Mental Garbage

There's this feeling you get when you solve a really annoying technical problem - you may know the kind, the one where things just aren't working the way they should, and the documentation doesn't help, and you've bashed your head against it for a long time, then in a flash it comes to you and it works, and then all the accumulated crap related to that problem just.. *goes*.

A problem like that is like a growth in your brain. It starts out with a little grain of sand, and then you deposit the results of thinking about it around it until it's some massive calcified mass. all the potential lines of inquiry, all the anomalous results of investigation, all the half-formed and half-assed ideas about what you might try, all the possible solutions from the almost concrete to the entirely nebulous. All the mental notes you made yourself, all in a giant fucking lump in your head.

It gets in the way of other things, and sticks to them, and so when you think of completely unrelated things that were interrupted by thoughts of this problem, then you always go back to thinking of the problem Then it almost takes on a life of it's own, and yeah, it's just your subconscious fretting at it, but it's just so damned pervasive, and intrusive, and odd. It squats at the back of your brain like a malign homonculous, *staring* at you.

Then you solve it. Finally.

All in a rush all of those possible solutions collapse into *one* solution. The one you just came up with, and all of that crap that was accumulated around the problem just flushes out of your brain, and it leaves a sort of space, and you're kind of in mental shock, since everything else has way more room to breath, and all the stuff that happened while that problem was back there gets to stretch out and rattle around and run and skip and yell.

I've never not solved it. No matter how many times i've been in this boat. But i hate to think what it would be like if you didn't. It'd drive you nuts.

That's why, i think, i'm an engineer and not a theorist.

It's been an interesting couple of weeks.