Darkoshi

I discovered an amazing and wonderfully relaxing auditory experience.

It requires a cloth headband and a pair of something to cover the ears with under the headband. If you have multiple headbands, try them all out as different kinds give different results.

For the 2nd item, I used an old worn-out contoured foam eye mask cut in half. I had wondered if sewing the halves to the inside of the headband on each side might make good ear-warmers. That was why I shoved them under the headband over my ears to see what it would feel like, and how I discovered the neat auditory effect.

The soft and curved shape of the foam I used seems to contribute to the best effect. If you have something else soft that can cup around the ears, you can try that. As an alternative, I tried folding over a pair of socks and placing them over the ears under the headband - that works too, though it doesn't sound as great and isn't as comfortable.

After putting that on your head, simply run one or more fingers lightly across the headband. You can follow a swirly path around the ears, up to the forehead, around to the back of the head, etc.

It makes a sound like roaring winds in a storm, like the roaring of the ocean, like airplanes taking off or flying directly overhead and then into the distance. You control it all with the path of your fingertips.

I tried wearing over-the-ear headphones, running my finger along the outside of the headphones, but that did not give the same nice effect like the headband.

...kids will still want to swap for a different color or style.

This search phrase returns what I was looking for on DuckDuckGo, but not on Google:
school facemask "paw patrol" spiderman lunch swap

That is unusual, and speaks well of DDG. Replacing "facemask" with "mask" brings back the wanted result on Google too, but it's odd that their algorithms aren't doing that replacement automatically. Normally Google returns as many or more relevant results for me than DDG, but not this time.

This is what I was looking for, a wryly prophetic* tweet I'd seen shared on FB yesterday:

You gon send your kid to school with the Paw Patrol mask and he gon come home with a Spider Man mask because he made a trade at lunch. Whole school gon be shut down the next day.

*I'd have written premoniscient, but the dictionaries are telling me that isn't a word no matter how much it sounds like one to me. "Premonitory" is a word but it doesn't sound right to me at all. "Prescient" is also a word, but isn't exactly the meaning I intended.

..

Auditory illusion, "Brainstorm or Green Needle?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pRY3wlKwm8

I only hear green needle. The first part could be either brain or green; those words sound similar. But how can the 2nd part possibly be "storm"? - it has clearly 2 syllables!? Even if I stretch out "storm" in my mind to be as long as 2 syllables, it sounds nothing at all like the sound in the video clip.

When I accidentally open the same video in 2 browser windows with a slight delay between them, it usually sounds weird. Sometimes it sounds really good.

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Part of that video I still want to post was a real example of me talking to myself while working from home. It amused me, listening to myself talking to myself.

Today I worked from home again, and talked to myself a lot again. I wonder why I do it out loud. Do I like to hear myself? Is it because the room sounds too quiet? Does it soothe me? Does it make me feel like I have a companion?

Often, I'll take on 2 personas while doing it. One, frustrated or discouraged about something, whiny, mopey. The other, practical, optimistic, offering solutions, giving me pep talks. "You can do it!" is something I say to myself a lotttttttttttt.

But a lot of the time, it's simply me verbalizing what I'm doing or what I'm about to do. There doesn't seem any reason to speak that out loud, yet I do it. I also verbalize things I'm feeling: "I'm hungry; I'm tired; my foot hurts; I'm cold enough now, time to turn off the A/C; etc."

When I'm at work in the office with other people around, do I have the same monologue, just inside my head instead of out loud? I'm not sure. I don't know if my thoughts, at least while working on computer stuff, even make it into words when I don't speak them out loud.

Right now, I'm not talking out loud. I'm only thinking these words in my head as I write them.