Living Out Loud volume 25: Always learning

Christmas of 2008, Rich got me a gift certificate for guitar lessons. I still have the certificate but don't know a single chord yet, having never taken a lesson. My excuse was that in January of 2009 I got pregnant, which meant I slept the first three months and then had an ever expanding belly the next six months which made it hard to fit a guitar in my lap. And then we had a kid and ... well, guitar lessons haven't been a priority. Our newborn is now a toddler and has discovered that we have a guitar in the corner of the guest room. He now runs to it constantly and demands we play for him. Rich only knows three songs, and I swear if I hear Dust in the Wind one more time, that guitar is going to be dust in the wind.

This got me thinking about if and when I'll learn to play the guitar myself. My old boss Harry had a project (campaign? philosophy? all of the above?) called Always Learning. To paraphrase him, "what joy to awake each morning with so much to learn."

Rich and I were chatting about German intelligence in World War II (you know, like you do) and while I remembered who Turing was, I didn't know anything about the term Operation Overlord and had forgotten most of the statistics for Normandy. I'm sure I had a class on that at some point in my teenage years, but it's all completely out of my head so that it may as well never happened. I told Rich I could probably calculate a standard deviation with a little trial and error, but can't tell you when the War of the Roses happened. Maybe I should find a history book to peruse.

This leads me to our theme for Living Out Loud this month. Tell us something you've always wanted to learn. If you could go back to school, money and time not-withstanding, what would you choose? Is there something you'd love to master but haven't figured out the logistics of who will show you? Do you think you'll make time to learn these things soon or is it something you're saving for "when you retire"? A friend of mine is teaching herself to sew. Another friend has gone back to community college taking one class a semester for fun.

Details include:

• Write something personal about yourself using the previous paragraphs as a guideline. Do not feel that you have to address each prompt above. The spirit of this project is to share something about yourself; I'm just throwing out ideas.

• Once you have completed your entry and posted it, please email me the link at genie [at] inabottle [dot] org. Remember, if you don't email me, I'm likely to forget to include you in the recap!

• If you do not have a blog to host your story, you can email me the story directly and I will add it here as a guest post giving you credit. The more the merrier!

• The due date for entries is Sunday, February 13th (the second Sunday of the month) at 5pm Eastern.

• Once I have collected all the entries, I will post a wrap-up to list them all and announce a winner. The winner will receive some sort of prize to be determined but all participants will receive fame and glory and a link on our Living Out Loud blogroll.

Note that the first Sunday of February is the Super Bowl and since our household has one HUGE Steelers fan (Rich) and one half-assed Packers fan (me) we'll be watching the game so I'm giving us all an extension til the 13th. So that gives us all a good two weeks to ponder our entries.

Remember, what joy to awake with so much to learn!

Recap of Living Out Loud volume 24: Total Recall

I'm a day or two late but here's our recap finally! This was a fun topic and I'm particularly impressed that there were several different takes on how to write about it. You all continue to impress me every month. Let's check them out ... Rachel's Like something out of a movie Wow, that gave me goosebumps. I've never witnessed something like that but it would definitely stick with me.

Grace's Total Recall You say you wish you had a better memory but all those senses are working quite well, it seems. I have strong reactions to smells and sounds too.

Erin's Re-do on the Recall Ooh, I'm always thinking of things to say hours after the moment has past. Or years ...

Peg's Scattered Memories I think most people have issues with memories like that. I used to be able to remember all kinds of things and now there are whole chunks of my life I've forgotten. I feel like it's a sign of a full life.

SuziCate's A Night I'd Rather Forget All that sounds so rough to go through but I love the comparison to the rise and fall of his chest then and now.

Megan's Perfect Poems of Memory I've been trying to force myself to remember certain moments with Ian but the next day is full of things I think I'll want to remember or things I'm full of experiencing now. I can't focus on what he felt like as a newborn because I'm focusing on his faces and sounds now. Nothing stands still long enough for us to really note it!

Candice's Photographic Memory I take so many pictures these days and I'm so glad I do. I want our lives to be recorded like the paparazzi followed us so that we can remember the furniture, the pets, the clothes and everything else. And hopefully have lots of happy memories.

Ruth's Remembering memories So much of my early childhood is through the window of my parents' retelling of stories. It makes me feel like I have a stronger memory of my early years than I actually do and that's awesome.

and my own The filing cabinet of my mind

I'm excited to see what you all did. There were some recounts of things you'd rather forget, some lamentations of the memories lost in our minds and some great details on everything in between.

I choose SuziCate as our winner this month, mostly because after reading all these hers is the one I keep thinking about days later the most. The rise and fall of his chest. And I'm a sucker for dad stories. SuziCate wins our customary $25 Amazon gift certificate but everyone wins my undying gratitude and appreciation for sharing so much with us.

Oh, and if you have ideas for future LOL themes, feel free to drop me a line. You're under no obligation to write an entry if it's your idea. :)

The filing cabinet of my mind

Memory is funny. I can tell you my ex-husband’s and boss’ social security number. I can remember server passwords and ip addresses (though that is slipping a bit these days). I can remember the harmony for the songs we sang in high school choir. I can’t remember what my senior speech was in high school, though, and it took me weeks of research and writing. I don’t think I could calculate a standard deviation if my life counted on it, though I loved calculus. I don’t remember when we got our dog Lady as a kid and how long she lived.

Rich was telling me this morning that scent is the sense most connected with memory. I do know that Jergens lotion reminds me of evenings in my grandmother’s apartment and the glee of a coke in a glass bottle or Breyer’s ice cream. There’s a particular version of Speedstick deodorant that reminds me of the crush I had on a boy in high school. (Said boy is now my Facebook friend. Life is funny.) My ex-husband Jeremy is allergic to preservatives and a side effect was his sneezes smelled like a musty old attic. I can distinctly remember that smell even though I can barely remember the five years we were together.

I’ve been a sensitive soul my whole life. It’s why I don’t do well with being fussed at because I remember it forever. My father fussed at me once when I was about five for messing with his neck harness while he was stressed out and bustling around the house. It still makes my stomach hurt to think about it now. My old boss Harry fussed at me once for talking to my father on the phone while at work and it was at least five years before that memory faded enough I could think about it without getting red faced.

My sweetest memories are ones of late. Rich and I had a wonderful wedding, but one of my strongest and fondest memories was Gail telling me my brother Doug told her “my little sister is beautiful!” as I walked down the aisle. Doug didn’t talk to me during the wedding or reception that I recall, but it meant the world to me that my incredibly anxious brother made the five hour drive to our wedding and enjoyed himself.

I should remember the magic of first seeing my son as he was born but I most remember being incredibly thirsty while pushing for three hours and my mother telling the doctor “she’s the strongest person I know.”

This weekend, we’ve been in San Diego for a conference. The woman next to us on our incoming flight asked if we had been here before and I told her “yes, but I no idea when it was.” I later found out it was 2003, but it may as well have been someone else who went on that trip. Most of this trip I’ll probably forget as well as they run together with all the other conferences.

Now that we have Ian, I try to force memories to stick. I hold him while he’s nursing or snuggle up with him in the bed and tell myself “Remember. Remember. Remember.” When Rich and I manage a few moments of quiet together, I tell my brain to store it away so I can have it carry me to the next few moments. I count the scales on his dragon tattoo. I take a deep breath when the air is crisp with winter and we’re playing in the snow. I wonder what will be the first things Ian will remember.

My mother has said that it takes both she and Daddy to remember all the things they’ve done. Each of them remembers things and helps fill in the others. And Rich’s dad was recently lamenting that with the death of his last sibling Tommy he’s lost so much of his childhood and his parents that he couldn’t remember on his own.

We rarely get to choose what we want to remember. The brain works in mysterious ways. I wonder if it’s all in there for all of us and only some of us have the filing systems to be able to recall it. As a pack rat, I’d like to believe it’s all in there.