Brain Farts
Have you ever had those moments where your brain just spaces out and suddenly some key piece of information is in some kind of blackhole? I do. All the time. Like this morning in a meeting, I uttered the intelligent words “The test results have… *pause for at least 10 seconds as I mumble under my breath to myself and pulling out the virtual jumper cables to jump start my brain trying to get it to form the next word, all while 7 people stare at me* …consistently shown that….”
I do that with people’s names and other things too. Like when suddenly I’m trying to tell somebody something, it has been known to come out like this… “Um,…. shoot, for some reason his name is not clicking… who am I thinking of? I’ve known him for several years, he works for me and I talk to him every week, he was just here 5 minutes ago…. argh…..” Sucks even worse when I lose a person’s name when I’m speaking to them (how embarrasing would it be to fail to come up with someone’s name you have known for years and see frequently? … I’ve done it.)
Add this to an err in judgement of sometimes (often?) speaking before thinking, and that counfounds the problem. 
“Hey, did you know that… um….. oh shoot, nevermind, I can’t think of what I was going to say.” And one of my favorite idiot responses recently when a friend was talking about Maryland… “I was in Portland once…” Yes, I know Portland is in Maine. Yes, I knew it at the moment I said that too. Try wiping that egg off your face while trying to retain some semblance of intelligence. I find distractions often one of the best recourses… “Oh, hey what about this weather!”
It’s one of the blessings of Internet communications…. seeing what you are saying before transmitting it, and blaming long pauses in IM’s on “oh, I had to take care of something.” I’ve even had my own family say “Wow, he can write! Where did that come from?” when they’ve seen my weblog (even though I still contend I suck at writing, but then again we are all our own greatest critics.)
So what was the whole point of this entry? I don’t know. I can’t remember…