Sometimes I feel like the neurons in my brain are over-sensitive and need to have their input damped so they don't run off on hundreds of thousands of overly shiny ideas all at once.

I've found ways and moments and rituals to slow myself down, and I do get rest. but I can't do so on someone else's command. Tea is an excellent ritual (and a mighty tasty drink). So is a nice, loping jog down the street from the subway stop, through the scattered patches of sunlight that manage to creep between the cracks of NYC.

I've found working from a terminal - just a blank, white-on-black terminal, command line and text editor and text-based mail client - to be somewhat effective in countering my scatteredness when things get to be too much and my mind feels way too jumpy and reactive to everything. I need to do that tomorrow... just sit down with pine and write, and write, and write, and stretch my muscles out (my back, my wrists - I wonder if there's a way I can learn yoga, and whether it would be a good idea - there is Not Enough Room in my room to do Tai Chi).

Especially scattered today because I couldn't hit flow state in the office - Jeff and I were doing testing, but kept on getting interrupted by blocker bugs that kept us from testing more, a borked laptop (Jeff's), a virtual Windows box that randomly threw weird redraws at us, the stack that we were testing getting rebuilt (imagine someone driving away the car you were poking around the engine block of, leaving you standing on the sidewalk with a wrench in your hand, forlorn, for a while), and - well, we got some things done, but not the ones we'd hoped, and maybe 1/3 of what we thought we would. That constantly-interrupted state of mine stayed with me tonight, apparently.

It's faded now that I've written this. Sticking to linear text pouring into a single window tends to do that. (Does anybody else write so that they can smoosh their brain into a certain state of mind?)

If you read my vital ideation post, you can see that my brain was even more scattered an hour-ish ago. This post is evidence that it still is - but at least it's scattered in larger chunks (I manage to keep my train of thought for a paragraph or two at a time).

I hope that someday I'll be able to write another language well enough that I'll be able to use switching into writing in that language as another way of changing my own state of mind.