First, a cotton candy machine update.

Today, I got my meaty paws on some sugar free hard candy, and let me tell you, it wasn’t easy. Shoppers Drug Mart really let me down by having absolutely nothing for me. Not one single form of sugar free hard candy remains at our local Shoppers. I used to be able to get both sugarless Werther’s and sugarless Campinos there, as well as sugar free scotch mints (I miss them so), and now they have nothing.

I am very disappointed in them. I bet if it was GLUTEN free candy, they’d be all over that shit.

So I had to go to Safeway, and despite having, in general, way less varieties of hard candy than Shopper’s, they did have the sugar free version of the original Werther’s Originals, and that’s what I got.

Luckily, I am going to Costco tomorrow, and I will likely be able to find something there. At the very least, I think they will have one of those throw-pillow sized bags of sugar free Jolly Ranchers.

Werther’s in hand, I was able to try out my new toy that makes food, and it worked perfectly. Did exactly what it was supposed to do. And Werther’s flavoured cotton candy is pretty good. I am normally not that into Werther’s, I find them a little boring, but as cotton candy? Faboo.

One last little note : in French, cotton candy is Barbe A Papa, which literally translates into Father’s Beard, although if you are the super Catholic kind of French, it translates as God’s Beard.

So I have now heard it called Father’s Beard, God’s Beard, Candy Floss (total stripper name) , Fairy Floss (the British are adorable), and Cotton Candy. I am sure there must be more out there.

None of them are what you would call dignified and they all have issues (especially the beardy ones), but I figure cotton candy is more or less the best of the lot.

Oh, and one more thing : my body is very confused right now, because I just ate a whole bunch of extremely sugary tasting cotton candy and so my taste buds are telling my body “holy shit, brace for sugar!”, but of course, it’s not coming.

This often happens when I eat sugar free stuff. My body will sort things out soon.

Now, to boredom. I have been really thinking about how much of my life has been complicated by my low boredom threshold.

I get bored easily. I need a lot of mental stimulation to be happy. Specifically, what I need is variety. I have a seemingly limitless capacity to mentally encompass a lot of varieties of an item, and I grow restless and irritated with what, for a less easily bored person, would be a perfectly adequate number of options.

That’s why I have almost 4000 mp3’s, and I still crave more. That is four thousand songs, hundreds of hours of content, and yet there are still times when I don’t feel like listening to literally any of it and I get bored and frustrated.

It’s also why I have hundreds of books. My goal, since I was a child, was to have enough of all my favorite media so that I would never face having nothing to read (or whatever) because by the time I reach the end of the collection, the beginning of it seems new again.

It’s a noble (if somewhat passive) goal, but it has proven very hard to achieve. This big old brain of my just plain retains too much of what I experience for things to “freshen” fast enough. It takes a lot of time before I can go back to something and enjoy it. Until then, it will almost gross to me.

And that’s a minor thing compared to my low boredom threshold leading to my trouble focusing. It’s very hard for me to focus on just one thing. I am always multitasking. Right now I am writing for my blog, but I am also chatting with my furry friends online. If I didn’t have that other thing going, I would find it very hard to concentrate on blogging.

That accounts for a lot of how I feel about my mp3 collection. Not only is music inherently awesome and a big part of consciousness, but I can play some mp3’s and give my brain the level of distraction needed in order for me to focus.

Clearly, boredom can be defined simply as a lack of occupation for your mental faculties, and the more mental you are (hah), the more faculties you have and the harder it is to keep them busy.

That’s why I become highly devoted to anything which can keep my brain occupied. For example, games like Hearthstone. The complexities and strategies of the Collectible Card Game type games are more than enough to keep my capacious and rapacious brain busy.

In fact, during a really good match, it even mutes the nearly constant buzzing of my busy mind-hive that is always searching, thinking, processing, and digesting things.

Now I know that I have likely derived a lot of benefit from this restless and hungry mind of mine. The restlessness powers the rest of it and it is what keeps me searching for answers and insights while maintaining a very high intellectual standard.

So in a sense, it is both a function of and a cause of why I am so smart, and not just CPU smart but deep insight smart.

But when I think about the constant complex and chaotic symphony playing inside me, and how noisy the inside of my skull has always been, and how tiring it can be to have a mind like a shark, always moving, never resting…

All I can think about is how nice it would be to be able to press mute now and then and just relax.

But no. Not even in sleep does my mind rest. Even my dreams have me searching, wandering, unable to stop looking for what I know I will never find.

Talk to you tomorrow, nice people!