Scatterbrained

I find myself feeling scatterbrained on this lovely Saturday morning. This happens from time-to-time, a kind of phase that I go through, my own personal 1202 alarm that occurs when I’ve got too much going on inside my head.

It started yesterday when, after outlining all of the great things I had to read, I couldn’t settle on anything. I started and then stopped half a dozen books. I still haven’t settled on anything at this point, and not knowing what to read next always unsettles me a bit. I can’t force myself to read something I am not ready to read. And apparently I have not been ready to read any of the books I thought I was interested in. This is not uncommon, although it tends to come in phases. It usually resolves itself, but sometimes it takes a few days.

I have been working on a personal archiving project that has finally gained some traction, but there are many moving parts to it and I can’t figure out which of these parts to focus on. That doesn’t help with the scatterbrained feeling.

Then there is writing. I couldn’t figure out what to write here this morning. Nothing leapt to mind, and nothing on my idea list seemed particularly appealing to me as I sat down to write. Those ideas included:

• Pens and pencils
• Useful things around my desk
• Filling out forms
• Things I’ve found in my bed
• Complaining
• Acquired tastes

There are other things on the list but those were the most interesting and they fill me with inspiration this morning.

In addition to this, I am finally forcing myself to learn how to use Vim the right way. I have re-enabled Vim mode in Obsidian, using a Vim plugin that allows for a .vimrc file, and I am forcing myself to use it correctly, without resorting to the arrow keys and maximizing effect with minimal keystrokes. This is slow-going, but effective. For instance, as part of my archiving project, I am trying to locate versions of all of the stories I’ve ever written, and convert them to plain text (markdown) dating the files based on actual creation dates. Once in plain text, some of these files need some tweaking. In one instance, every paragraph was indented one space. I managed to use 4 keystrokes to fix this across the entire 30 page document. Try to do that in MS Word!

There are other random tasks I have to take care of that occupy space in my brain, nothing urgent but things I have been putting off. Put all of this together and it provides a good background for why I feel so scatterbrained today.