Month: June 2018

Penetrated

There’s a trio of nursing students who have been coming in and quizzing one another on terms, symptoms, treatments, etc., this week and last week.

Today, they were asking one another questions about ischemia, strokes, and other cerebral vascular events. I’m usually pretty good at zoning out and blocking out others’ conversations and exchanges, but today, their comments penetrated my walls and took me back to my time with coronary and peripheral angioplasty start-ups.

One of them hired me after I retired from the U.S.A.F. I began as the customer service/sales operations manager with a coronary angioplasty company developing coronary stents mounted on angioplasty, ended up a product manager, and then went into marketing services with a start-up trying to develop devices to treat chronic total occlusions. I worked with some terrifically intelligent and energetic people, and wound up wandering the Google “where-are-they-now?” path. I was only with those companies and that industry for a few years – 1995 to 2000 – before moving on to Internet security, but it was an exciting time. I learned a lot, and appreciate the opportunity that I had.

Okay, now that I’ve gotten that out of me, time to return to writing like crazy.

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Floof-timing

Floof-timing (catfinition) – to betray a cat by friendship or attention with another cat; to deceive a cat.

In use: “When she came into the house, her cat stopped short of greeting her to lean forward and sniff her pants legs. “Yes, I petted another cat,” she said. Giving her a hurt look, he turned his back on his floof-timing person and walked away, refusing to answer her when she called his name.”

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Thursday’s Theme Music

How ’bout a little ditty about “Jack & Diane”? I always thought I could hear a sneer in John Cougar Mellencamp’s voice when he sang, “Two American kids doing best they can.” The song captured so much of small town Americana and references, how and where they’re hanging out, hopes, dreams, attitude and clothing.

So let it rock.

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Voting

Is it just me, or does anyone else want to strangle those people who proudly announce that they don’t vote, and have never voted?

Yeah, it’s probably just me.

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Kafloof

Kafloof (catfinition) – to be utterly defeated by a cat.

In use: “Every time he sat down to type, his small black and white cat stretched out on his keyboard with a green-eyed look that asked, “What are you going to do now?” His answer was to sigh. He knew his goal to do some writing was kafloof.”

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Word Count

He was mentioned as not being very talkative, but I found him loquacious. I mentioned the disparity to him.

“Well.” He shrugged. “I don’t talk much around my wife and family, or her friends.”

He turned his beer bottle by its neck. “I read a 2014 study about the number of words men and women use in a day. They always used to say that women talk more than men, but this study showed that men and women speak the same amount on average, about sixteen thousand words a day. Most of us filter it out. I talk more at work than at home because they filter more of my words out at home.”

“How do you do that? I mean, how do you figure something like that out?”

“Well, it’s all rough. There are a lot of factors. I set up a spreadsheet to figure out the average. I can show you on my phone.”

“Ummm….”

“Okay.” He laughed. “No problem. I understand. I’ll give you the executive summary for an average day, quote, unquote.

“I work nine hours a day. Monday through Friday, of course, with holidays off, all that. With commuting, I’m gone about eleven hours a day. I sleep about seven. That’s eighteen hours. So I’m awake and at home about six hours a day.

“Since I’m awake about seventeen hours a day, I decided that I average about nine hundred forty words an hour. I decided to call it a thousand. So I spoke about six thousand words a day at home. I figured that they hear about half of what I say. Three thousand words. They pay attention to about fifteen hundred. So, I’ve reduced what I speak at home to about a thousand words.”

“You speak a thousand words in six hours?”

“Yep.”

“But don’t the same rates hold? If you’re saying a thousand words, aren’t they hearing just half of those, and so on?”

“Oh, no.” He grinned. “Now, because I don’t talk much at home, they pay more attention to when I do.”

“That’s all pretty cynical, isn’t it?”

“Cynical? Or honest?” His grin turned rueful and his gaze turned inward. “Truthfully, I think they still pay attention to about half of what I say at home, if I’m honest. I think I’d rather be talking more and ignored, but I see them tune me out when I open my mouth.”

Shrugging, he lifted his beer bottle toward his mouth. “It is what it is.”

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Wednesday’s Theme Music

I always think of this as a party song. It’s been covered by many, like the Blues Brothers, but I love this original.

Here is the Spencer Davis Group with Steve Winwood and their hit, “Gimme Some Lovin'”, from when I was ten, in 1966. You can imagine how this beat and the chorus appealed to a kid.

Still appeals to me.

Odd, intriguing video, though.

 

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

“Shine” by Collective Soul was playing in the coffee shop when I stopped writing like crazy today.

Released in the early nineties, Collective Soul’s CD became one of my car collection recordings for dealing with traffic and the work day. Maybe strangely, but I always thought of the song as almost like a hard rock prayer, alternating between speculation about existence — “What will I find?” — and then a request to know more — “Heaven, let your light shine down.”

 

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