Conversations

Discussing The Impact Of An Audience + Sharing My Summer Blogging Schedule

/ Ally Bean / 179 Comments

The Impact Of An Audience

a jigsaw puzzle with a few pieces missing

AFTER I READ WHAT I read, I couldn’t stop thinking about the advice that many people found inspirational. Considering I had worked in a world where “know your audience” was the mantra, what I read seemed off-base.

Yet being open-minded I got thinking about it. Oddly enough it seemed like good advice and bad advice in one paradoxical statement. So in an attempt to get to the heart of what this advice meant I talked with a few friends about it.

We couldn’t agree about what to make of it.

So what, you might be asking yourself, did I read that lead to pondering and *perhaps* profundity? I read this brief article entitled: Amanda, There Is No Audience.

The title IS the simple advice that may or may not make sense to you depending on your personality and/or your idea of community. You might like or not like the advice depending on the context and/or who is saying it to you.

There are variables.

As best I can figure, and I’m sure you will tell me if I am wrong, the advice is saying that in order to not second-guess yourself, which is a positive thing, you have to not care about what other people think about you and your choices.

There’s a truth to that.

Don’t give your power away to just anyone or anything.

But how you use your own power seems to divide people in a philosophical way that reveals how you think about the people around you and any influence they may, or may not, have on you.

Anyhoo the issue, simplified, comes down to how the advice resonates with you:

• Do you, like Amanda, find this advice inspiring because by denying you have an audience you’re free from judgment and this allows you to do what you want to do unhindered? You are alone.

OR

• Do you find this advice unrealistic because to think no one is watching you is delusional, but in spite of that by ignoring what the audience suggests you are productive? You are indifferent.

Thoughts, anyone?

My Summer Blogging Schedule 

image via pagesbyleanne

LIGHT is my guiding word this year.

Thus in order to allow more light into my life, The Spectacled Bean will be on SPRING/SUMMER HOURS until further notice.

I’ll post here every couple of weeks, reply to comments, and check-in with you on your blogs every so often because I try to keep up with you, my bloggy friends.

Take it easy, everyone. Let the light shine on you.

Do good. Play nice. Be happy.

• • 😎 • •

The One About Spring Cleaning, Taking A Tumble, And Discussion Of Said

/ Ally Bean / 248 Comments

The Spring Cleaning Part

Last week we decided to do a proper spring cleaning on the first floor of our house. It’s almost all wood flooring, the outliers being the powder room and the laundry room that have tile floors.

As you can imagine cleaning and waxing all the wood floors means moving furniture, rugs, plants, lamps, decorative items from one room to another; then moving them back from whence they came.

Please note that we’re not obsessive about doing all the spring cleaning in one day, like we were when we were younger and working and being social butterflies who had places to go, people to meet.

No, now we go with the flow and take our time.

Over a few days.

The Tumble Part

Well, we’d done the floors in all the rooms except the living room. And I suppose I was feeling a little cocky about how efficiently we’d moved furniture and such around the first floor, like pros.

But pride goeth before the fall, people. [No pun intended but it is one.]

So as we were carrying the rolled up 8′ x 10′ heavy wool rug + pad back into the living room preparing to place it just so, I lost my balance on the slick clean waxed floor and dramatically, albeit slowly, fell down, KERPLUNK.

At this point, if’n we were a younger married couple, my true love would have rushed to my side making sure I was uninjured.

However as a much older married couple my true love knows I’m clumsy as all get out, so he just looked at me in a heap on the floor and said: “it’s just a few more steps to get the rug into place, you gonna help?” 

Thus prompted by his *concern* I stood up, doublechecking the knee on which I’d fallen to see if it still worked. And it did. As did my toes that had gotten twisted around and smashed when I sat unceremoniously on them.

No harm, no foul.

The Discussion Part

Now the foregoing isn’t meant to be a motherly warning against wearing only socks on your feet when you move heavy items around on wood floors, which I think we can agree might not have been, in retrospect, a good idea.

Instead think of this tale as the precursor to the conversation that followed in which we discussed what I could/should/might say to our primary care physician when I go for my annual physical checkup wherein she’ll ask: have you fallen in the last year?

The answer to this question is, of course, dependent upon how you choose to define “fall.” To wit:

Is a fall any incident wherein you find yourself unintentionally down on the floor/ground despite the unusualness of the situation? Such as what happened to me while helping with the rug, something that might be classified as a minor mishap, merely a slip.

OR

Is a fall specifically when you lose your balance unexpectedly whilst doing something normal like walking around your house, your neighborhood, a store, a park, wherever? Such as tripping over something, or having a stroke-like moment, resulting in a serious keeling over out of nowhere. 

I await your insightful comments, my little moonbeams of good health. Trust me when I say this has been an ongoing, unresolved, conversation here at Chez Bean.

What say ye?

Implausible But True: Learning About Gnus & Answering 10 Questions

/ Ally Bean / 256 Comments

Subtitled: A Look At How Seamlessly One Thing Can Lead To Another

Photo of a gnu by titiamatta via Pixabay

“In Scrabble putting the GNU in the wrong place won’t get you the points you need,” said I.

I’d lost to Zen-Den in a close game and I felt like explaining myself, assessing where I’d gone wrong. He, however, burst out laughing, finding my statement hilarious, resulting in a question.

“Do you even know what a gnu is?” 

“No, not really,”  said I.

So off I went to research GNUS because I like to learn and because I thought this topic might be decent blog post fodder.

And it was, just not in the way I’d anticipated.

• 😜 •

So first here’s what I learned about GNUS, using bullet points to summarize the information in this article. Then I’ll share the surprising place where I ended up.

  • Gnus are the largest of all antelopes and live in Africa, the largest herds being in Tanzania and Kenya.
  • Gnus are also known as Wildebeests.
  • Gnus is pronounced like “news” making the ‘G’ as useless as the ‘G’ in lasagne.
  • There are two species: the black, also called white-tailed, and the blue, also called common.
  • Baby gnus, called calves, arrive in February and March so we’re in gnu birthing season right now and how exciting is that?
  • Gnus are herbivores who can become dinner for spotted hyenas, lions, cheetahs and African wild dogs.
  • A group of gnus is an implausibility according to James Lipton known to many from Inside the Actors Studio fame.

• 🤓 •

Well once I learned this last point of about gnus I had an epiphany. I knew I had to find Lipton’s famous questions based the Bernard Pivot adaptation of the Proust Questionnaire.

Then, of course, I had to answer Lipton’s 10 questions because to a personal blogger a list of questions is manna from heaven. The questions are as follows with my answers immediately after each one:

1.  What is your favorite word?  

Snazzy

2.  What is your least favorite word?  

Should

3.  What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?

Going for a walk, seeing what I see, letting my mind wander, quietly pondering what’s really going on around and within me

4.  What turns you off?

Hypocrisy

5.  What is your favorite curse word?

Fu@k

 6.  What sound or noise do you love?

The sound leaves make when the wind blows through the trees, resulting in a quiet rustle that is the epitome of mellow

7.  What sound or noise do you hate?

The high-pitched whirring of a poorly maintained machine that is the aural manifestation of anxiety

8.  What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?

Interior design

9.  What profession would you not like to do?

Trash collector

10.  If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

Welcome! Your favorite table is waiting over here on the deck with a good view of the ocean. Now, are you still drinking Sauvignon Blanc? Will you need to see a menu today?

• 😇 •

Questions Of The Day

When’s the last time you played Scrabble? Did you win?

What’s the last subject you researched? If you write a blog, did you share what you learned?

Back in the day did you ever watch Inside the Actors Studio?

Will you be answering Lipton’s 10 questions?

• 🤔 •

Let’s Laugh: Three Absurd Conversations + Something I Cannot Explain

/ Ally Bean / 243 Comments

~ • ~

Three Absurd Conversations

ONE – Out to dinner with friends. The conversation turns to ice cream. The questions: 1) What is your favorite flavor? and 2) Where do you buy it?

My answer: Spumoni is my favorite flavor but it’s difficult to find, usually only around Christmas, and never for sale in Kroger where I shop most of the time. Seems like they could have it.

A friend, a lawyer, pipes up and jokingly says: It’s not Kroger’s fault for not having spumoni, it’s your fault for liking a weird flavor of ice cream.

Immediately everyone at the table agrees with him and starts laughing at me while I’m forced to admit that he could be right. He might have a point.

You like vanilla, it’s everywhere, no problem.

• • •

TWO – Overheard while shopping in Dillard’s. An older couple, mid-80s, are in the women’s clothing section near where I’m standing. She’s looking at blouses, he’s looking bored. She pulls a blouse on a hanger off the rack and tells him she’s going to try it on.

He seems surprised and says: I thought we were just horsing around here. Then he makes a low guttural snorting sound like a horse whinny while attempting to prance like a horse.

She looks over at me, rolls her eyes, then turns to him and says: Slow down there Roy Rogers, hold your horses, and wait here.

This spunky reply made me laugh out loud and him smile like the ornery cute kid he probably used to be.

Oh, to age with your sense of humor intact.

• • •

THREE – Said by the husband after he plugged in the heating pad so I could lay on the bed with it on my aching thigh.

Him: You’re not supposed to sleep with the electric heating pad on, so once you fall asleep turn it off.

Me staring at him: Think about what you said.

Him: Really, that’s what the warning on the tag says.

Me: Keep thinking.  

Him after long pause: OH… I see the problem.

Which confirmed that he still understands logic, but had me in stitches laughing at and thankfully with someone who rarely says anything illogical.

Even the brainy ones can be dim. 

Something I Cannot Explain

This isn’t my car.

Mid-afternoon I pulled into a parking lot adjacent to a city park and found this car *parked* [abandoned?] in this awkward way.

There were no indications that the car had hit any other vehicle, stopping midway while pulling into the parking space.

After I parked down the way and walked back by the car I saw that the inside of the car was tidy. There wasn’t a note on the windshield explaining what had happened. There was no police citation on it.

It was just a half-parked car in the way in a public parking lot with nary a soul around to explain the situation.

Any idea what was going on here?

~ ~ • ~ ~