Scattered

Yesterday I had tunnel vision. Today I feel scattered.

I feel like three dozen little embers of attention singeing various threads. There's a thread of "all that backprop network stuff going on out there," with a constant refrain of "and isn't this insane?" There's a thread of "that backprop network stuff going on in my general vicinity." There's a thread of "what's next at work." There's a thread of "hmm, my data processing scripts often end up a horrifying ugly mess even without Pandas. what's going on there? is there a way that things could be better?" There's a thread of "oh, right, I am supposed to give a talk in less than six months, I should probably do something about that." There's a thread of "the puppy." There's a thread of "where is the cat." There's a thread of "I should read that thing I started but I don't want to, I'm getting bored with it." There's a thread of "I could read that other thing I started but eh, don't feel like it right now." There was a thread of "what am I going to write about?" — that one at least I've burned! There's a thread of "oh yeah, this poetry group, I should probably figure out what I'm going to submit this cycle, and also we lost one of our more active members, that might be a problem." There's a thread of, "what's all this meditation stuff about, I don't get it, am I a fool, does it make sense, am I being had, but look how well things are going." There's a thread of "my toilet kinda half works, I Guess I should keep track of how the fixing-it project is going, but also I wish I just knew what was wrong with it and then I could fix it? but then I'd have less time for everything else? but maybe that is fine? what else was I going to do with the time anyway? but it's out of my hands now, so oh well." There's a thread of "'what about that game I was playing? well the framerate gets real bad toward the end of a session and I was getting bored so I stopped...' which is fine I guess? I got more than my money's worth out of it... huh..." There's a thread of "hey there's that movie you thought about, maybe you can go see it with your cousin, but that would require planning and coordinating and who knows, ugh, sounds like a pain, better not." There's a thread of "what about that other movie that's coming out with the bomb." There's a thread of "I could stand to spend more time talking to people, and that sounds like work, and I'm not sure if I want to do that." There's a thread of "what's this project management stuff, and maybe I should work on this figuring out what the problem is stuff." And...

There's probably another few threads, too. I'm surprised I got to 18 and also surprised I only got to 18. Both at once somehow.