a blogpost where i basically just write my every thought as it comes

sometimes i don't write down brainstorm notes because if i commit the idea to paper, then in collapses into whatever words i haphazardly choose. if i don't write it down, then it can remain vast and all-encompassing. 

the problem is, if i don't write it down then sometimes i don't remember it at all. 

is bad data worse than no data at all? i used to have a knockoff fitbit just to count my steps. but half the time it didn't sync right, and some days it only record 100-odd steps, when i certainly did over 5,000. but a year later, all i'll have is the record of 100 steps, and gone will be my memory of which days the data was actually totally wrong. 

how much should i trust the connections my brain involuntarily makes? 

i try to practice secure attachment to the thoughts that pop into my head. i'm not the biggest fan of "secure vs. insecure attachment" language but that's the best way i can describe my attitude here. (is it really? how much should i trust the ideas my brain involuntarily has? maybe i should actually investigate these things more, rather than just going with the first thing i think of that feels kind of right.) 

i've described this before as "not clingy, not scared they’ll abandon u and be gone forever…just calm and warm." hmm. let me go google what secure attachment is. (i do this ~often but maybe i should do it even more. sometimes i have a good grasp on things, but you never know when you've run off with a not-quite-right impression of something.) 

yeah i'm not really sure how to evaluate whether it's a good description or not. not really? i guess what i mean is one specific aspect of secure attachment, not necessarily the entirety of it. but is that enough? 

i saw a video the other day of a STEM student saying how humanities concepts are easier for outsiders to discuss, because they're named in plain english, not opaque jargon like "gnomon" or "lemma" (i don't know what either of these mean, i just googled random math jargon). but that kind of frustrated me, because oftentimes people assume they understand a concept just because they can vaguely guess at it if it's named in plain english. (oh, i'd like to write my next blogpost in sentence case, actually.) but if they guess wrong, then now they and their interlocutor are talking past each other, because they're not even discussing the same thing! 

sometimes our intuitions about something are actually totally off-base. did you know sometimes adding risk can make something safer than it was with less risk? adding more complexity to a thing lets us know we should stay on guard, not let our defenses down. preserving cultural artifacts when subtitling a foreign movie (rather than choosing some makeshift "equivalent" in the culture it's being translated for)—not to mention keeping it subtitled rather than dubbing—keeps the viewer aware that they're existing in a new context, where things might not be what they expect.