Caffiene and your brain!

Wooo! Zooom! My mind flies by at 1000 miles per hour, which is really fast for sitting in a rolling chair. (Get the implied double meaning? I'm sitting in my chair while my mind is moving, but I'm also conjuring the image or literally rolling, in a rolling chair, at 1000 mph. That's seriously fast, past the sound barrier. (Of course, theoretically this is easy to imagine. With frictionless wheel bearings, on a good slant, in a vacuum, gravity will pull you faster than 1000 mph. (But, frictionless wheel bearings are imaginary - they don't exist, how could they? You only need bearings that are good enough to have a max speed of over 1000 mph. (See? I did it again! I implied that the giant vacuum with the slant long enough to roll a rolling chair up to 1000 mph DOES exist, by the mocking tone I used when noting that the frictionless bearings don't! (Anybody else realize that I'm now inside of 5 sets of parentheses? This is seriously off topic. These metatopics just keep coming to me. (I'm thinking very much nonlinearly. Of course, grammar is an art (some call it a metalanguage) and the use of parentheses is subjective. This could've been written with much different prose. In fact, I think almost no one would open such a ludicrous amount of parentheses; maybe Gabriel Garcia Marquez would. (Ms. Charlip made me read 100 Years of Solitude in 11th grade, and while only about 5 of us read it all, and I thank her kindly for years of excellent teaching (I still think about the 5 types of comedy also), I think my readers might have some words for her (Another pun! 'Have some words for her?' Wooo! Zooom!) Of course, maybe they'd pass their thoughts on to the great Colombian grammarian savant instead.) The problem with thinking this nonlinearity, is that it is very easy to lose your train of thought. This comes about much more frequently in conversations with multiple people, but with me it happens, occasionally, solo. The problem with WRITING nonlinearly is that, even though we have the grammatical structure to do so (parentheses,) it makes the reader strain to figure out what the hell is going on. (Of course, Joyce still got published, as well as many other prose artists. Grammatical engineering is just another tool in the literary artists' box.) Illegibility is a problem, however, and isn't really something to be sought. )))))) The reason I'm thinking so fast is that I had a small cup of weak coffee at the donut shop this morning. I also had a bran muffin and a sesame bagel - no cruller. I don't usually partake in caffeine. When I do, Wooo! Zooom! (Triple-O-mind explosion!) Of course, the mind is influenced by chemicals. The ancients knew this, in a way. They didn't know much about what those chemicals were, but they knew which plants to chew, frogs to lick, and so forth. Recently we've learned about how life's basic activities alter our brain chemistry. (Recently meaning the last 100 years or so.) Food, sex, exercise, sufficient sleep, sleep deprivation, stress, et cetera, all effect our affect. (I couldn't resist! (I should've. (Oh man, totally non linear again, but now I've got a nagging conscience to return to the train - the train of thought. (It's going to be hard though, if I can't lay off the puns. (I need a plan of action: no more puns or double entendres. If one slips out (I seem to not be able to help it,) then try to refrain from commenting on it. (I seem to be having difficulty with this as well.) That's a plan!))))) Caffeine works profoundly on me, but for the last 15 years I've been trying to get better at noticing the subtle changes of brain chemistry. Eating healthily changes me over the next day or so. Exercise changes me for the next two days, or so. Coffee works for about 2 days. 36 hours of hyperness, then it tapers off into a lull of less energy, mood, and esteem for the rest of the second day. Sad, but Wooo! Zooom!

Find your own brain chemistry, and you can be your own engineer. Most all of us self medicate, but an advanced technique is to self diagnose, and treat the causations of happiness, rather than the symptoms of unhappiness. Experiment on yourself, and enjoy.