I mispell things!
I may have a reason for owning a drone now. This is awesome. It is even better because he catches the bass on a Arbogast Jitterbug, the greatest of all lures. Now sure that even Andy Lickel has done this.
In addition I have mad respect for the guy for having wits enough about him to tell the person taking his photo to do so horizontally, rather than vertically. Folks, there are very few occasions when it is okay to take portrait style photos.
I love living in Wisconsin and being from the South. Ninety-five percent of everything is super cool because of the contrasts that I experience during my days because of the differences between the two cultures. However, five percent of the time the conflict is too great and I become frustrated. Yesterday Conor was the sources of one of those 5% moments.
I ran into Conor yesterday at Emy J’s1 . It is incredibly typical for me to run into a “thread” at Emy J’s. It is one of the multitude of reasons that I love going to Emy J’s. We spent around an hour solving all the world’s problems (you’re welcome) and I introduced Conor to the Firecracker rolls at the Main Grain. If you have not had one of these then you need to go to the Main Grain early (because they run out) on a Wednesday and get one. They are amazing. Anyhow after an hour I decided to go home and eat leftover homemade chicken and dumplings for lunch. I invited Conor to join me because Pam’s chicken and dumplings are amazing. I mean seriously. I literally moan when I eat these things. They are that good.
Anyhow it didn’t work out for Conor to be able to join me because I couldn’t verify with Pam that there was enough left over for two, and while I am willing to share my leftover chicken and dumplings with people I care for, I am most definitely not willing to give up my leftover homemade chicken and dumplings. As I wrote earlier, they are VERY good. So we decided it was best for the friendship for him not to come over.
As I was leaving Conor said “Enjoy your chicken and dumplings soup.” That’s right he called it “chicken and dumplings soup.” Now chicken and dumplings can be liquid enough to look like a soup (which is the way I like it because then you add in cornbread to sop up the juice) but it isn’t a soup. Therefore, it is incorrect and just sounds plain wrong to call it “chicken and dumplings soup”.
I ran this past the weekly small group that Pam and I are a part of and they were pretty much split down the middle on soup or no soup. It is chicken and dumplings folks. That is all. Just chicken and dumplings!
Get it straight you darn Yankees. 🙂
I am sure you have a true job title like “sound engineer” or “audio artistic developer” or something else like that, but right now I am irritated at you and therefore I don’t care about searching out your true title. I usually appreciate what you do. You add wonderful audio elements to the TV shows and films that I watch which help to immerse me in the world of the video I am watching. It wouldn’t be the same without you adding both small and big sound effects. Doors should sound a little squeaky when they are opened and you make sure they do, and how else will I know that someone drove by rather fast without that little tire squeal that you add to the scene.
Yet every now and then you add a sound effect that sounds more like something going wrong in my house than it does anything that would be happening in the movie. For example, last night when Pam and I were watching the 2016 Call the Midwife Christmas Special.
Now don’t judge me. Call the Midwife is excellent. It is a really compelling show and as a member of a care giving profession and the spouse of another member of said profession I will add that the care fictionalized on Call the Midwife is usually a wonderful example of how to listen to someone in need. The fact that I get bonus points with Pam for watching the show … well that’s just gravy.
Anyhow last night the cast of Call the Midwife cast was in South Africa. It was a very good episode, as usual. You however, Mr or Ms Sound Effect person, decided to randomly add the small tweet of a song bird in the background of many scenes. I’ve never been to South Africa so I wouldn’t know if there should be song bird tweets or not. I do know there weren’t random lion roars sprinkled throughout the episode. Anyhow the tweet was never very obvious so I never thought “Hey there’s a song bird tweet”. The sound effect was consistently there, sprinkled throughout the episode, and it sounded almost exactly like something going bad in our furnace or some creature deciding our warm house is a better place to winter than the very cold outdoors of Central Wisconsin.
Furnaces going out and unwanted furry visitors are a real fears up here in the cold North. If your furnace goes out when it is -3 degrees outside really bad things can happen and the battle never ends with small creatures that think “mi casa es su casa” during the yearly reign of Jack Frost. Therefore, your ears are alert for these sounds during the chilly time of the year.
Tweet, tweet, tweet. Is that a pulley going bad? Squeak, squeak, squeak. Is that a mouse figuring out if it is safe to come out and not see the cat?
It only took us a few times of stopping the DVR and listening to finally figure out the sound effect stopped every time we paused the video replay.
Darn you. Darn you all to heck sound effect people.
“We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.”
Mary McCarthy, “Characters in Fiction” Partisan Review, March/April 1961
I don’t know the context of Mary McCarthy’s words1 . I’ve tried finding McCarthy’s article from the Partisan Review and I’ve had no luck. I’ve also tried to find someone talking about the context and meaning of McCarthy’s words but I haven’t had any luck with that either. I have had a ton of luck finding posts discussing the post’s author’s view of the quote, which doesn’t help me a ton.
The vast majority of the posts I see the quote in use it basically telling their readers to go out and live as heroes since they are the heroes of their own stories. Not bad advice. Still I believe there is another side to the quote.
I feel like part of the truth found in the quote is that we tend to see ourselves unrealistically within our own lives. We often think the best of ourselves and our actions even when we would think the exact opposite if we saw others commit those same actions.
For example, I have a friend from years ago who would tell stories of things he had done and said. He was sure these were great stories in which he had acted in great ways, but in reality most people around thought his stories showed he had been a jerk. It was ok though because he was our jerk and therefore we knew who he was and loved him no matter what.
As a minister and chaplain I talk with people regularly that think their actions are heroic, yet when I hear them I think the exact opposite. The person who is convinced everyone is against her, when in reality she has just been mean to everyone she knows. The guy who thinks that he is a great listener, and yet you spend 10 minutes with him and he never stops talking. I have an acquaintance who brags about reading over a hundred books every year, yet when I asked him how he did it he says he reads the first and last chapter of books and is able to figure out the rest from that. These people aren’t purposefully lying. They really believe what they say about themselves.
This isn’t just someone else’s problem. It is mine too. I too often view myself as the hero of my own story also. I look at my actions and I am convinced of their inherent rightness. I lie to myself and I believe those lies to actually be true. We look at ourselves through very smeared glasses, and far too often believe we have perfect vision.
I believe this is partially why the Psalmist says “Search me, God, and know my heart” (Psalm 139:23). The Psalmist recognized that we aren’t very good judges of our own lives because we think we usually think we are the heroes.
It’s a new year and I don’t have anything of any depth to write about so I’ll just post a couple of things just to get back into the habit blogging more often.
1st, Eric G made my day today because during setup he asked if I had a black sharpie. I know this doesn’t sound like much but it gave me a great chance to prove Eric wrong and proving him wrong is a wonderful thing. You see he regularly mocks my possible, the bag I carry with me pretty much everywhere I go to help me cope with whatever I may possibly face. He calls it my “man purse” because he doesn’t recognize the genius of a possible. That’s just wrong. it isn’t a “man purse”, it’s a possible. So when he asked if I had a black sharpie I was able to “why yes I do” with a smile and reach into my possible to pull out a black sharpie for him to use. It was a glorious moment.
2nd, each week I try to put a quote on the front of the of the bulletin (the piece of paper we put out each week that has info about who we are, the scripture for the week, and various announcements). My goal with the quote is to try and summarizes what the message is about. Sometimes I do a better job of finding quotes that do this than other times. Anyhow I try to find something that conveys this message because I figure that way if someone remembers nothing else from the message but the quote then they have a basic summary of the message. So this year I have decided to do a graphic from the quote each week and post it on the Tapestry Facebook page. If any “thread” would like to do some of these I would be more than happy for the help. Just let me know.