Not like a crêpe. Like soda water that's been left out too long. A friend of mine remarked that this is because I'm using it quite a lot these days, but it doesn't feel that way to me. What it feels like is a certain loss of capacity. I just don't do some of the more intellectually adventurous things that I used to do: I'm not reading the heavy-hitting books, or writing the large amounts of fluid prose, or thinking the limber thoughts. I am doing other things, admittedly. Working a job, taking care of my mother, writing a novel (although not at the moment), and also collaborating on a big secret project that I can't tell you about but which adds up to a whole other job. So it's not as though my mind isn't occupied. But I am aware of a kind of airy, empty feeling towards the upper reaches of my mind which I'm pretty sure is the mental equivalent of the first vestiges of age-related stiffening in the joints.
Which should be enough, I think, to put me back on the trike and set me pedaling to work again. Exercise is a proven spur to neurogenesis. It's also good for improving the taste of your neurochemical soup, depression-wise. And, for fuck's sake, it's only five miles to the office. There's no reason I shouldn't be riding, and every reason I should. So I think perhaps I'll start doing that on Wednesday. I couldn't do it today, or tomorrow, on account of having to drop off and pick up my mother from the hospital for her regularly-scheduled IVIG infusion. (That's how this usually works: when I get the impulse to start riding again, there is almost always some reason I can't act on that impulse immediately.)
If nothing else, the abundant evidence for the forestalling of age-related decline ought to be enough to set me spinning again. Neurologically speaking, that decline starts at about 30 (sorry if that's alarming), and I'm sensitive enough to my own ways of thinking and being to spot the nascent fuzziness here and there. But! It's also reversible, if you do and eat the right things. The most effective remedy is exercise, and if I expect to be up for all the many things I've got planned for 2011 (not least of which is publishing one novel and completing a second) I need give my little bucket of gray matter every advantage.
Speaking of which: getting enough sleep is also crucial to proper brain function, so I suppose I'd better shut down the computer and see about putting my flat brain and me to bed. Ta!
Which should be enough, I think, to put me back on the trike and set me pedaling to work again. Exercise is a proven spur to neurogenesis. It's also good for improving the taste of your neurochemical soup, depression-wise. And, for fuck's sake, it's only five miles to the office. There's no reason I shouldn't be riding, and every reason I should. So I think perhaps I'll start doing that on Wednesday. I couldn't do it today, or tomorrow, on account of having to drop off and pick up my mother from the hospital for her regularly-scheduled IVIG infusion. (That's how this usually works: when I get the impulse to start riding again, there is almost always some reason I can't act on that impulse immediately.)
If nothing else, the abundant evidence for the forestalling of age-related decline ought to be enough to set me spinning again. Neurologically speaking, that decline starts at about 30 (sorry if that's alarming), and I'm sensitive enough to my own ways of thinking and being to spot the nascent fuzziness here and there. But! It's also reversible, if you do and eat the right things. The most effective remedy is exercise, and if I expect to be up for all the many things I've got planned for 2011 (not least of which is publishing one novel and completing a second) I need give my little bucket of gray matter every advantage.
Speaking of which: getting enough sleep is also crucial to proper brain function, so I suppose I'd better shut down the computer and see about putting my flat brain and me to bed. Ta!
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