Friday, March 20, 2009

The Open Bingo Square, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Garvey Coming Up with a Topic and Love the Freedom

As though I spend a long time fretting over Garv's topic du jour. I usually mention it, but often go off the map. So telling me to come up with my own topic is less a free pass and more an infuriating challenge, telling me to be creative is the fastest way to stop me from being creative.

I made up my own topic yesterday. Blah blah blah, the Italian Fest sucks. Blah blah blah, I like my new club.

I like playing basketball at my new club. I have referred to this as my therapy. When I'm in a game, I don't think about anything else. If you're an athlete, or a video gamer, or a musician, I assume you can relate to this. Much of the rest of the time - driving, cooking dinner, blogging - I can't shut my brain off. Many thoughts spin around my head, often leading to weird occurrences. Like when you're trying to remember the name of the next door neighbor's boyfriend on some random sitcom from the eighties, and you can't think of it and you can't think of it. Then the next day while you're driving along it jumps to the front of your noggin even though you aren't really thinking about it. Like that. I figure that thoughts and the fore of our consciousness are like a child's toy with lots of little differently shaped blocks and a container with differently shaped holes. Once all of the pieces are in there, you gotta just keep shaking it or spinning it or something until the right piece falls into the right spot. I'm not certain that it's the most efficient way, there may be a release that you can turn to open the container, but that's for quitters, always taking the easy way out.

It's like how people say that it takes fewer muscles to smile than to frown. And all you grinning idiots are just lazy.

1 comment:

Big Bear said...

My high school Latin teacher (who was more of a sixty year-old dictator than a mentor), used to always say that if you couldn't come up with an answer on the test after thinking about it for more than thirty seconds, you should just move on to the rest of the test and "let your subconcious work at it." Hell, sometimes even in class if you got called on, and didn't know the answer, she'd move on to another problem and then five minutes later come back to you with the same problem, demanding that you pull the rabbit out of the hat. Despite her many pleasantries, I've found that her little tip actually works ,and that the more you do it, the better you get at it. You almost, train the subconscious to perform a reconnaissance mission while you go on with the rest of your life. Pretty soon your subconscious is training like a damned green beret.

See why create-your-own topic night sucks Garvey?