Sometimes, it's an Unexpected Cigar

Catching up with a good friend over the phone this morning launched a thought experiment I'm playing with today.

We started talking about life and co-incidences and trying to know what to do, and it could very well have ended in a fiesta of long-distance navel gazing. But it didn't. Because she pointed out that, well, sometimes people get completely lost in trying to find meaning in the things that happen in their lives. And I, with a self-deprecating disclaimer for my love of tacky astrology and fortune telling, agreed with her. Sometimes, as Freud said, a cigar is just a cigar.

So I decided, just for today, to take that thought to the extreme. Not in a Buddhist way - I'm not meditating and I'm not seeking a nothingness in which everything is interconnected. Instead, I was walking around Brooklyn trying to train my brain to see, hear and smell everything as completely random, without relevance, and completely cut off from anything I've known or thought about before - rendering sense impressions as non-sensical as I could.

One of my current "great theories" is that men are often more productive because they think less. Or rather, that I am less productive than most men I know because I get distracted by everything, despite the fact that I actually seem to myself to be working and thinking constantly, even when I'm not "at work". And, well, my internal monologue is never switched off - as evidenced by my "I can't even find it embarassing anymore" habit of talking to myself. In public.

It's surprisingly difficult trying to switch off associations and "meaning" though.

For instance: Two women walking ahead of me, one says to the other "You know, thirty is just another number, like twenty, but you add ten," and my brain starts rushing off finding it funny, a comment on age hysteria and rebranding of ageing-categories ("35 is the new 21"), giggling that someone would actually PRONOUNCE something so banal, wondering if I was an arrogant bitch for laughing at other people's innumeracy while I've carefully groomed my own since high school to avoid having to deal with anything practical and money related outside the sphere of people who know i'm actually really good at maths, and of course what does that say about women in WEstern society? and...
STOP.

Just two women, walking. One says "You know, thirty is just another number, like twenty, but you add ten." I giggle, and think I find it funny because...


STOP

Just two women, walking. One says "You know, thirty is just another number, like twenty, but you add ten." I giggle.


OK good. I can totally do this.

In the store, soy milk costs me almost five dollars. "Really? five dollars? but surely in this day of genetically modified foods all this is a huge mark-up based on the knowledge that the people who buy the product are either rich or hippies or allergic so they are willing to shoulder the cost, and what does it say about my lifestyle choices and would I have become so lactose intolerant if it hadn't been for living in China for so long and remember the last time when you had to run to a bathroom because there's been cream in your food and how embarassing and annoying it was and..."


STOP.

It's soy milk. It costs five dollars. You are carrying enough change. Pay at the till.

Basically, I figure this experiment is exhausting, but a good reminder of how personal perception is - something i struggle with in any creative, non-biographical writing. I'm a terrible, terrible actress because I can't switch my own thought processes and emotional responses off for long enough to don someone else's - and I'm sick of re-reading my character's thoughts and finding that their minds all run away with them in exactly the same ways as mine does. OBVIOUSLY that's why they all sound the same - and i hadn't thought about that until realising that even when I'm not trying to, my brain sees associations and meaning and co-incidences in everything.

Which, in turn, I guess means that my trying to switch off that function of my brain led me to discover something that'd been clouded by "meanings" before - suck on that "cigar".