My Lack of Love Affair With Audible.com

It takes time for me to adapt to technology. It took years for me to get a cellphone and only within the last few years did I get a smartphone. I just started texting a little over a year ago. I mocked friends who were early joiners of Twitter and for a long time thought people who had more than 100 friends on Facebook were just lying and sad. I still don't embrace FourSquare (I really don't want you to know where I am every second of the day plus being mayor appeals to me waaaay too much.) and I've yet to cave and join Google Groups.

And yet, I thought I'd like audible.com. Friend David Horne suggested I try the site that lets me listen to books on my smartphone. The appeal is that since I have a 30-40 minute drive into and home from Greensboro most days, my time would be better spent listening to novels instead of the newest Taylor Swift song. ("We are never ever ever getting back together. Like, EVER.")

My first book selection was/is the novel Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter. Amazing writing. Stunning descriptions. Laugh out loud humor. And this is all in the first three chapters... which have taken me almost a month to get through. 

I can't do it. I listen raptly for 10 minutes, then my mind starts to wander. I pull it back and force myself to pay attention to the narrator. But by the 20-minute mark, my mind is elsewhere and suddenly I realize the narrator is reading dialogue between characters I don't even recognize because I blanked out. 

I suspect the problem may be I'm listening to a novel. I listened to a non-fiction self-help sort of book a couple of months ago and loved it. Maybe I need the self-involvement element for car reading to work for me. 

I'm determined to get through the book but at the rate I'm going, I'll be lucky to wrap it up by Christmas. Still, as someone whose cat now has over 5,000 followers on Twitter and who has close to 900 (dear, close) friends herself on Facebook, maybe I'll come around. Maybe audible.com will save me from a lifetime of knowing all the words to every current bad pop song out there. 

Here's hoping. 

Cheers,

Dena

Smug Marrieds: Name Your Elements

I've spent the better part of this weekend reading The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun by Gretchen Rubin. I'm reading it on my iPad, so I find myself highlighting sections and taking online notes, mainly because I can. (I rarely go back and read the passages I've outlined, but hold faith that someday the habit may come in handy.)

Inspired by Rubin to do a better job of connecting and engaging the loved ones in my life, I decided to start a conversation based on a paragraph in the book that resonated with me. When neither cat seemed keen on analyzing the finer points of the passage, I went in search of Blair.

"Let me read this to you," I said flopping down on the bed. Blair was barely visible behind a mound of shirts he was ironing. (I'm a wife, not a maid. Don't judge me.) "This is about why it's important to grow and try new things."

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Smug Marrieds: Blairism

Earlier this evening: We're sitting in a booth across from each other, eating Chinese food. There is a large red scratch on the side of my nose.

Blair: What happened to your nose?

Dena (self-consciously touching the red mark): I accidentally scratched myself.

Blair: Sugah, you gotta be careful when you're picking your nose. You could hurt yourself. 

Oh. My. God. I spit out a fortune cooking, laughing.

Cheers,

Dena

The Accomplishment List

Back when I worked as a librarian at Lorillard Tobacco, my supervisor (Hi Larry!) had each of us on his team submit our list of accomplishments at month's end. It wasn't a "big brother is watching" tactic but more of a way for him to keep up-to-date on what we were doing. 

I fell in love with this practice. Hello, it's a list, right? I kept a sheet of paper on my desk and just jotted a quick bullet point every time I completed a task. A lot of them were minor things that never made it into my report to Larry but there was still a huge satisfaction in looking over the list and thinking, "Hell yeah, I got all that done." 

I recently decided to readopt this practice. I think it was Blair coming home one day and innocently asking, "What did you do today?" I knew I'd done something, I just couldn't put my finger on what, exactly.

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