I Digress…

Did you ever have to make “mind maps” in elementary school? It’s like a web of thoughts all over a page, somehow related or linked to one another by a main topic until it is just a mess of ideas. (We used these for brainstorming for projects or title pages etc.)

ANYHOW, that is how I feel my brain works, just a mess of random ideas, particularly when I’m explaining something or trying to tell a story. I’ve been told my whole life that I give WAY too much detail. When I was a kid everyone would head out of the room whenever I finished watching a movie or reading a book, because you better believe they were going to hear every minor detail about all of the characters, sub-characters, plot, etc. Sometimes my Dad would humor me and sit through my whole story, and for that I say “thanks Dad!” but I think it’s only because he knows I got it from him and felt he owed it to me to stick it out.

But whatever, no big deal, I like back story, I think it’s valuable. But sometimes when I’m telling a story I get so side tracked that I can’t remember where I was going with what I was saying in the first place… and by “sometimes” I mean pretty much every time I open my mouth. I’m like one giant run-on sentence. The product of a 4 child home. If I have someone’s undivided attention I don’t know what to do with myself, I get so excited everything starts flowing out with no for-thought or plan, its like I’m on Gilmore Girls, I talk a mile a minute. The BF always says “all of your sentences start with ‘and’”, which is pretty accurate, but I’m telling a story, AND it’s good, AND it will likely lead to another story, which is equally as good…AND this could continue all day, AND you better listen to me, because this story is important, or awesome, or both!

I do however loose people’s attention regularly and I’ve gotten pretty good at detecting when it’s happening. Mostly this happens when I’ve started explaining how a minor character in the story is related to the story as a whole, and then the story turns into one about that character, and on and on, and we loose the point of where I was going all together, but I always feel like those details are CRUCIAL to what I’m saying…you need to know that this guy (who triggered the story I’m telling about a different friend from highschool) has a brother, who is the same age as my brother, in fact, all three of his brothers are the same age as my siblings…well kind of, some of them are off my a couple months…and his one brother that’s the same age as my sister is going to university, and blah blah blah, do you have all day?

The big problem is when I notice that I’ve lost them I get so distracted that I can’t remember how to get back to what the story was about in the first place, and I probably had a good reason for telling it, but the whole thing ends up goes to hell in a hand basket, because I usually end up say, “uh…I totally forgot where I was going with this…BAH”

BRUTAL.