I puked my brains out today

A lot of times you'll hear someone say "I puked my brains out." Of course, they're being figurative. A more accurate way to describe is that they puked their stomach out. But no, today I puked my brains out. Literally.

Back in the days of the Roman Empire, they had something called a "vomitorium", a place where one would gorge oneself on food and drink, go into another room and puke it up, only to go back and eat some more. They would repeat this orgy of delights over and over.

I realized I had begun to do the same thing. But not with food. In the mad dash to finish my degree, I would go on these marathon sessions of reading, learning, writing, testing. Literally an orgy of learning. Then when I was done with the class, I'd do this "out, out, out! Gotta make room for more!" I'd try and clear my head of everything, go on a mental vacation, clear everything out, because I had to make room for the next class, to concentrate and focus on something else. In a sense, I was puking my brain out. Not really of course, but definitely "mentally make room" ("allocating mental bandwidth," as I described it to my boss) for the next onslaught of learning and educational performance I would have to entail. And of course there were some classes I'd actually just rather forget (let's say Accounting 1B), and others that were actually helpful (Advanced C++ or the Project Management class I just took). But for those, I just kept my notes and books. If at some point in the future I actually needed that knowledge, I could go back and reference it. Preferably at a time when I had the mental room to do so.

So I finished up my Project Management class this morning, fired up the laptop, wrote another blog, and began to purge. I got a major paper to write and a final to study for, and the final two weeks of my Business Writing class! :-)