As humans, are we ever idle? We lead busy lives and I am constantly irritated by those jobs that take me away from the things I would like to be doing. I consider ironing, cleaning or any domestic job to be times when I am enforced into a kind of idleness.
"You're funny." a friend said recently "I do all my thinking when I am ironing."
"The only thinking I do is how much gin I can drink to take the edge off a job that I loathe."
In the interests of the Minx Institute of Research into 'mind-numbingly boring jobs', I decided, this morning, to make my thought audible as I did the dreaded deed.
In thirty-five minutes (I don't hang around), I had planned a new project for work and added a few things to a current writing project. I visualised some art work, poured lavish scorn on my boss, noticed that we were low on milk and ran through a table of events that need to be sorted by next week. In between all this, I observed that my coffee making skills leave a lot to be desired, fed the cat (reminding myself that he needs a new collar) and willed Big Fecker into remembering his revision in his exam today.
Is my brain never idle then? This is worrying! I will have to think about that next time!
"I have been thinking for hours - but still
have not come up with a way to remove my hand
from my head"
8 comments:
There's a wonderful screensaver you can get called electric sheep : http://electricsheep.org.
When your computer is 'idle', or goes to sleep, the screensaver comes on and creates all sorts of beautiful fractal patterns that are visualisations of its dreams (it communicates with other computers over the internet and morphs together animations called sheep).
The name of the screensaver comes from Philip K Dick's Do androids dream of electric sheep. I've always loved the idea of watching my computer dream. It's totally mesmerising...
Fetching pic...
No wonder I can't write anything decent. I stopped IRONING! Yikes!
You remember all that stuff? Yowzer, that's some mind! I must try this ironing thing.
Oh, I do that too. Doing things like vacuuming and painting or mowing the lawn let my mind go off to do other things. I try not to do it when driving though...
I hate ironing!
What's ironing? Ok seriously when I was a student I spent one summer ironing other people's clothes and being paid for it. That's probably the only time I've enjoyed ironing and I used to day dream away. Now I own a fabulous range of DON'T NEED TO IRON clothes.
I wonder if there will come a time when we can plug 'electric sheep' straight into our brains.It may be a good distraction from the dreaded deed. I suppose by that time we won't have to do the ironing anyway - taken over by some ingenious machine called 'husbands'!!!!
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