Caramel Chew Chew
There is a tub of caramel ice cream sitting in the freezer – waiting for me to finish writing this blog post, stream a movie from the internet, and hole myself up in the junk room while I eat it.
My brain is running on empty. I've been learning something new at work, and while it's interesting, exciting, and all those other words, it's also incredibly draining. Actually – let's scratch that – I'm not so much learning something new, as learning an entirely new way to look at the world – a new way to think about things – a new frame through which everything will need to be seen over the coming months and years.
It crossed my mind more than once today – while doing mental gymnastics – that I'm getting too old for all this idiocy. I've seen the studies on YouTube – I've seen how much more quickly young people pick up new things. Whereas I was once the swift sailing boat, I have become the lumbering supertanker. Sure, I carry decades of experience, stories, and whatever else, but I also take quite some time and distance to change direction.
I saw a supertanker once.
When I was young my uncle worked in the merchant navy, and would tell stories about the size of the ships he worked on. He circumnavigated the globe several times during his career – sending momentos back to his family from the most distant corners of the globe. Although I didn't think twice about it when I was young, we had a coffee table from Fiji. Go figure. A few years later my Dad built a boat, and we would spend weekends going sailing off the south west coast of England. During one of those vomit inducing trips, I remember fingers being pointed to the horizon, and a vast slab of steel just being visible in the far distance. It was a supertanker. Several football pitches long, lumbering across the ocean. We saw coastal freighters pass in front of it during the day – many miles in front of it, and still dwarved by it.
Anyway.
Ice cream.
This is where I publish the blog post and then set off in search of something interesting to watch – which could take some time. The rest of my family castigate me for flicking endlessly through movies before choosing anything. I wonder how long tonight's selection might take ?
p.s. I'm working from home tomorrow.