Proof is in the Pudding

My therapist...

(yes, I own one)

... has mentioned the once or twice that the number of thoughts and ideas for new projects buzzing around my head, combined with the many unfinished personal projects I have on the go, make even HER feel a little exhausted. Top that off with a subtle dusting of impatience and focus issues on my part, and it's a recipe for disaster.

A quick glance around my flat leads me to think she might just be on to something...

books 1&2:

book 3: book 4: books 5&6: book 7:

This is nothing new. There are pictures out there somewhere of a 7-year old Le Pew watching television whilst reading a book AND constructing some dodgy lego-technic invention, all at once. The parental units used to fire questions at me to verify whether I really did follow what was on TV AND in the book at the same time. Legend has it my feedback was accurate. Altho this might be the stuff of parental myth-making, it proves that my attention is scattered, to say the least.

It was with great pain then, that I decided to put books 1 to 6 back on the shelf, imposing an embargo on their re-un-shelving until book number 7 (Critical Mass by Philip Ball) has been thoroughly completed.

I believe sane people called it "focus". A neologism to many a neuron in my system.

I may need to consult my GP about the unabated side-effect: a continuous itch to grab an extra item to occupy myself with.

Peripherals

The back-light of my phone is flashing 3 am at me. I'm tired, but can't seem to get myself to bed. To switch off the light, to lie down and close my eyes... to ask my mind to stop, right now, is like asking me not to breathe. It's essential I grab hold of the minutes. To not surrender to time lost. To not slip away.

Through the windows, subtle tones of amusement find their way in from a party next door and muffle my thinking like a blanket of snow muffles sound. Softening my train of thought, slowing it down and bringing it back to me more clearly than before, I realise I've perhaps not as much been thinking, but feeling. An intense clarity of emotion that words could never support in thought.

Everything is perfect, just the now. All emotion thrown in the balance. And for once, the scales don't tip. A fragile equilibrium to be savoured. Right now.

I'd write it down. A guidebook for days to come. To remind us how to get here. But feelings can rarely be owned. They grace you with their presence at their own desire and leave but mere traces upon their leaving. Elusive. Like peripheral visions, they can't quite be looked in the eye. But they linger. And for now, I linger with them.

I'm tired. But I revel in time gained.

Beyond Enthusiastic

When my girlfriend warned me that she could talk for Britain, I brushed off the comment with a very smitten reply along the lines of "But babe, I could listen to you ramble for hours". What I didn't know then, is that the talking doesn't generally stop when she goes to sleep. This for two very different reasons: Jo is a notorious sleep-talker (whole dreamt-up phone conversations and the lot) and well, Jo's also got a tendency to become very excited about cute little things.

Just a few nights ago, I got prodded in the arm at about 4.30 a.m. It was with some reluctance that I surfaced from the dream I was having, but when I opened my eyes, I found two very awake, sparkly shiners staring back at me.

"Do you know," she said excitedly, "that there's a place in Edinburgh called Saxe Coburgh?!?!"

A little confused about why exactly this bit of information had warranted a prod so early in the morning, I replied: "Erm... what?"

"Well, isn't your royal family called Saxe-Coburgh?!?" *excited Jo-wiggle*

Now, it has to be said. If anyone else were to attempt interrupting my sleep for such a random bit of information, they'd probably get a good thumping or a dangerous little growl, but right then, all I could see, was a big happy grin on the pretty face of that excitedly wiggly girlfriend of mine, and I couldn't help but burst out in a wee giggle.

Now, I think the REAL test of our relationship will come if she'd ever insist on talking me through the life-cycle of the single-celled amoeba in the middle of my sleeping pattern, but until then, I can't wait to find out the other random bits of info that excite this girl so much ;-)

Hierarchy on its way out

A friend introduced me to del.icio.us a few weeks back and while I was initially a bit hesitant to use it (unlike her I'm not an early adaptor), I am now absolutely besotted by the concept.

Del.icio.us is a webbased feature which lets you store you favorite links and bookmarks online on the basis of semantic categories. Most of us organise our computer files and links in a hierarchical manner: we create files and subfiles to store them under.

For instance, if I am trying to hunt down a picture of a friend's party a while back, I would open a file called "LePew" then "Pictures" then "Olympus Camera" and then I need to rack my brains to remember when exactly this party took place, because I have stored all my private pictures by month. So if the party was in August 2005 I'd have to click on a file called "08-2005" to locate it. It's a bit of an effort, to say the least.

My weblinks were stored in a comparable manner. But del.icio.us now allows you to tag your links. For instance, if I was to store my own blog as a favorite, it would first of all be stored under its own name "Ubiquitous" and then instead of placing it in a file or subfile, I would simply attach tags to it: "blog, Pew, science, entertainment, ubiquitous, lesbian, Ghent, physics, life" etc... whichever term I would associate with this link. When I next try to find the link, I merely need to type in a few key-words to hunt it down, instead of trawling through a hierarchically structured directory.

What makes it easy, is that this type of storage is based on semantic and associative thinking. You don't need to remember dates or filenames. You simply think of keywords that naturally spring to mind when you yourself think of that file. And I'm becoming increasingly aware of just how associative my brain thinks. I rarely remember exact facts (which can be frustrating at times). But I do remember concepts, ideas, keywords,... that link into and out of others to connect the general dots and to see connections between otherwise unrelated or distantiated topics. I guess this is a common characteristic for people used to interdisciplinary environments and for conceptual thinkers. But what strikes me, is how different my keyword structures are from other people's.

Del.icio.us allows one to make "Tag Clouds" which is a visual representation of all your keywords. I've browsed the del.icio.us pages of several friends and they are generally very succinct and logical it seems, with keywords such as "blog", "music" or "fun". Whereas my tag cloud... well... see for yourself: