210 Two Bowls

Tears in the kitchen. Three bananas on the counter and a recipe I know by heart but cannot, for the life of me, turn into a sequence of actions.
Seven ingredients. Too many decisions. My brain could not do seven. So I broke it down. Dry ingredients in one bowl. Wet in the other. Three and four. Manageable. The bread was good. I ate it in bed and felt unreasonably proud of myself.
The locus coeruleus (pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2110630118) is the brain’s attention control room. When norepinephrine (academic.oup.com/brain/article/144/8/2243/6174…) depletes, everything arrives at equal volume. A dog barking becomes as important as the eggs.
An old friend helps out in the kitchen. And the moment when I realised the invisible labour (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10148620) I’d been doing for decades had only become visible because I could no longer do it.
Music: Jude Cosmo, Queen of Angeles (musicbed.com/songs/queen-of-angeles-no-oohs-ah…); Waveshaper, Our Time (Instrumental) (musicbed.com/songs/our-time-instrumental/59746)

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