Tears, phones and wine. Oh my!
I am a big giant sap. This cartoon made me cry, in the middle of my lunch. Big Time. At one time I was rather proud of my ability to burst into tears on cue - extremely handy for theater and role-playing for counseling classes. I did it by having a short list of memories that would trigger me - “Bambi, your mother can’t be with you now” was always a stand-by. I can now add “I’ll remember your bee, orchid. I’ll remember you” to the list:
http://xkcd.com/1259/
Of course, now I’ve got to spend the rest of the afternoon de-sensitizing myself to it, since I’ve already got a short list of the expletives amongst you that will come up to me this weekend and use that phrase.
Yes, I have a new smart phone. One that is clearly smarter than I am, since I barely can figure out how to use it. I figure it’ll take me about 18 months to get a handle on it. Sigh. I had a little trouble getting it set up, and the woman on the other end of the line who was trying to help me then insisted that I do a test call to make sure it was up and running…which was sweet, but it meant that I had to scroll through pages of set-up stuff and was barely use-literate enough to get from one screen to another, not sure if I was supposed to be touching something, swiping something, typing, whatever. I was not at my best - sorely irritated that something that is so easy for everyone else was something that I was struggling with. Self-shaming makes me really, really crabby. Plus, I was keenly aware that she was waiting for me to get through it all so I could make the test call and she could move on to the next customer. I really get stressed out when I feel like I’m holding people up. And me knowing how call centers work and how performance is measured, made it worse. It was awful.
Not made better when she consoled me “oh, don’t worry about it. Once you have a chance to sit down and just play around with it for a couple of hours, you’ll totally master this.” She was being very sweet, so I clamped down the full Imperial Dragon that wanted to unleash itself with a “Do I strike you as someone whose got HOURS to play around with ANYTHING? I’ll NEVER learn this, if that’s what I have to do! Why don’t you have an expletive user manual?” roar.
A week later and I’ve made minimal progress, but okay, I can handle some of the basic stuff, so the panic level is down. Although I still can’t figure out why it randomly “DROID”s me. I think it gets angry from time to time.
I ordered additional screen covers when I got it. I’ve just now placed ANOTHER order for screen covers, since I’ve had the phone a whopping total of seven days and the current screen cover looks like the plexiglass wall of an agitated Komodo dragon’s enclosure. Claw marks, scrapes, poisonous saliva and drippy nose smears.
(For the record, we now know that a komodo dragon’s saliva is not actually poisonous, just loaded with a dragon-ton of bacteria that causes rapid sepsis in the dragon’s prey targets. But I was already grossing myself out so I went with the more poetic, but less accurate.)
My most favorite of Liars hit the nail on the head - in order to write regularly, you have to write. And it’s hard, once you’ve gotten out of the habit, to get going again. I’ve been beating myself up about it and then realized part of my problem was not just that I had stopped making myself write daily, but that I’d fallen out of the habit of jotting down notes. For some reason, I was letting myself believe that I would REMEMBER that witticism, that interesting spark, that turn of phrase. Despite years of hard evidence that I do NOT remember, pretty much always.
At a certain point in the evening, after having spilled your glass of wine into the laundry basket of clean clothes…and then again onto your keyboard…you realize enough’s enough! Time to set limits! Enough damn laundry and writing, time to focus on drinking the wine.
http://xkcd.com/1259/
Of course, now I’ve got to spend the rest of the afternoon de-sensitizing myself to it, since I’ve already got a short list of the expletives amongst you that will come up to me this weekend and use that phrase.
Yes, I have a new smart phone. One that is clearly smarter than I am, since I barely can figure out how to use it. I figure it’ll take me about 18 months to get a handle on it. Sigh. I had a little trouble getting it set up, and the woman on the other end of the line who was trying to help me then insisted that I do a test call to make sure it was up and running…which was sweet, but it meant that I had to scroll through pages of set-up stuff and was barely use-literate enough to get from one screen to another, not sure if I was supposed to be touching something, swiping something, typing, whatever. I was not at my best - sorely irritated that something that is so easy for everyone else was something that I was struggling with. Self-shaming makes me really, really crabby. Plus, I was keenly aware that she was waiting for me to get through it all so I could make the test call and she could move on to the next customer. I really get stressed out when I feel like I’m holding people up. And me knowing how call centers work and how performance is measured, made it worse. It was awful.
Not made better when she consoled me “oh, don’t worry about it. Once you have a chance to sit down and just play around with it for a couple of hours, you’ll totally master this.” She was being very sweet, so I clamped down the full Imperial Dragon that wanted to unleash itself with a “Do I strike you as someone whose got HOURS to play around with ANYTHING? I’ll NEVER learn this, if that’s what I have to do! Why don’t you have an expletive user manual?” roar.
A week later and I’ve made minimal progress, but okay, I can handle some of the basic stuff, so the panic level is down. Although I still can’t figure out why it randomly “DROID”s me. I think it gets angry from time to time.
I ordered additional screen covers when I got it. I’ve just now placed ANOTHER order for screen covers, since I’ve had the phone a whopping total of seven days and the current screen cover looks like the plexiglass wall of an agitated Komodo dragon’s enclosure. Claw marks, scrapes, poisonous saliva and drippy nose smears.
(For the record, we now know that a komodo dragon’s saliva is not actually poisonous, just loaded with a dragon-ton of bacteria that causes rapid sepsis in the dragon’s prey targets. But I was already grossing myself out so I went with the more poetic, but less accurate.)
My most favorite of Liars hit the nail on the head - in order to write regularly, you have to write. And it’s hard, once you’ve gotten out of the habit, to get going again. I’ve been beating myself up about it and then realized part of my problem was not just that I had stopped making myself write daily, but that I’d fallen out of the habit of jotting down notes. For some reason, I was letting myself believe that I would REMEMBER that witticism, that interesting spark, that turn of phrase. Despite years of hard evidence that I do NOT remember, pretty much always.
At a certain point in the evening, after having spilled your glass of wine into the laundry basket of clean clothes…and then again onto your keyboard…you realize enough’s enough! Time to set limits! Enough damn laundry and writing, time to focus on drinking the wine.