Time To Reboot Your Brain

We're about a month out from the first day of school. I'm excited, but I'm apparently alone in my ex- citement, because every time I make some wistful com- ment about wishing school were back in session I get the death stare from my little brother.

I recently read an article about "Summer Learning Loss," a phenomenon in which children forget a good deal of the past year's learn- ing over the summer.

"Well, hey," I thought, "that can't be a problem for me. People are always telling me how great my memory is."

These were my thoughts as I opened up a manuscript that I was writing on the computer. At any given time, I can have up to ten different writing projects in the works, most of which will never see completion or are too hackneyed, personal, or similar to other ideas to actually publish. I call these my "sucker" manuscripts after the little vines on a tomato plant that suck energy away from the highly productive main vine to create their own fruit and leaves.

This one was a sucker manuscript - actually, the script to a musical play that will never see the light of day. (Hey, that rhymed! Now if only my songs didhellip;) I was in the process of typing a stage direction when I realized that I had instructed my character Gretchen to read an encyclopedia entry 'allowed' to her friends.

What?

I mean, I got a very good grade in homophones (a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning) during elementary school.

A frantic scan of this and similar manuscripts revealed several errors. Some were funny. Most were just plain embarrassing, the sort of things that plague the work of much younger children.

"He's over their."

"Your looking beautiful tonight."

"Forgive me, my deer."

While I'm sure that Bambi will eventually accept that last speaker's apology, it will take a lot longer for me to come to terms with the fact that my brain has taken a summer vacation.

I've been doing my best to kick start it back into gear. Minesweeper sessions? Check. SAT prep? Check.

Extra sleep?

Well, check on the morn- ings that I don't get woken up by a private accordion con- cert and escorted to breakfast with a couple strokes of toy nunchucks. It could be that this computer is killing off my brain cells. In fact, that's probably part of the problem. But the fact remains that computer word processing is prob- ably the best way for me to process all my story ideas into reality, not to mention that it's quick and easy to fix grammatical transgressions.

(Were I submitting this article in pencil-and-paper format, my poor editor would have to deal with a drafted page utterly covered in eraser smudges, even assuming he could decipher my handwriting in the first place).

Or it could be that this issue has always existed for me and the only reason I'm just noticing it now is that I'm making my brain work much harder than usual this summer.

Only four more weeks to go. Hang in there, cranium.