Cotton Brain

Do you ever get cotton brain? I call it cotton brain - the term is fashioned after the ever-famous cotton mouth - but cotton brain is far more serious.

About once or twice per month, I have a few hours, sometimes even an entire day, where I feel as if I have cotton stuck between my skull and my brain. The cotton makes it hard for things going on outside of my head - conversations, lectures, movies, what have you - to get inside my brain. I see them, alright. I hear what you're saying. But it's just not registering. There it is. I see it. Yes, yes, I'm nodding in recognition. But, oops. Now it's gone, and I forgot what it was we were even talking about in the first place. It's like the pathway is blocked, and things. just. can't. get. in.

I absolutely HATE cotton brain. It's a very specific feeling, and as far as I can tell, it's not really related to anything I can pinpoint.** It's not fatigue-related, because I generally get it after a good night's sleep. It's not due to a long day's work, because I get it most often around noon, long before the day can really be considered over. It's not drug- or alcohol-related, because I'm a good girl. I just can't figure it out.

Anyway, today I went through a good five hours of cotton brain time. I was so off in so many ways: absent-minded, incapable of following conversation, generally clueless as to what was going on. When this happens, I really, really feel out of sorts.

A perfect example of how this affects me: I went to a wine-tasting shin-dig (another article to write, but the experience was so great I'm afraid my words are going to come bubbling off the page and into readers' faces) and left afterwards to go to the bathroom. When I finished, I flew out of the bathroom in a rush to catch a movie with a friend. Once I reached the door to leave the restaurant, however, I looked in my bag for my mittens and realized they were missing.

Do you know where I found them? On the bathroom floor, right in front of the toilet, sitting on the ground as if I had peed in the position of a track runner just before the starting gun shot. My mittens were my handprints, turned in towards one another about a foot away from the toilet base.

Who forgets their mittens THERE of all places? Who even puts them there in the first place?

After the wine tasting/mitten fiasco, I missed the movie, so I instead hung out with my friends and tried to follow their conversation. Annoying, I just kept falling behind. I really could not keep up.

I remember I used to know this girl in high school who was perfectly nice, reasonably pretty, and very athletic. The problem was that she was stupid. I still respected her because she fully admitted to it, and not in a ditzy way ("Like, I am so dumb!") but just in a really upfront, honest way ("No. I just don't get a lot of things sometimes..."). I've thought of her from time to time when I get cotton brain because that must be how she feels ALL THE TIME. How does she manage?

I fully knew today that I was just incapable of being the slightest bit witty or bringing anything extra to the conversation. I was a dead weight this evening, adding a general slowness to the group dynamic. God, the slowness of my brain was so painful.

In the end, I gave up. I came home around ten and took a bath. I still feel a little cotton-y but I'm sure it will clean up by tomorrow.

In the meantime, do you know what I've discovered? E-Bay. I know, I'm really behind. But dude, you can get knitting needles from dead people for really, really cheap, and I totally don't have issues knitting with a dead woman's needles for $12.95 (for 100!).

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**I have a medical expert friend who theorizes that the cotton brain-ness is a food allergy. I'm waiting on allergy tests to come back from the lab, so it will be interesting to see if I have any, and if they get rid of the cotton. My internet research has shown that my medical expert friend was not totally full of shit, and that it is a possible side effect. So at least I know I'm not just having fits of dumbness.