Mail me. Go home.
I've heard too many people say, "I'll have to do that tomorrow morning. I can't concentrate any more today." It makes me nervous. What's so different for them in the morning?
This may be difficult for me to understand because I am not a morning person. I can't concentrate in the morning. I can barely move in the morning. Concentration is something that happens to other people.
In my attempts to understand this phenomenon, however, I found myself wondering, "Exactly what is it that changes over night?" You can't think one evening, and yet you're the same person who did three things at once, that morning. Presumably, if you can't concentrate, it's because you're distracted. Which means there are too many thoughts in your head at the same time. Which leads to the conclusion that our brains do fill up, like the cover of the phone book fills up with doodles. If it holds still too long, people put something in it. "Say, if you've got a minute, will you take a look at this letter and see what you think?" "Next time you get a chance, call that guy and see if he's still interested." "Need something to do?..."
So after a day at work, you go home with a full brain, still trying to remember where you put your coffee cup when you were talking to Jim and the woman from Chicago returned your call. Once you get safely home (after stopping for three green lights because you were wondering if Barb will have the memo ready tomorrow morning, after you told her Linda wanted the flyers out by Tuesday with all the corrections made) (come to think of it, who checked the corrections to see if they were right this time?), you try to remember to eat before your brain shuts down completely. You watch a sitcom until you realise that every commercial for shampoo reminds you that you forgot to schedule haircuts for the kids tomorrow, and you switch to PBS where the nature special on pumas gets you worrying if there's enough cat food for the week. When was the last time you saw the cat, anyway?
After another hour or so like this, you go to bed. While you're asleep, your brain is taken out and copied. In the transfer of information, all of the useless and irrelevant information is left out. Your new brain is replaced and refitted, bright and shiny with all the information that you need to keep, including the two useful things you learned that day. When you wake up in the morning, you can concentrate again. All the pointless, distracting thoughts have been removed.
This is where the magic takes place. All right, it isn't magic. It's modern science. This copying of the brain is the work of the Brain Fairies. Every night, they come to each of us while we're asleep and open our heads, sifting through all of the junk and clutter and salvaging the things we need to know. (This also explains why you can never remember the names of your sister-in- law's children, why you don't remember being told the garbage man was going to come on a different day this year, and why you can't program the VCR.) The Brain Fairies take all of the useless information they've collected and give it to people whose brains aren't as full. (This explains why your sister-in-law can always remember the names of her children, why the neighbors know what day to put their garbage out, and why the kids can program the VCR, the computer, and the alarm at school.)
Brain Fairies explain a lot. For a while there, I was really wondering how this could all work. And how that quarter got under my pillow.