Brain as an object

I've been married for nearly two years and I'm starting to realize that everyone who ever said that men and women are from two different planets, or speak two different languages, or have two different brains, was right.

My husband and I have the classic argument that goes from one of us trying to tell the other something, to arguing, debating, voice raising, anger-ing, and finally: realizing; realizing that we were talking about the same thing all along.

My husband works construction and the other day he told me it would be fun to have all his co-workers' significant others come to work and have them do the job for a day.

I asked him why he thought it would be fun: he said because it would. I asked him what would be fun about it: he said it just would be.

He told me I was over-thinking it and I told him I was just trying to understand how he got from one thought to the next. How did he go from "significant others at our job for a day" to "fun"?

He told me that I think differently than he does, that all my thoughts are clear and laid out and 'sensical'. I told him he was wrong.

All of my thoughts do connect to each other, each paving the way for the next, but they aren't in any way organized. I can go to thinking about oranges to thinking about the day I was in grade three and for show-and-tell told the class about my uncle with the lazy eye. Why? Because after I gave that presentation, my teacher told me that when I do show-and-tell I often have no direction; one moment I'm talking about apples, and the next I'm talking about oranges.

So there's the common thread that linked my thoughts together: oranges.

Speaking of thread, I told my husband that my thoughts are like a ball of yarn that's been unwound. The one long thread crosses over itself over and over, there are knots that are beyond un-knotting, some of the thread has worn away and ready to snap (theses are the moments in my thought-process where I forget what I'm thinking about) and all other sorts of travesties. But it's all connected.

He turned to me and said, your brain is a bunch of thread, but mine is a bunch of bouncy balls.

I thought about that for a moment and realized how true it was. We're pretty sure he has ADD so bouncy balls made the most amount of sense, especially since he's also a very bouncy person externally. He bobs his head with each bouncy ball thought, entertained until it dribbles out into nothing and rolls away, then he turns around quickly to find the next one and watch it bounce around for a while.

He says that none of his thoughts are really connected, but I think there must be SOMETHING similar between each thought. Maybe it's the color of the bouncy balls, or their size, or their proximity to each other that causes the link.

In any case, we're still a "newly-wed" couple, we're still in love with each other, and we're still trying to figure out how to get our yarn and bouncy balls to play along.