Writing

Cloud City

I'm not much on cooking. I operate the grill at our house when I need to grill some hamburgers or steaks, and I bake the pizzas I bring home from Papa Murphy's, but that's about it. Oh, I will make a bowl of instant oatmeal in the morning using hot water from the hot water dispenser, and on occasion I will heat a bowl of soup in the microwave, but that's not really 'cooking', is it? Other than that, it's fast food, sandwiches and eating whatever I can grab out of the fridge.

This morning I decided I needed to cook some sausage patties. They've been sitting in the fridge for a few days. I could freeze them, but then they would likely never be seen again. And I really like fried pork sausage, so I got out the frying pan, fired up the range and set the sausage to sizzling. Now comes the hard part, waiting for the sausage to cook. It doesn't take long, about 12 minutes, but I am not really good at standing around doing nothing. I could play solitaire while I am waiting for the timer to expire (3 minutes, 4 times), but maybe I could work on a blog post while I am waiting. My trusty laptop is sitting on the kitchen table, so let's see what I can get done.

Turns out, not much. In 24 minutes (two batches of sausage), I wrote a thousand characters which is roughly 150 words. I was surprised by the timer every time it went off as I had only written a single sentence. Near as I can tell, this post to this point has taken me about 15 minutes. Oh, well, speed isn't everything. If you disagree, you are wrong. This is my blog and I'm write, er, right.

Anyway, I came across a short blog post yesterday that said, in essence, that some people think in words and some people think 'natural thoughts', or something like that (I looked for it but I can't find it, it didn't strike me as important at the time). In any case, they don't think in words. My wife and I are good examples of each. My wife remembers what people say, and when I tell her something that I heard from someone else she inevitably asks me what they said. I have no idea. I parsed the words they spoke, extracted the information from their message, stored it in my brain and discarded the words. Yes, maybe I have spent too much time working with computers. Or maybe computer systems have evolved to mimic natural thought.

P.S. 'Cloud' uses the same letters as 'could'. The brain works in mysterious ways.