Crushing it

Things that went through my mind in the process of composing this week’s blog post:

1. To Partner: “We need more of those crushable baking potato chips that are not potato chips…”
2. Hey, there is an entire site devoted to logging prior weather in the U.S.! Someone anticipated the deep-seated need of the ADHD community for a site to fact check them when they write, “Even though it seems hard to believe when we hit the 70s this week, we were in the 20s just last week” and they can’t perceive time well enough to remember if it really was “just last week” – or only felt like it.
3. Good. My Partner added bread crumbs to our order.
4. That historical weather site was probably intended for historical fiction. Solipsism is great in theory, but the idea that my mind shapes all of reality falls apart immediately upon being reminded that there is (still) no site to determine the actual word I am looking for from the random descriptions of my ADHD/brain-fogged mind. If the Internet were built around me, there would be. Ipso facto, my mind is not the only one that exists.
5. To Partner: “You are right that if we order bread crumbs instead of making them, then they are not ‘crushable’ but ‘already crushed.’ Isn’t tense relative to the frame of reference though? By the frame of reference of the bread crumbs, the description is ‘already crushed.’ Potato chips don’t come pre-crushed. So, didn’t I use the correct tense for their frame of reference?”
6. The moment an AI can obtain ‘bread crumbs’ from ‘crushable baking potato chips that are not potato chips’ – regardless of tense – is probably the moment we achieve the Singularity.
7. This list of random thoughts is about to be longer than the rest of the blog post.
8. This is also why my Partner and I crush games like Taboo and Heads Up. Maybe I should just go with that and make this post about how effective communication in relationships becomes even more convoluted with brain fog?
9. I should still explain why I was originally looking up the weather last week to fact check myself, even though it seems kind of anti-climactic now to state that chronic illness and ADHD can lead to word-finding difficulties when I’ve clearly shown it.
10. Wait, my original example works just as well as an example of effective communication with chronic illness! I can just relay the original conversation from last week’s cold snap that was intended to become a polished blog post verbatim! Crushing it.

Lavender: “Where’s the…er, <little warmie thing>?”

*Partner looks around our apartment*

Partner: “Are you asking for the space heater, your heating pad, a cup of cocoa, the weighted blanket or the cat?”

Lavender: “The…er, heat box one. Brain fog sucks.

*beat*

Still Lavender: “Wait, I can see how it could have been most of those. But, the cat? How does that work?”

Partner: “I know your brain. Your brain could easily have reached for a description of a little furry thing, detoured through the Soft Kitty song because she’s a Soft Kitty, Warm Kitty, and then lost ‘furry’ before finding ‘kitty’ to end up with ‘warmie.’”

Lavender: “That’s what you are going with? Not the easier explanation of ‘She’s warm when she sits on me?’”

*Partner gives pointed look*

Lavender: “Ok, fine that is how it would go.”

Partner: “See, you can’t even deny it. The ‘little warmie thing’ could totally have been the cat.”

Lavender: “Yes. But, you know that – thanks to this conversation – I now want all those little warmie things, right? This is the price you pay for knowing me better than I know myself.”

Partner: “I can help you with most of those, but the last one you’ll have to convince yourself.”

Lavender *in a sing-song voice*: “Here little warmie thing…”

I assume that most of my readers have at least a passing familiarity with word finding difficulties thanks to ADHD, dissociation, chronic illness or all of the above. I sincerely wish you all at least one relationship with a creature who also speaks brain fog. I will note that my cat did come when I called her a Little Warmie Thing. (Cats are not particular about semantics when there’s a warm blanket draped over a soft human who has a space heater pointed directly at her upon which to nap.) The most effective relationships with brain fog don’t necessarily have to be with humans.

However, I kind of hope that they aren’t – at least for the immediate future – with sentient AIs. It’s not that there would, in principle, be anything wrong with that. It’s just that my Partner and I only placed that grocery order with the pre-crushed not-potato-chips this morning. Delivery won’t happen for two days, so we need to postpone the Singularity and resultant Apocalyptic readjustment long enough to ensure we’re well-stocked with a fighting chance to escape a large urban downtown in chaos before learning what an entirely different type of “crushing it” feels like…

—

P.S. – Did you know the lyrics to Soft Kitty are alleged to have been plagiarized? I didn’t know that until I pulled a Wikipedia link of the lyrics for any unfamiliar readers. I did know that legend says Shakespeare coined many common terms such as “assassinate.” I don’t know if he had a chronic illness, but Elizabethan-era medical care was poor enough that it seems a safe bet that something somewhere was hurting as he wrote his most famous works. That’s close enough to chronic illness. If any brain-fogged proto-Shakespearean bloggers didn’t already know it, WordPress offers a guide to preventing content theft. If you commonly coin neologisms out of sheer necessity, be sure to lock them down as your own intellectual property now or risk future generations of brain-fogged bloggers incorporating those neologisms into their own convoluted thought patterns with incorrect attribution.

P.P.S – Need a recap of anything I’m talking about in any post? Check out the Glossary of Terms.

Advertisement