According to The Urban Dictionary, arbiter of all contemporary usages, brain lint is defined as "information that serves no purpose and consumes valuable space in your head." And like lint, it multiplies; when one person shares a brain-lint factoid with another person, they then BOTH have that space taken up in their heads.
One of the occupational hazards of the ways that Nora and I work is that we pay attention to a lot of details, and thus accumulate barns full of brain lint. But I think couples harvest lots of brain lint early in their married lives, as they notice things they'd never noticed before. The classic argument about whether she squeezes the toothpaste from the bottom of the tube and he from the middle of the tube is one of those brain-lint moments; it doesn't REALLY matter to anyone, but it's something that they've now noticed for the first time and it's taking up residence in their heads.
Here's some brain lint from a single hour of one morning.
We have a fingernail brush that has been pressed into service at the kitchen sink as a vegetable brush. The trade name on that brush is "Ambassador." Who the heck would name a fingernail brush in the first place? And why Ambassador? I'm imagining the marketing meeting...
"Mr. Thompkins, we've developed a line of grooming products in a tiered-marketing strategy. There are three nail brushes... the entry level model, which we call the 'Proletariat,' has denser bristles well suited to cleaning heavy greases and soils from the hands of working men. The mid-priced model, the 'Country Squire,' has milder bristles, intended for use by men whose hands rarely come into contact with anything more staining than shoe polish. And then we have the top-of-the-line 'Ambassador,' which is the same as the Squire but comes in a very regal dark green."
We had friends over for dinner last night. They don't drink, but we wanted to be celebratory nonetheless (they'd had to miss the wedding for a family funeral), so we opened up the sparkling cider and got out our new champagne flutes. Lovely glasses they are, but why that shape? Well, the verticality supposedly keeps the bubbles from dissipating too quickly, and the stem keeps your hands from warming the wine (otherwise you'd use a test tube or something really long and vertical). I drank my non-sparkling Italian trebbiano from the same flute, with no ill effects on its taste. Champagne glasses were historically shaped more along the lines of standard wine glasses, with the royal goblets of France supposedly being molded upon the shape of Marie Antoinette's breast (not true of course, but a wonderful story). Not so worried about the duration of the bubbles, those decadent French, since they knocked down glass after glass rapidly enough that the carbonation was preserved.
Neither of us ever throw away containers. Long after the product has been forgotten, there's the box, or the plastic quart soup jug. I have about 200 cubic feet of storage space in my basement in Medford taken up by nothing but empty boxes; some broken down and palleted, some still whole and awaiting the television or the speakers for some pending move. Nora... well, Nora has a garage filled with boxes, and the cabinet under the sink has the archaeological record of every purchase of hummus or chili in the past three years (all cleaned, of course). There's a box sitting on my desk that had the wedding-gift flatware. We've used that already half a dozen times, but we still have the box. We're not going to return the silverware, so why do we have the box? And why is it still out on the desk?
Life is all details in the end, really. Our details may be uninteresting to others; the definition of a bore is someone who imposes their arcane knowledge of something—Dungeons and Dragons, bowling ball technology, the story line of Dawson's Creek—with no attention to the listener's degree of interest. But what is brain lint to one person is a core of work or identity to another. And so Nora and I work to make room for one another's lint.
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