My mind feels empty all the time.

Really.

It's part of why I'm so bad at conversations. It's why I was (and assumedly still am) so bad at writing humanities papers. It could be why many people much more astute than I have likened me to a monk.

When I have the urge to do any "journal" writing (I suppose the right word is "blog," these days), it's almost always because there's a thought bouncing around in my head, and I feel like I want to let it out, somehow. Get my mind back to that blank state. When a song is running through my head repeatedly, I'll listen to it over and over until it lets itself out. I enjoyed swimming, because after two hours straight, I didn't have enough energy to feed stray thoughts.

Zhuoma mentioned a few times that she had so many thoughts in her head that she couldn't get anything done. Maybe I finally understand what she means -- sometimes if I have just one thought in my head, I can't get anything done either.

This mental state of mine has shaped what I studied -- I was reasonably good at math or physics tests, where you can get by with remembering 2 or 3 theorems and deriving the rest of the things you needed, step by stateless step.

It's shaped the way I've written software -- I gravitate to building things bottom up because you have to keep fewer things in mind at the same time that way, or writing totally empty classes as a way to not have to remember the list of things that needed to be created.

It's preventing me, right now, as I stare blankly at my computer table and munch on sunflower seeds, from thinking of a third example which would end this list of examples with righteous rhetorical fluorish.

If you have a conversation with me and I just kind of stare off in some direction for a while, I'm sorry. I'm probably all there. Just drawing a blank.