Hidden meanings

Yesterday afternoon, on the comfortable Radiology Department lounge, my friends were debating on whether I should change the name of my site to something else. 

"Bottled brain—what does that mean anyway?" Bon Buño asked me. I know that some of my classmates read my blog on a daily basis, and it's a privilege to waste their time, but Bon isn't one of them. He hardly goes online, and when he does, it's only because of group work deadlines.

"I just like the sound of it," I said.

"You should change it to something more . . . sizzling. To attract more readers, you know? And so that you'd sound really hot. Change it to something like . . . Paranoid Pepper," he said.

People around me picked the conversation up—the acoustics can be explained by the smallness of the lounge—and joined in. I asked them what they thought Bottled Brain meant. I didn't like the attention, of course, but the look on my classmates' faces as they searched into their souls, looking for hidden meaning that was not really there, was priceless.

"It's like Lance preserving his thoughts on a bottle for everyone to see. Because glass is transparent."  To which someone replied, "But not all glass is transparent. Sprite bottles are green and they're not totally transparent. There are amber bottles, too, that are translucent—there's a difference."

"His brain has been soaked in formalin."

"He's sharing an important part of himself to the world." To which someone said, "That must be a pretty small brain . . . something that can fit in a bottle."

But the most memorable interpretation: "Maybe it's like Lance's message in a bottle. All his thoughts are contained there. And he lets it float in an endless sea, and someone may pick the bottle and get something from it." That was from Bon himself.

And, yes, I promised my friends I'd blog about this conversation.