useful information, and then ditch it all for something else I decide to love. (I’m not like that about everything – I don’t think I’d be super interested if I had a baby and then suddenly decide I’m not that into it. I mean, there are bridges you can’t go back across. And sometimes I become RE-obsessed with things. Like fantasy baseball. It happened when I was 10, and here I am at 26 having a relapse). I also happen to like a LOT of things. It’s like trying on jeans at the store. I bring 15 pairs into the changing room and sometimes come out with one pair. Or none, usually. I guess I like to try new things. Not like heroin, but you know. It’s adaptive for something like school – I just LOVE learning! Except I changed my major like 9 million times, so a more cost-effective strategy would have been better. For instance, I’d be more successful if I became obsessed with and then excellent at linear algebra and nothing else. Instead I’ve settled for a general proficiency in a variety of crap. Well-rounded, I called it on college applications. I was an extracurricular-ly active kid.
That said, I have had several strong obsessions throughout the last 26 years. At seven years old, my parents asked if I wanted to subscribe to a magazine. We could pick anything we wanted. So I chose Parents magazine. Oh yes. I read about EVERYTHING. I read about autism, weaning, colic, cystic fibrosis, ectopic pregnancies, how to spice up your sex life (whatever THAT was) if you’re co-sleeping with your three-year-old. You name it. There were sections in that magazine on each milestone of a child’s life, and as I was reading them I was growing up into different stages (so I guess I was always introspective). Yet I recall nothing in depth. I have a very general bookish idea of what it’d be like to be a parent. When I read things like Sarah’s blog though, I realize I have absolutely no concept of what it’s like in practice. (Naked marathons! Where was that in the job description? In comparison, the motherhood interview process is a piece of cake – at least the first time around). Anyway, I would cut out the articles I thought would be useful for babysitting. I did a giant research paper in 8th grade on the steps to becoming a pediatrician, where I went and volunteered at a low-income and mostly with a Hispanic population medical clinic. I got to translate the Spanish for the doctor during a patient’s checkup. (I’m sure the doctor already understood, but still I felt special.) I read a book about medical school and dissecting dogs, and how one doctor dealt with the experience of examining a two-year-old with multiple bruises under her diaper. I was all for the rewarding aspects and the heartbreaking bits, and I decided when I was like 40 I would write a book about it just like that doctor I read about. In high school I started shaping my transcript and activities so I could pursue medicine. “Purdue pre-med program, here I come!” I said. I visited the campus. I wanted to major in biology and specialize in genetics.
Until I deferred admission there and instead studied abroad in Italy the first term of college and decided I wanted to learn a lot of languages and be a translator so I could travel for the rest of my life. In Italy I had a conversation with a fairly attractive Italian guy who didn’t know English but knew German, and I didn’t know Italian and knew German pretty well at the time. We spoke in German for a while, about President Bush and whether or not I agreed with his politics, and it actually worked! That kind of blew my mind a little. Until he wanted us to go somewhere in his “taxi.” Yeah! Totally like in that movie Taken. Except I’m not an idiot, so I was not taken. (On a related note, a similar thing happened in Barcelona, except that guy wanted me to go on a plane with him to Morocco the next day. Maybe later I’ll write a blog about how I escaped being kidnapped or whatever by that dude). So after that I decided I’d just translate for hospitals or something.
When I started at UO I had two years of both Spanish and German, and one year of Italian. I needed to learn maybe Japanese or French or something else useful. So, logically, I signed up for Danish. Not even first-year, it was some intensive crazy class for people who obviously were born in Denmark or something. I took two weeks of that class and opted out when we read this impossibly Danish news article. Why the hell do I need Danish anyway? I thought. I could just learn these things on my own and it would be much faster and more fun. So I made my friend, a Japanese major, teach me the Hiragana alphabet. He quizzed me and everything – I totally knew what sounds the characters made and a few of the Kanji characters. I bought French tapes and children’s books in Polish and all sorts of glorious things from the Powell’s language section (the Red Room). I had read the first Harry Potter in Spanish for a class, so I bought the second one in French. I studied the patterns and word order and sometimes thought I could actually understand it. I took linguistics classes and more Spanish. I know what a interdental fricative is. P’s and M’s are bilabial stops. And then I thought for like one second about the possibilities I’d have as a linguistics major and said screw this - I’m majoring in comparative literature.
I mean journalism. Wait! English. Actually I’m going to minor in Art – photography. Oh never mind I guess I’ll do psychology. And respiratory care at the same time. Yep, that sounds good.
I still am particularly interested in the power of the mind though – especially right now since I’m reading all these books about spiritual enlightenment and cosmic connections. But I already went through that phase when I took a bunch of philosophy classes around the same time as the Danish, so I’m not allowed to get obsessed again. There are too many other enticing and obsession-worthy things out there, right? But maybe not, if I just had enough space to figure out the spiritual enlightenment bit…but that is probably going to be difficult.
Because I bet I could remember how to play F@#% the Dealer if I was given a deck of cards and a 30-rack of Keystone Light. That is precisely the kind of space I denied my spiritual health. Thankfully I only needed to know it for a couple experimental years, and did not become obsessed - that would be alcoholism. Maybe then my blogs would be funnier. Anyhoo.
Let’s just say I don’t need any of that other filler crap now. Wasted freaking brain capacity. And that was space that I intentionally wasted!! I wasn’t even talking about automatic things I do to decrease potential. Those things are much harder to not do. Like memorizing an oldies song – like 50s and 60s oldies. I memorized them because I chose to listen to them for like four years straight, to my mom and dad’s horror. So maybe I had some control over that, but how the hell do I know what’s going to stick around for 17 years when I’m nine?! Parents of today’s kids, don’t let them listen to the 80s. It will not be cool. I have not changed for the cooler by listening to pop music my parents grew up trying not to listen to in high school. And yes I do have the Eugene oldies station programmed into my car radio. Keepin’ it real.
It’s the little things that I haven’t consciously put in my brain that I worry about. These are the things that make it difficult to answer an impromptu question. Like today when I was listening the teacher who I REALLY NEED to listen carefully to because at any moment I could shift slightly in my seat and he could use that as an excuse to call on me. I was listening attentively, but also staring at one corner of the wall, where it meets the ceiling. It’s never good to stare at a wall, because I do this thing where I connect invisible lines in my mind so that triangles are formed. I guess you could say I create invisible hypotenuses whenever I see an acute angle or a bunch of squares, or even bricks. Good thing I can’t measure the lengths of the sides and stuff, or I would be A-squaring plus B-squaring away my life. That’s the type of thing that I could really do without. (God it’s satisfying to use the word ‘hypotenuses’ in a sentence. Finally, after all these years of storing it in my files…wait. Ahhhhhhh!!!!) Also I count things. Sometimes I have to think something a certain number of times in order to be satisfied with it. Or split things into acceptable groups of equal number, and most importantly an even number (because then I can have one on each side of my mouth. Equal cavity chance). If I dump them all out on the table and there are 61 Skittles in my pack, this is annoying. It just is. Because there are five different flavors of Skittles in an original pack: red, orange, green, yellow, purple. You could divide them into five piles of 12, but then you’d have an extra one. I have to eat all the unmatched extra ones first because they can’t go in sets of two. Thankfully there’s only one extra one in that case, which would be extremely rare. Normally I have to whittle away at them until there’s five piles of six each or something. This is clearly just some obsessive-compulsive issue, but if you think about it, I could have been using all that space in my brain I took up by making a rule to sort Skittles for something useful! Good grief.
Another thing I do is make up little scenes in my head. Everyone does this to an extent I think – like after you do something and it’s embarrassing, you think of how the scene would have gone if you did it right. That’s kind of a productive way to use the scenes, except it means dwelling on unimportant things from the past. I ultimately know that whatever I did that was stupid, those who matter won’t mind and those who mind don’t matter. So why the replays? And why is that phrase about mind and matter in my brain anyway? Probably because my brain can’t hold onto anything actually happening in the present because it’s too busy going, “Step by step, ooh baby, gotta get to you girrrrrrrrl. Step one: you can have lots of fun, step two: there’s so much we can do, step three: it’s just you and meeeee, step four: I can give you more, step five…" Thank God I don’t remember step five - I think I just realized what that song was about. But maybe they’re only talking about second base. At least that’s all I would have comprehended when my insane child-self was committing this all to memory.
I also remember other jingles from my youth. Like this one (you have to say it aloud so it makes sense – there’s a lot of word play): “Miss Susie had a tugboat, the tugboat had a bell, the tugboat when to heaven, Miss Susie went to hello operator, please give me number 9, and if you disconnect me, I’ll cut off your behind the refrigerator, there was a piece of glass, Miss Susie sat upon it, and broke her little ask me no more questions, tell me no more lies, the boys are in the bathroom, zipping up their flies are in the meadow, the bees are in the hive, and Susie and her boyfriend are kissing in the D-A-R-K, D-A-R-K, D-A-R-K dark!”

Oh GREAT! I just realized something. I’m going to cardio pump in a little while with Nancy, and I’ve just started learning all the step calls. This is not good! I mean, I’m doing OK at it, all uncoordinated handicaps considered. But now when my teacher points at me to answer tomorrow in class (when I make a sudden movement to pick at my pencil eraser), I’ll probably have my cardio instructor saying, “Hamstring curl, karate repeater, turn straddle turn straddle, walk the curb, chug up chug down,” in my head. And it would all be to the beat of a Lady Gaga song I learned word for word. Let’s face it: I’m doomed.