jeff yen

Eh? What?

I am apprehensive, on some vague, almost-not-there-at-all level, that I am losing my mind. Not, happily, in the sense of foaming at the mouth and dry-humping cookware (after all, there are only so many ways to occupy a free afternoon). Rather, I have noticed that I am steadily losing focus. If I had to use a commonly understood name, I would probably call it ADD, but I despise the idea of using the shield of a label to hide what is, to me, a symptom of my apathy.

In truth, that might be an overly pessimistic view of things. It might not be a hard-wired facet of my own personality that makes my attention and memory falter. It could be that particular vapidity of MTV's programming, which simultaneously commands one's attention and shuts off all higher brain function. It could be the long periods of trance-like mental states, attained during marathon video gaming sessions when I was supposed to be reading up on the neurological bases of cognitive function (ironic, no?).

Whatever the cause, I have found that time seems to pass particularly quickly. More accurately, I constantly find that time has always passed by me with astonishing speed.

This is not uncommon; you always hear people talking about how the week just flew by, or my goodness, is it December already, I have to get the shopping done, and so on and so forth.

Now, I am not by any means trying to say that I am unique in this respect, but for most people, I imagine that the above sentiments are accompanied by some kind of explanation; i.e., they were busy at work or with the family, and while they were thus occupied, time marched on. I, on the other hand, am a particularly idle soul. You can ask anyone in a certain local cafe who their least profitable customer is, and you probably won't have to wait long until they point at me, walking in the door, just in time for my appointment to drink 50-cent refills of coffee all afternoon.

I don't even particularly like coffee.

Back to the point, perhaps it's just that I am unusually talented at wasting time. Given the considerable exercise this talent has gotten recently, maybe I'm simply out of practice at thinking. I haven't really had much of an occasion to turn my brain back on recently, so I suspect it has started to atrophy. Now that I'm trying to wake the damned thing, I can almost see it crack one bloodshot eye at me, before rolling over and pulling the pillow over its head.

It has gotten bad enough that I recently took to the practice of carrying around a memo pad and a pen, just to jot down things I might like to remember or think about later. This little brainstorm ran afoul of a small snag when I kept forgetting the memo pad at home.

I had similar sneaking suspicions a couple years ago, when I thought I was losing whatever laughably rusted, pitted remnant of an edge I might have retained from my more lucid days. I laid those suspicions to rest by taking a bunch of standardized tests, and resolving to never let myself get apathetic and forgetful again.

What was I talking about again? Whatever, it doesn't matter anyway.