400!

It's my 400th entry posted on Bradism, so that means it's time for my Traditional Day 50 Nostalgia Entry!

Quote:
Monday December 13th 2004
Lately I have been trying to improve my mental-social abilities by decreasing the amount I over think and therefore overcomplicate situations. This includes, but isn't limited to, improving my ability to say hello to someone I know when I see them, instead of trying to avoid them. Yeah, I suck at initiating conversations, but every day I make progress.
Today while at Dads house digging a retaining wall I was pushing the wheelbarrow back to the dig site and looking down the hill I saw the neighbour, who I don't know, walking towards his shed. Without thinking, and I mean spontaneously, I lifted my hand and waved at him. Then I quickly faced forward and didn't look for a reaction. But I was friendly to a neighbour! Later I remembered that Dad had been reporting him to the council for noise complaints and stuff and they were effectively mortal enemies but I still felt a little more self-assured.
Thing is, I've always been prone to seriously over-complicate things. I'm constantly mentally arguing with myself and lately its gotten worse and it's starting to get more aggressive. I hope that they can get along soon because it would be a messy divorce for me and I already went through one of those!
I was thinking today, over thinking as usual, and I figured that considering the amount of mental aerobics and fight-dancing that goes on, my brain must be very unique. I wonder if I have a tasty brain.

It's difficult, at least without preparation and research, to determine at what stage you stop doing things. Life moves so fast and I change so often in so many areas that it's sometimes not until I read something I wrote less than a year ago and realise that not so long ago I had a completely different outlook on the world. And yet at the time, it seemed normal. I guess it was pretty normal. I realised after much introspection that I try and live almost every moment as a sitcom. I reduce all situations and interactions into the appropriate clichés, make jokes at every opportunity and hopefully, by the end, learn a lesson.

And in this Sitcom of life, in which I star, the same rules apply to me. This time last year I saw myself as the quiet, socially awkward guy who always spent more time planning what he was going to do than actually doing it. Through sheer fluke I may have stumbled upon one of the moments that led to me shedding that skin. In other ways I still am that socially awkward guy who is trying to work out how he fits into the world. However, these days my social awkwardness is most often caused by my bluntness or monochrome like rationalisation rather than my introversion. I still feel special in a way that I believe my brain seems to possess more complex functionality than most others. Working three years in retail backs this up. I remember I was putting Ajax and some other cleaning chemicals up on loose during a nightfill shift when I originally mulled over my brain’s argumentative fight dancing. So to bring this full circle back into temporal-character comparisons, I don’t work at Woolworths anymore. I don’t spend 15 hours a week inhaling every cleaning fluid in Blackwood and possibly coincidentally my thoughts are less erratic and conflicting...