Thursday, October 9, 2014

Learning is an ongoing process...



And even though I act, at times, like a know-it-all I do know that others know much more than me on so many different levels and topics it is truly amazing and with patience their knowledge could and should be tapped!

The problem is… with my journalistic training, if only for that short time, we are all brainwashed to ask those five extremely important questions of who, what, where, why, and when?
Sure you all know that those questions when speaking to regular folks might be considered of you of being way too nosy, hmm?

So, I have found over the last several years, after being told one time by a woman in a doctor’s waiting room who told me just what I said above, that I was way too nosy, which shut me down…I was hurt, but I knew in retrospect why she felt that, thought that and was exactly right about me.

My mode of getting to know people at one time used to be not unlike an interview style of a news woman or newspaper gal.

Those questions though have gotten me into too much trouble over the years and so I have since become the one to tell it all, whether anyone truly wants to know or not.
Some times it does work where when people who feel they know so much about you then feel comfortable to tell you a little if not more about themselves, and others are just plain bored to bits and run for their lives!

Well, not physically, metaphorically, by staying away, wait that is actual, therefore physically, any-who they then make sure not to ever again engage you in conversation or ask any questions of you with fear of you not stopping your litany and of you not stopping your litany, and on and on… nope not a typo duplication, a truism, ha!

These days I do so love the idea of meeting people but my procedural ways to progress in getting to know them has a dual fear. Of not showing the right amount of interest in what they are saying and trying to interject with appropriate questions or knowledgeable additions to show that I am listening and can relate!

Balance is a hard thing when you have either worked in managerial , teaching, and owner types businesses and volunteerism positions over your lifetime careers…You have the disadvantage of needing to be in control and knowledgeable as also informative.
Or as my shortened stint with a few by-lines and interviews for the newspaper, still being in charge, but due to my somewhat iffy listening skills I always tried to have a note pad to write down info/answers or a tape recorder, yep that is the way it was done way back then! Having a photographer to verify things afterwards or an editor with you was wonderful too!

I did have a couple of times I was left to my own devices thus the recorder camera and notebook!

I should have taken up the practice earlier on in my life for it was a pure joy doing that.
But I did enjoy the promotion business I had been in too, but neither choice would have been very profitable for me.
I did not have the credentials to become a staff reporter, and although promotion did not need any special training and it was a party going to work daily it was a commission position with a woman who was not totally honest with paying the monies she had owed me. Let’s put it this way she had to ask her husband for additional funds that she said were for me but paid the rent and phone bills, finally, of her office instead of me and when they cut off her phone she used our bag cell phone and racked up an enormous bill of over $600 bill and refused to pay it. Foolishly we loaned her the phone to keep her business afloat… and that my friends was over twenty-years ago! Her comment to me was that I was a volunteer, which sadly at first I had said I would work for free until I learned the business , but after I had booked some bands on my own and she had paid me those commissions I felt I was NO LONGER a volunteer!
Then she owed me thousands for more work and refused to pay me… sorry it was a nasty experience in a job that I really did love…

So many mistakes I have made over the years with poor judgment of people, too trusting…
Perhaps that is why they all baffle me and hurt me still even at this ripe old age.
Hubby and I have been fine with just the two of us lately and now some new folks want to be friendly, but it is difficult for me to go into these things full force…

But I am open and so is Hubby, I think…

Old friends are there but distant, literally yep only on Facebook, and safe since if we find something we don’t like we don’t say anything and the same with short conversations are much easier, since we know or remember the way we all were and when, what we were doing and why we were doing it and even where!

See, I incorporated all those questions into conversing with my ole schools chums from Gosh elementary school some, quite a few actually and one from high school … and even a friend from the 1970’s from our first neighborhood as adults with our youngins; how wonderful and of course my cousins, so many to count from firsts, seconds and even one removed…!
Not to mention all the new friends, ones that are becoming family too!
Facebook has brought us to this point in our lives that it gives so many of us the joy of catching up… or finding out without fear those answers to questions that might be a bit difficult face to face… uh oh!
NOSY ME!
Yep, I have been shut down on there too and unfriended when people do not see the expression on your face when asking or saying something…
Seeing people up close and personal can never take the place of this techno marvel but we all know that and although fear has not been my friend I must learn restraint, someday!

On that note of whatever floats your proverbial boat allow me to be the very first to wish all of you a very happy good night and ask all of you to kindly count all your blessings and share all those overages with you know who and we will too!

And next time please be here or be square, ya hear!

PS Just thought I would let you all know, it was 92 degrees for our high today and so after one P.M. the pool was back up into the mid-eighties and so I was back in the pool again doing all my exercises!

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