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It's a brain of two halves
So someone has made this game where you play Tetris and Snake at the same time with the same controls. It feels like this is both a) the thing I was unwittingly training for throughout the 1980s, and b) a metaphor for my life.
After a few minutes on it I managed to get as far as 8:12 (Tetris:Snake). It's much harder than it looks. But it also feels somehow familiar, and I eventually realised that that's because I spend an awful lot of my life with my brain in split-screen mode, listening to two loudly-delivered monologues, one in each ear, which scramble my brain on different frequencies. It goes something like this:
Channel 1: "I'm going to play with my magnets. I'm making a house! Housey housey house, housey house, house house house, look! I've made a number H for Hazel! A B C D E F G H I J K ELLAMENNOPEEEEEE Q R S T U V W X Y AND ZEEEEE NOW I KNOW MY A B C NEXT TIME WON'T YOU SING WITH ME mama DID YOU HEAR my alphabet song? IT'S SINGING TIME MAMA"
Channel 2: "Oh - mum, can I tell you something that happened at school? Mum, right, so, yesterday, I mean, it wasn't yesterday, but the bit I'm going to tell you is, but on Tuesday - I mean Monday - so at lunchtime, mum, Iris said - cos I was playing with Iris when it happened - I mean, it's not a bad thing - well a bit of it was bad but I wasn't doing that bit - so yesterday, right, mum..."
and occasionally I find myself literally unable to finish thinking the half-thought I've had in my head for half an hour, something like "what do I need to put on the shopping list", but I can't even work out why I'm having trouble concentrating because the noise is completely bypassing the actual conscious noise-processing bits of my brain and going straight into some kind of background process that slowly grinds the entire system to a halt, until suddenly it breaks through into the conscious & I realise that for the last 10 minutes Img has been trying to tell me something very important about her complex web of friendships, and H has been trying to tell me something very important about a picture of a dog, and I have to stop and tell them both I'm sorry I somehow haven't heard anything you've been saying for the last 10 minutes or managed to hear myself think.
It occurs to me that I do a split-brain thing to try to get myself to sleep sometimes as well, counting backwards from 100 to 1 while visualising the numbers in the other order. So 'saying' 100 in my head but 'seeing' the number 1, 'saying' 99 while 'seeing' the number 2, and so on. Like the thing where you try to pat your head & rub your tummy at the same time (which is easy) only both the head and the tummy are in your head. God knows what the people who say it's impossible to see pictures in your head would make of that.
It does absolutely drive me round the actual bend, though, the way Img orbits elliptically around the point of what she's saying, getting asymptotically closer to the inferred point of the thing, cocooning herself in a series of infinitely-nested parentheses. I don't know WHERE she gets it from hem hem.
On the other other other hand, mind you, this. I'm in this picture and I don't like it.
After a few minutes on it I managed to get as far as 8:12 (Tetris:Snake). It's much harder than it looks. But it also feels somehow familiar, and I eventually realised that that's because I spend an awful lot of my life with my brain in split-screen mode, listening to two loudly-delivered monologues, one in each ear, which scramble my brain on different frequencies. It goes something like this:
Channel 1: "I'm going to play with my magnets. I'm making a house! Housey housey house, housey house, house house house, look! I've made a number H for Hazel! A B C D E F G H I J K ELLAMENNOPEEEEEE Q R S T U V W X Y AND ZEEEEE NOW I KNOW MY A B C NEXT TIME WON'T YOU SING WITH ME mama DID YOU HEAR my alphabet song? IT'S SINGING TIME MAMA"
Channel 2: "Oh - mum, can I tell you something that happened at school? Mum, right, so, yesterday, I mean, it wasn't yesterday, but the bit I'm going to tell you is, but on Tuesday - I mean Monday - so at lunchtime, mum, Iris said - cos I was playing with Iris when it happened - I mean, it's not a bad thing - well a bit of it was bad but I wasn't doing that bit - so yesterday, right, mum..."
and occasionally I find myself literally unable to finish thinking the half-thought I've had in my head for half an hour, something like "what do I need to put on the shopping list", but I can't even work out why I'm having trouble concentrating because the noise is completely bypassing the actual conscious noise-processing bits of my brain and going straight into some kind of background process that slowly grinds the entire system to a halt, until suddenly it breaks through into the conscious & I realise that for the last 10 minutes Img has been trying to tell me something very important about her complex web of friendships, and H has been trying to tell me something very important about a picture of a dog, and I have to stop and tell them both I'm sorry I somehow haven't heard anything you've been saying for the last 10 minutes or managed to hear myself think.
It occurs to me that I do a split-brain thing to try to get myself to sleep sometimes as well, counting backwards from 100 to 1 while visualising the numbers in the other order. So 'saying' 100 in my head but 'seeing' the number 1, 'saying' 99 while 'seeing' the number 2, and so on. Like the thing where you try to pat your head & rub your tummy at the same time (which is easy) only both the head and the tummy are in your head. God knows what the people who say it's impossible to see pictures in your head would make of that.
It does absolutely drive me round the actual bend, though, the way Img orbits elliptically around the point of what she's saying, getting asymptotically closer to the inferred point of the thing, cocooning herself in a series of infinitely-nested parentheses. I don't know WHERE she gets it from hem hem.
On the other other other hand, mind you, this. I'm in this picture and I don't like it.
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Also one of the strange types of meditation I do involves 'welcoming' opposites of sensations, emotion, belief or whatever at the same time, so you're kind of doing this weird split brain thing. It's quite weirdly effective (you alternate back and forth first between for example opposite emotions and then welcome both at the same time).