Perhaps brain dumps are therapeutic
I used to occasionally take part in a damn fool crusade on the internet called “750 Words”. The idea behind the site is that you empty your head into the keyboard each day with at least 750 words worth of jumbled madness, and it would expose enough for the website to chew through, and tell you how happy, sad, crazy, or wonderful you were.
I can't help thinking that getting a machine to analyse our state of mind is no better than reading the astrology page in the newspaper. We are fantastically good at associating things – and in a heartbeat will recognise that “oh my god, this computer knows how unhappy I've really been” (when in reality, we had used the lots of words like “can't”, “won't” and “didn't” in amongst our 750).
After tearing apart the idea, I am now going to do the admirable thing, and completely contradict myself. I'm wondering about doing the brain-dumps once more. Writing about whatever comes to mind, in a random, freestyle purge of my conscious thoughts. I guess some filtering will need to go on, otherwise you'll discover the wizard behind the curtain (or rather, the lack of a wizard behind the curtain).
So. After filling three paragaphs with nothing at all, let the head emptying commence.
It's Wednesday lunchtime. I'm sitting at my desk, at work, half watching a product installation happen on a virtual machine (don't ask). Writing this is a half hearted attempt to have a break from work – it's too cold and wet to go for a walk, so I have the Wordpress editor running full screen, in it's “minimalist” mode. I can't escape completely because a second screen sits alongside, filled with Outlook, and the occasional arrival of email. At the moment there is one unread item; apparently somebody downstairs is tinkering with my schedule next week.
I had great plans to get up early this morning. The kids have become more and more difficult to explode out of bed each day, so I was going to get them up an hour earlier than normal, and not say a word about it until we finished breakfast; at which point I could inform them they had time to watch cartoons, and do a hundred other things for an hour, instead of being chased from room to room by an irate parent demanding their hair be brushed, that they find their shoes, that they find their school bag, their coat, their reading record, and a hundred other things.
I overslept.
Actually, that's a lie. I didn't oversleep. I chose not to get up early because the bed was too warm, and the world outside the bedclothes seemed altogether too hostile to be bothering with until the last moment before I absolutely had to get up.
While watching the clock tick inexorably towards an unspoken moment when we both have to fall out of bed in order too have any chance of getting everybody out of the house on time, our eldest daughter appeared in the bedroom doorway. After a few tearful comments, she ran to the bathroom, and emptied most of the contents of her stomach into the toilet bowl. Apparently she had done the same in the night, but hadn't wanted to wake anybody up.
Minutes later we were all downstairs, running around the house like lunatics. Hasty plans were being made for W to stay at home and look after the newly crowned projectile vomiting champion, while I herded the younger children out of the door and on to school.
Arriving at work brought an end to the mayhem. Sitting quietly, switching on my computer, and checking emails in relative silence felt like exhaling after the madness of the morning routine.