Did you ever have one of those days when only at the end of it you discover your jumper is on the inside out? I know it can’t just be me, or at least I am hoping I’m not going for the doh! lifetime achievement award – can you get female Homer Simpson’s? To possibly mirror the insanity of my life and work – not much life more work actually but there you go – I today just about half an hour ago discovered my jumper has indeed been on the wrong way all day. I feel a bit like I should be confessing this as scatter brained anonymous or something, but there we go.
Jumper inside out days can also be metaphorical – it’s a general and oh to real term for me today. I love my work and can shall we say get a tad too involved possibly for my health. Obsessive and workaholic are words people have sometimes given my love for what I do. I don’t mind mainly because I don’t notice as I’m often enjoying doing it too much. I also don’t overly mind these jumper inside out days as I no longer have the embarrassment of them being in public since going freelance. I think the last one I had at work was a lesser not matching socks day a few months before I went freelance. Those days are the nicer side of inside out brain burping days.
A common dual day whammy is that these wearing your jumper inside out days often coincide, precede or follow brain burp days. These brain burp days tend to come more and more the older I get and I do dread the fact that one day I will just be brain burping and not so much brain working. Brain burps can be small like forgetting something, they can also be big like searching for a ; in reams of code for half a day and finding it wasn’t just under your nose it was waving a giant neon sign saying ‘here’. Also, on these days I can be found staring at various things in order to focus what brain cells aren’t off playing hide and seek behind my brain stem. Brain burps can be just a moment too – that pause in your function when you can find yourself staring at something and catch yourself open mouthed making a silent deeerrrrr. Brain burps have a variety of types but I think we all have them.
Some days you don’t get that strong emotion of ‘I wish I’d never got out of bed’. The days when you feel you’d rather be banging your head against a bed of nails than be conscious a second longer – these are not jumper inside out days or brain burp days – these are just bad days in general and often only resolve by duvet, sleep and waking up the next day holding onto the thought that it can’t get worse, but probably will unless you spend the whole day under the duvet to check you don’t have another one. Jumper inside out days are more gentle. You only realise at the end of the day what either your work colleagues (my dogs and husband for me) have failed to mention despite you having conversations and appearing lucid all day (yes, I do talk to me dogs…and?). These kind people have figured ‘ah jumper inside out day’ or ‘oh brain burp know it well’ and gently ignored the obvious lack of proper clothing wearing you have been sporting all day. In some ways they are being nice and in some cases not so as they have been joking to everyone they can of the mad person having a day again (I’m sure Dillon our puppy was in-fact doing this today at one point and he also tried bringing me leaves to replace my obvious lacking brain cells today).
As you realise at the end of the day it’s not so bad really. You can even write a blog post about it whilst still wearing the inside out jumper because you’re ready for bed and what is the point of all the effort of getting your clothing at the last minute? I never was one for last minute gestures unless they involved college coursework. I’d make a bad super hero just because of my lack of last minute saving. Well, that and the fact you don’t see many super heros with their capes inside out or staring at things pondering nothing because their brain is burping, while they fly into the wrong hide out as they thought it was turn right at the big sign not left. These days aren’t horrible they are more the part of what makes us all human, maybe I’m slightly more human if we use that scale and considering the day I have I’ve got to save some face somewhere. At the end of a day like this all you can do is make sure you lay out tomorrows jumper the right way and maybe opt for some more obvious clothing like a hoodie with a zipper that handily will tell you if it’s inside out or not early on in the day and thus save another repeat for at least a day.
