Flashes of Panic

Falling asleep Sunday evening, I was thinking to myself, what I want for Christmas is something that doesn’t really exist. I want a stack.

Not pancakes, nor paper, nor exhaust (though paper comes close.) I want a data structure for my brain that works like pushd and popd (two command line utilities I recently learned about and already love.) pushd . stores the current working directory in a “stack,” which in the world of computers is relatively narrowly defined, generally referring to a last-in-first-out (LIFO) data structure. (As opposed to first-in-first-out (FIFO,) which is called a “queue,” because it functions like a line at a store.) You “push” values on to the top of a stack, then “pop” the top value off. Once something has been pushed to the stack, you can move on to do something else, somewhere else. When you’re ready to go back where you were last working, you just say popd and you’re there. Because the stack is limited only by available memory, you can nest (pushing repeated values on to the stack, then popping them back off in reverse order.

So what I want is to be able to do pushd and popd on the entire working context of my brain. (From an Object Oriented standpoint, I want a stack of BrainContents objects.) So if I am distracted or diverted by something else (which inevitably happens) I could serialize my mind context, push it on a stack, go through the distraction, then pop the context off once the distraction is over and get back to work.

Anyone who can invent this will probably make a fortune.