Balloons

Growing up, we had a two-story-height roof in a mostly 1 story room, and balloons would escape and just float up to the roof, unreachable but still visible if you looked up. Even the adults couldn't catch them, because even my parents didn't have thirty-foot long arms. The balloons would just sit there for days, above our couch and our table and our living room. Eventually, they would float back down to the ground, but by then they would be sad-shriveled-not-floating balloons. The fun was in the floating and the bobbing and the magical-THIS-BALLOON-IS-FLYING.

That's where all my thoughts and ideas are. I forgot to hold on to them or I miss the chance and they float away up to the ceiling. They are there, but by the time they come back to me, they are sad and are missing the parts that I was interested in. I miss posting things on here and figuring them out by writing about them. I figure so many more things out by writing them, but I keep missing the chance to grab them. There are tons of half-floating ideas that I think of when I am biking to school or walking to the bus or somewhere else. They are half-remembered ideas just out of reach and it's frustrating.



I can tell they are there, but I can't tell what they are. I want to be able to reach out and pull them down and figure them out. I want to classify  my thoughts and order them out so I can figure out how and what I'm thinking. And whenever I succeed in grabbing them, they are only half-there. It's the sad old not-flying balloons. The essential part that made them good and interesting and desireable has diffused out.

I'm doing fine, generally, in life, but busy with TAing and actual lab work and grant writing and literature reviewing and wedding planning, and I just don't have the tools available now to reach up and pull down those thoughts. I want to be able to figure out how to grab onto them right away so they can't escape to the roof immediately, to take them and run to my normal-sized-roof room right away, where even 5 year old me can reach the string of the balloon if I stand on a chair. But I don't have thirty-foot-long arms to reach the ones on the ceilings, and they always appear when I can't grab onto them. It's a minor annoyance. I don't need balloons. I can get along fine without them. But they make life better and I want them.

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