As you may recall, I announced that I have purchased the domain 2PhatGirls.com. There’s nothing on line yet, but the plan is to create a podcast with my dear friend Ray and/or other women (or possibly men, we’ll see what direction we go in). We made our first recording on 3/7/20 and it is fabulous! It is an introduction to ourselves and what we plan on chatting about throughout the series. The sound quality is excellent, considering it was recorded with some basic equipment in my home office. I was so excited at the results we made plans to go full steam ahead, get a dozen or so recordings and put up a website and then…the world exploded.
Seven months later, we decided to try again. We made two recordings that came out okay, but now the sound quality was nowhere near as good. I reached out to my mentor and he was not able to “fix” them. He recommended hanging blankets on the walls to reduce the tinny sound I was experiencing. This was something I was willing to do, but why the change? What had happened in the past seven months to affect the sound quality that much? Okay yes, the world had exploded, but not my home office. It had remained my safe haven filled with pineapples, pink flamingos and palm trees, so why the difference?
I am seriously a creature of habit. I tend to order the same entrée in my favorite restaurants, I have a set routine for most everything I do and I have lived in the same house most of my life. Because of this, I am very aware of my environment. If I hear a peculiar sound, I immediately investigate it. If the house seems too cold, I’m checking that old boiler of mine. If there is change, my body reacts with a slight convulsion (sometimes not so slight) and I do everything in my power to remedy the situation. Basically, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it, just leave it alone…please!
I bought a new car, not that I wanted to, but I needed to. Trying to adjust to all the new “horns and whistles” was literally making me ill. No, it wasn’t the new car smell getting to me, it was all the change and the learning curve. I had to figure out how to manipulate my windshield wipers, headlights, and I even had to figure out how to pop open my trunk (fortunately, an understanding friend just pointed to the button without ridicule). As I went through the owner’s manual and watched YouTube videos on how to use my car, I was getting headaches and feeling sick. The stress was overwhelming. Why couldn’t I get a car that I would immediately be accustomed to? Why? Because they don’t make them like that anymore. Now, a car is more like a computer on wheels. A computer is something I manage to use, but have never been able to master. I can navigate the basics, but using a computer more times than not, leads me to experience the headache and nausea I had while trying to learn how to use my new car.
So, I hung a blanket on my office wall and I covered the radiator with a blanket. I even hung up a blanket on the door using duct tape to create a play fort of sorts and did a test recording. Nope, it still sounded tinny. I made plans to buy an area rug, but in the mean time I could lay blankets and pillows on the floor, but that didn’t work either. What had I done to “change” my environment? Yes, the world exploded and my mind along with it, but how could that affect the sound quality? Sitting in the office, I thought and thought and thought and then I realized, I did change something, I had moved the equipment from one side of the desk to the other. Maybe, when I made that move, I touched something I should not have.
Yesterday, I literally spent hours going through the owner’s manual and watching YouTube videos on how to properly set up the audio/MIDI interface or whatever the hell this thing is called and the headache and nausea ensued. I thought about reaching out to my mentor and ask him if I could pay him to set this thing up for me, but I knew in my heart that that would not teach me what I needed to learn. I needed to learn how to do this by myself, so I started doing test recordings of me saying what I was doing. “I am pressing the button…I am turning this knob.”, but nothing seemed to work. I finally decided to do what I was dreading and I asked my son for help.
Oh, how I dread asking my son for help, especially when it’s for something he has already helped me with before. The reality is, this usually happens when it comes to using electronics. Even if I take notes, I can’t seem to remember how to do things. One of the worst feelings in the world is when I know I have “saved” something on my computer, but I have absolutely no idea where or how to get back to it. I went to my son, my head hanging low and asked for help.
He took a deep breath and came to my office. I told him everything I could think of, I showed him everything I had done, but I was still not getting the results I was hoping for. He seemed pleased with me that I had remembered some of the steps he had shown me in the past, but huffed when I really didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know what the buttons I was pressing really did, I was just pressing them to see what changed. He began to Google for the manual, but I stopped him and handed him the paper one I did have. He began to read the same pages I had, but for some reason when he read them out loud, they made more sense than when I had read them. I fully realize that I deal with some sort of learning disability, but somehow, I have managed to get through life well enough, or have I? Maybe I’ve just been stumbling through life and just lucky enough to survive.
I made the necessary changes to the settings. Long story short, I was not using the correct pathways. There were no trails of breadcrumbs for me to follow, so I had simply lost my way. When I had unhooked the device to move it, it reverted to its original settings, but by watching the videos and picking up on some key terms, I now had a better understanding of what I needed to do. I made a test recording; I followed the notes that my mentor had given me and did the editing. I saved the file, but now I needed to do the last step and drag that file to another location and guess what? I had no idea where the fucking file was! I had done this over and over again and I still had no idea, I really didn’t “know” what I was doing. I was guessing, like I was fumbling around in the dark. “Why can’t I do this? What can’t I remember? What is wrong with me?” were the questions I was screaming in my mind.
Once again, I had to admit defeat and I walked out to talk to my son and I asked him the same questions I had just asked myself, but I wasn’t screaming. Instead, I was holding back tears of shame as I asked out loud, “Why can’t I seem to do this?” He looked at me with disdain and said, “Pay attention.” I cannot even begin to tell you how many times my children have said this to me. Every time I have had to ask for help with the TV, my phone or computer they tell me to “Pay Attention” and I think I am, but really, I’m not. My mind is constantly racing, “Okay, okay, got it, now just do it for me and I won’t ever touch the setting again and everything will be okay.” Wrong, because inevitably something will change and once again, I won’t remember how to fix it because I wasn’t paying attention.
Over the years, I have been trying to work on my listening skills. I have been told that one can see in my eyes that I am not really listening to what someone says. They can see that my mind is racing to come up with a response instead of actually listening to what is being said. I consider myself to be a Winnie-the-Pooh of sorts, a bear of very little brain. Try as I might, I can’t seem to really comprehend what is going on. I watch news related shows with my son and I tend to ask him repeatedly what something is or what something means. He looks at me with disdain and informs me that he has already told me this and that I need to pay attention.
Why can’t I seem to pay attention? How many mistakes in life have I made simply because I can’t seem to pay attention? How many wonderful experiences have a I missed? How many nightmares might I have avoided if I simply paid attention? My mind goes a hundred miles an hour, almost constantly. I can cover ten subject matters in ten minutes and not even know how I got to the tenth one. I have always figured, that is how I am able to be so detail oriented and get so much done in a day, but am I really doing anything well? I’m good at a lot of things, but I don’t believe I am truly great at anything, simply because I don’t pay attention long enough to do so.
I could write it off as having a learning disability, but that’s not the whole truth. I’m inpatient, I want things done yesterday and I’d rather have someone else do it for me. It’s not that I’m lazy, but because I’d rather continue along, blinders on and continue to believe that there is not enough space in my brain for more. I cannot handle more, please don’t ask me to do more, I’m doing enough! Back in the day when I was an assistant manager at a different job, I looked around the office and asked myself, “Why are these people managers and I am not?” They weren’t smarter than me, they weren’t better than me, but they were willing to do more than me. So, I learned to be willing to do more and more and more and I became a manager.
There are times I am forced to learn to do more so I can improve the quality of my life and it appears to be happening again. I think to myself; I should just pay someone to produce this podcast of mine and I may still do so at some point, but not now. It would be silly of me to spend the money to have someone else do the ground work for me, even before I know that I will enjoy doing this on a regular basis. I bought the domain name so I would have it, it is mine to use when the time presents itself, when I’m ready to do more, when I’m ready to pay attention. The question is, will there ever be a time that I will be willing to take that next step and do more and really pay attention?
I’m trying. I really am trying, but I’m tired and feeling void. I don’t want to pay attention, just for a moment, I’d like to stop. I don’t want to do more. Maybe tomorrow, maybe in a few hours I will feel differently, but not now. Maybe that means that I’m actually paying attention. I’m paying attention to me, to what I’m feeling and what I need to do to feel less void. Maybe I’m learning to do more by forcing myself to do less.
Maybe I’m lying to myself again, or maybe I’m learning to be more honest. Whatever the case may be, change is inevitable, but as long as I have my pineapples, pink flamingos and palm trees, as long as I have my breadcrumbs to follow, I’ll be okay. Now, where’s that dirty martini with blue cheese stuffed olives, extra olives please.
#thelieswechoosetolivewith
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