Back in the blog life again….

hello friends! it has been 7 years, 10 months, and 5 days since my last blog post. and what have i been up to all this time? well, good news everyone! i received tenure. then, almost immediately after, there was a pandemic! i have to admit, i was pretty burned out at that point, and a year and a half of working from home actually suited me quite well at the time, since i live alone and only have myself to take care of/put up with. being a web services dude meant some heavy lifting transitioning all things to online, all of a sudden, but also there was much crafting and letter writing and time spent cuddling with my cats.

true story: the exact day i started back up in the office again, after getting home and starting to relax and pat myself on the back for leaving the house ALL DAY and not having any sort of meltdown over it, i got a phone call from my mom that my dad had fallen and hit his head and likely had a traumatic brain injury. so that was a fun month of driving to the hospital/rehab every day (my mom doesn’t drive, so i needed to go pick her up in bayonne and take her to the hospital in new brunswick or the rehab hospital in edison.)

my dad is now doing much better, and because of his injury, and the insanity that american politics has been, i also got really into neuroscience. seriously, i can’t stop thinking about brains. i’m currently considering an MS in the field, which is offered at my college and i could do for very little money, if only i can convince a bunch of life scientists to admit a social scientist with very little lab experience into the program. it’s truly wild to me that this could even be a possibility but i am told by the program coordinator that it’s actually not that crazy of a thought.

i guess i should cover the 2 most obvious questions you probably have: what the hell does the title of your blog mean, and while we’re explaining titles of things, where on god’s green earth does the title of this post come from?

1) in my forays into learning about brain science, i have discovered that A) apparently i have a pretty weird brain, and B) there is a name for a problem i’ve experienced my whole life but never been able to explain or really even coherently expound upon, and that name is “aberrant salience“. as a neurospicy individual with diagnosed OCD (mainly of the obsessive thoughts variety), my brain tends to like to take in AS MUCH INFORMATION AS POSSIBLE AT ALL TIMES, but due to some quirk in my processing, it doesn’t really know how to sort or prioritize this overload of information. apparently this is a problem often associated with schizophrenia and others who suffer from psychosis, but i don’t experience any other symptoms of those disorders, so i don’t know why exactly i would have this particular issue, but after reading the definitions and descriptions, i realized it put into words a problem i’ve dealt with pretty much forever.

i’m not sure what to make of this, or what it means, other than that i’ve learned that in order for me to understand a situation or a story or a joke or what-have-you, i need ALL THE CONTEXT. seriously, my brain can’t tell the important details from the trivial ones on its own most of the time, so you need to tell me WHY you are telling me something, and what the important parts are that i should be listening for and paying attention to. i basically need those bowling alley bumpers on every conversation i have, or i’ll come out of that conversation with entirely the wrong point. this is a huge pain in the ass, but also kind of a superpower? like if you need something looked at in a novel way, I KNOW NO OTHER WAY TO LOOK AT THINGS.

also, like many neurospicy individuals, my brain loves finding patterns, so if you don’t tell me what the pattern i should be looking for is, i will find my own. several to many of them. which brings us to:

2) what the hell does the title of this blog post mean? it’s actually a line from my favorite podcast, Knowledge Fight, which covers the shenanigans of pundit and lunatic Alex Jones. after the first trump presidency, i got extremely interested in why and how some people seemed to be creating and living in their own little realities, and BOY IS THAT RABBIT HOLE DEEP. those of us with brains that like to find patterns, can all too often fall into conspiracy thinking, because we see connections everywhere, between everything. so the line itself is actually not important, it’s just an homage to my efforts to learn how brains get themselves into trouble, and how to shore up my understanding of objective reality so that i can avoid falling prey to people and entities who are good at manipulating minds.

i have since picked up a whole cadre of podcasts on similar topics, like Decoding the Gurus, Embrace the Void, Some Dare Call It Conspiracy, The Podcaster’s Guide to the Conspiracy, QAA, Conspirituality, Conspiracy Clearinghouse, I Don’t Speak German, and probably a whole bunch more. what a good idea for a topic for a future post!

aaaaaaaaaaaaanyhoodle, that’s a lot for one post, i think, but covers quite a bit of ground in terms of how i got here, and what’s going on with me. plus the internet kind of sucks now and really what we need is to bring blogging back into the mainstream (GIVE ME BACK MY GOOGLE READER!) in the future, i’ll talk about what’s going on with library technology, which is my day job, and with various neuroscience topics, which is my obsession. i’ll also probably post some updates involving whatever crafting and gardening projects i’m working on, because it turns out that i’ve gotten REAL into native perennial gardening and biodiversification. i might even talk about that time i edited the New Jersey Native Perennial Society’s podcast about poetry and plants, because once upon a time i got that master’s degree in audio production, and once upon a time before that i was a huge poetry nerd.