I blog mostly to keep my brain from turning into turnip soup. When you are a student, which, let's face it most of us in our 20s-30s have spent a majority of our lives being, you are constantly working out your brain. Actual effort is needed to concentrate and think about what's going on at the moment (lectures, tests, etc.) Added effort is used to block out distractions (talking, daydreaming, hunger, etc.), not to mention the requirement to create "original" concepts on the fly. Thus our brains are in peak mental condition. Students are the Olympians of basic brain activity.
Then you graduate, or drop out, or make some other exit, and you begin to lose the ability to "think" as well as you did. It's not really thinking by definition though, because it's organized. (As though organized thought doesn't exist.) Thought is easy; it just occurs naturally. It's free-flowing. Thinking about a grilled cheese, or what the lyrics to Stairway to Heaven are, is not, however, going to lead to any gold medals.
The condition and use of our brains during our formal education is... what? What's a good term to use here? It's like being the CEO of Get-my-tail-out-of-college-and-start-making-money, LLC. It's community planning and thesis writing. It's struggle-juggle. Yep, struggle-juggle.
That unique state of being consistently overwhelmed. Maybe I associate this with college because that's when I felt it most severely. Maybe others associate with other points of their lives.
It's the state of mental exhaustion, which one then pushes through to reach new heights of ability to make witty remarks.
Because that's what college is for, witticism. Really. Read what the college students you know are tweeting. It's a an audition for writing for the New Yorker or some series on HBO.