Saturday 23 July 2011

What to do?

Man I have a huge to-do list, and it gets bigger every day.

Now I have some fairly reasonable excuses for not doing a few of the listed chores, but my main problem is my own mind.


Of the many things I should be doing, the main one I really ought to be cracking on with is a one act play I'm supposed to be writing.

Well to be exact, I've already written it. In my head. The problem is my imagination. Every time I sit down to type, my imagination fucks off and does it's own thing. Which is a bit of a pain in the bum. So instead of typing out a play that I'm supposed to be working on, my imagination distracts me with a whole new idea. Not helpful at all.


You could say it's a disability. Hyper-active imagination syndrome. I strongly suspect many people, who struggle to finish things, also suffer from this disorder. It's not a lack of skill or motivation, our minds simply jump from one idea to another until we can't focus on the job at hand.


For example, right now I should be sleeping, but I started thinking about the play. Then out of no-where my imagination pops up and says

"I've got a really cool idea for a one man show", which i have to admit was a really cool idea indeed. Then i couldn't concentrate on the play and got completely sidetracked by an unwelcome but really cool idea. Next I made a rookie mistake. I turned to the Internet to do some light research for "project really cool idea". Giving it a name like that should have set of alarm bells and the safest thing to do would be switch off the computer and go to sleep, but noooooo.


Anyone who has ever used the Internet knows, that when you put in a word or phrase into a search engine, you get a whole bunch of results that have absolutely nothing to do with the original word or phrase. Somehow I was still surprised, and more than a little curious, when I typed in "Graffiti history" and came across a page containing a recipe for french toast.


A normal, run of the mill, over-active imagination would have paused........said

"Huh? Weird." wondered what possible link graffiti and french toast had, and gone back to the research.

Hyper-active imaginations are like Duracell bunnies, they just keep going and going.


I spent the next 20 minutes constructing the perfect french toast sandwich in my mind and decided I had to have one. After writing, what is probably, a really bad blog post about my evening. I now can't remember what I was going to write down for the play, Project really cool idea is now on my to-do list and I'm really quite hungry.


Moral of the story?

Everything can be solved with french toast.

Saturday 16 July 2011

Ying and Yang

I had a thought yesterday.


According to Newton every action has an equal and opposite reaction. I wonder if this applies to more than physics. What I'm getting at is the idea of perfect opposites.




Yes is the perfect opposite of No.


Day is the perfect opposite of Night.




You get the idea. However when we come to more complex objects and ideas things get...well complicated. What's the perfect opposite of a hammer? The easy answer would be a nail, but it's not that easy. Both hammers and nails are used to make things, and so cannot be perfect opposites.




Then I thought about words. Words are simple.


Yes/No


Right/Wrong


But what about a whole sentence, or an Idiom?




One immediately jumped into my mind.


The glass is half full/The glass is half empty




Simply by changing one word you get a change from optimist to pessimist. A perfect opposite. It didn't feel right though. Only one word was changed, and changed into it's own perfect opposite. It seemed like cheating.




OK so next step is to take a saying, make it's exact opposite and use a whole bunch of different words. To answer the unspoken question some of you may have swishing around in your head, yes I was bored.....very bored. Surprisingly though it was mildly entertaining and produced a few giggles.




If you have nothing better to do, I highly recommend doing some yourself. Below are a few I came up with, just to give you an idea of how it works. Once you've got the hang of it, challenge a friend and see who comes up with the best one (bonus points for doing actions and making said friend snort while laughing)




"Look before you leap."


has the perfect opposite of


"Fuck it! Weeeeeeeeeeee!"




"The grass is always greener on the other side."


is the exact opposite of


"The secret to a nice garden is to paint your lawn twice a week."




"Aim for the moon, and even if you miss, you'll land among the stars."


is the flip side of


"Aim for the balls, you'll get whatever you want then."




OK so that last one was stretching it a bit, but fuck it. My game my rules.