10 ways I have been confused: #1 - failure of the senses…


Last Friday night, I walked into a bookstore. I was just browsing, really, but I’m doing a short course at the moment so I decided to look for books on theatre. For a while I couldn’t find any, then I spied one at the back of the store, a big fat tome of a book called THEATRE.
Up close it was surrounded by art books, and indeed it was THEARTBOOK (The Art Book), clearly not a book about theatre at all.
I turned around.
Ah! (Insert smiley face.) ‘DRAMA’… over there, in a different section.
BURMA.
A cook book.
I read a little extract from a book called, I think, Brain Rules. If I remember correctly, it said that humans are blind, just for a fraction of an instant, four times a second.
The girl in the bookstore looked, to me, about twenty. She had brightly dyed hair cut into a sharp fringe and wore big fat-rimmed glasses that played on the line between Indie and nerd. She welcomed everyone into the store with the same I’m really happy if you don’t need my help line: “Are you just happy browsing?” Unfortunately, she was managing the store, which didn’t shut until 9pm, alone. This meant she hadn’t had any opportunity to go and make herself dinner. But she was enthusiastic about books and her replacement dinner.

“Aren’t wasabi peas awesome!?” she said to Lily.

10 ways I have been confused - #2: Why do I check my phone so often?


I get confused. Fine. Things happen that are weird, surprising, stressful and bewildering.
But then I become attached to the possibility of working it all out. And that desire, that attachment, gets me stuck. It is the desire to find that explanation (to learn! understand! comprehend! control!), rather than the event itself, that keeps me confused.
But  I go through periods when I check my phone a lot, and I really really want to know why.

Popular Posts