Repeat after me

My mind is a repetitive little bugger. I circle back around to the same crap over and over. It's like when I was in college and needed something to do to blow off steam and I would go ride my bike around and around and around the big parking lot across from the campus. I knew every inch of that parking lot. From both directions.

Since yesterday, I've been listening to the same song over and over. It's on one of those CDs I lost back when I started this blog (see the "Losing Music" post). I'm sure it's driving OM crazy. I shut my door for a while today so I could work on a project and listen to the song and sing it softly without making her want to get a gun. "OM got a gun..."

I occasionally teach a course on the intersections of psychology and culture. So I am a dangerous person to be around. Because I know a little too much about psychology to keep my mouth shut when I should. One thing I learned a few years ago while teaching the class is that our minds sabotage us when we try not to think about something. They (bear with the metaphor for a second) put one of those little post-it flags on the thing that we don't want to think about. Then, when our minds do the kind of scanning they have to do all the time--to answer some question about who the junior senator from California is, or to talk to some random reporter about urban legends, or to remember the cute new way to get home at night--they see the little post-it flag and scan on over to see why the post-it flag is there. And then, there they are thinking about the post-it flag and why it's there and lo there you are thinking about the one thing you didn't want to think about.

Once I learned that, I began to wonder whether or not I should just ride around and around in that circle. And if the circle happens to need to include a particular Indigo Girls song from 1992, so be it.

My honey thinks I get into things by rote. I start doing them and can't stop. I do like order in my life. It's hard to find order sometimes. Still, when I spend too much time staring at one crack in the parking lot or one post-it flag, I wonder if there are other ways to think.

Or if I could put up enough post-it flags in all different colors to keep me from focusing on one.

As I said to the random reporter, we say what we need to say to make sense of the world. One woman's brain post-its are another person's urban legends.

Lather, rinse, repeat.