Something About preëmption and retention

It’s this odd subconsciously-enabled habit of mine to just soak in all the seemingly-random and/or insignificant bits of data that I come across. And when it comes to talking about it all, I tend to lose track and just derail myself to such horrifying extents that conversations tend to become like making mops because it rained.

And while all this goes on, at some point something just has to be intellectualized all of a sudden, and I end up bringing something else up, or otherwise steering the discussion to a point it wasn’t intended to reach—like way above the average pay-grade of the participants involved. And somehow, that’s been a problem and something that just happens, like it’s embedded somewhere in my mind to preëmpt things.

Maybe it’s my innate tendencies towards enthusiasm, or maybe it’s a kind of impatience I’ve adopted—all I know is that it can make everyone involved pretty uncomfortable. It doesn’t matter much though, because the derailing gets to the point of getting back on track, after innumerable swerves and turns and basically detours.

In short, I preëmpt things—which kind of kills the excitement for others. Sometimes. It depends, really. But jumping to something that was going to be tackled anyway makes me feel queasy because there’s all the in-between things to have talked about that were skipped—what a piteous waste, unless it was a wasted train anyway.

But damn, all the potential synapses, missed!, and so forth. Who knows if any of the thoughts shared could have been re-shared until finally the world became that much brighter—ever so subtly? I wouldn’t know; I contributed to the oversight, dangit!.

Metahyperbole aside, it may be worth noting that the more I think about interaction, the more I think about counteraction, and then I realize that I could possibly be using more defense mechanisms than I thought, and that maybe jumping the gun is among them.

That opens up a lot of mental possibilities, actually; it’s quite daunting. There are already other streams of data that need processing; I don’t need to stir in another one. And not to be subtle about it, but these things tend to stick.

The constant burden of remembering tiny things strains my anxiety threshold, and as a result, little things aren’t actually little things to me. Metaphoric specks of dust aggravate my analogous allergies, and I am capable of having my figurative body overreact to the stuff. It’s like quantum tunneling.

It’s a good thing the processing isn’t as bulletproof as the short-term, though—but the long-term and recall is as reliable as the short-term if the process does decide to be reliable. So my mind is like this weird system that bottlenecks and mutates all the short-term input-slash-data-slash-stuff.

It’s weird because my short- and long-term mental storage mechanisms seem fine even without my paying attention to them, but I’m mostly processing—and that’s often where things go awry. Speculation based on sayings, “Too much of a good thing is not a good thing,” or something to that effect.

And is processing actually healthy? There are people I know who bask in the bliss of not having to process too much, and they seem to be doing fine. “Ignorance is…” blah blah. Or is there this recommended amount of processing, like a quota? A range…? Something, anything?

Sadly, the limit is not rational, so I tend to get all irrational just considering it. Who knows, maybe the limit is Tau? Hopefully not though, because that’s a quantity that’ll take practically forever to reach the end of, which is to say I refuse to accept that Tau is the value, approximated or not.

Somehow I really hope I don’t subconsciously figure out an approximation for Tau based on the thirty-something digits of Pi I still have memorized somewhere in my cluttered head. It’s hard to un-memorize something I’ve already hardwired into my mental system. But over time, I guess memories lose their footing without constant recall.

And how would I know if I forgot something? There’s a thought I think I had forgotten that I thought of before. All the more simple, I guess, that once something is forgotten… well, it’s forgotten. Eloquence is simplicity in language, so mathematical identities must be the most eloquent things ever.

Over-processing is cumbersome, especially when the input is huge. So naturally, my system makes up for it by preempting the discognition process in the form of forgetting the input before it even gets to the processing bit. But I’m rambling.

There must be an easier way of keeping track of the things I ought to keep track of, instead of remembering things I should have forgotten, remembering anomalous input, or forgetting the big things that I would have to piece together later by way of the little things. It just doesn’t make sense, in terms of efficiency.

I’m getting ahead of myself again; obviously I have not thought this through. I don’t even know when the supposed patterns would stop.