Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Lost Logic. Reset, Reset

When I visit my friend, The Bear, at his retirement residence we often listen to music on compact discs. He has a marvellous CD player with great sound. It's much like the Bose player, but was somewhat less expensive. It also has a remote control. After a year of use, the battery in the remote control died. When I replaced it and tried to use the CD player, it wouldn't work. I couldn't discover what was wrong with it although I read the owner's manual. Have I said I'm technically inept before? Well, I still am. We had to wait until The Viking could arrange to look at it because he couldn't diagnose the problem over the phone. It took all of 10 seconds to fix it. He unplugged it, plugged it in again and hey presto! - it worked. The device had lost its logic, but regained it after it was restarted. If only I could reset my logic so easily.

Mostly, I think of myself as a reasonably logical person, but there are times when I'm not. Almost always, those times are connected with critiques of my writing. I can and do, fail to hear the 'good stuff." in fact, very recently I received a critique from ye Canlit star and the list of "the good stuff'' had to be repeated before I could manage to hear it. But, I seldom have a problem hearing and magnifying any faults that are pointed out to me.

Maybe I'm like this because praise was only doled out in infrequent and minuscule amounts during my early childhood and when it was meted out, a caveat inevitably appeared in the same sentence. That rule was scrupulously followed in order to ward off something - bad Karma, evil spirits, an inflated ego, or so I assume.

It's evident I need a reset button. Luckily, I can imagine I have one. There, I've pressed it. Now it's time to go back to work.



2 comments:

Michelle Muto said...

Excellent advice! And for me, quite timely.

J.A. Campbell said...

I'm good at only hearing the bad stuff too. :) *presses reset button for all of us.*