My reluctant brain

Even when I was in the hospital, just days after surgery, I was incredulous to find that my brain won’t listen to me.

Me: “With all this laying-around time, I could catch up on my reading!”

Brain: “Nope. No books.”

Me: “How about magazines? Lots of pretty pictures!”

Brain: “Nope. No magazines.”

Me: “Hey, we could watch a movie! We never have enough time to see all the movies on the watchlist.”

Brain: “Nah. Too much noise and too much going on.”

Me: “Oh, music! We could just sit and listen to music … Classical especially.”

Brain. “Nope. Not interested.”

Me: “How about all those courses lined up in Udemy? Some of those are pretty easy, and geared to passive learning.”

Brain: “Shut the hell up.”

My brain seems to be a separate creature, removed from my will.

c) 2015 Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett
c) 2015 Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett

I gather that this is some primitive brain function, meant to keep me from overdoing it, while my brain devotes itself to healing – and protecting itself from another invasion.

It’s exasperating as hell. All this time on my hands. So much time…. The one thing I never have enough of, and now I have tons of it, and I can’t do anything with it.

All I can do is lay around. And do some stretching. I guess that’s allowed because it wards off the lower back pain.

What else, brain? Will you please let me do something of substance?

“Shut the hell up.”