Patti O'Shea's Blog

Sometimes lyrics to music gets me thinking. The latest instance of this happened as I was listening to The Pussycat Dolls song, When I Grow Up. One of the lines of the song is: We all wanna be famous. That made me ask, does everyone want to be famous?

My first round of thinking was personal. Do I want to be famous? It’s kind of a complicated question or at least a layered one. No, I don’t want to be famous, but I’d like my stories/books to be hugely popular and read by millions. Does that constitute personal fame? I’m thinking not because I want to remain out of the limelight. I’m much more comfortable that way.

This leads me to the second round of thinking–Do most people want to be famous? I mean, lets face it. I’m not normal. I hear voices in my head who tell me what their names are and won’t cooperate if I don’t do things their way. Most people don’t deal with this.

I thought about reality TV where people humiliate and embarrass themselves on national television for notoriety. About five minutes’ worth. Seems to me that fame or the chance to have fame is something others want. Which brings me around to wondering what the appeal is? Why do some people seem willing to do anything to get noticed?

I’ve been puzzling over this for days. I know. I think too much, but a lot of writers like to figure out what makes others tick. Occupational hazard, I guess. I’m having a hard time, though, with this. Maybe because it’s so opposite of how I think.

So…do we all want to be famous? Am I the one out of step again?

I’m a glass half empty kind of person by and large. I blame my parents for this because they’re glass-half-full people and someone had to point out the pitfalls. They would look at the ocean and say, “it’s so pretty.” And I’d mention, well, yeah, it’s pretty, but remember there are sharks beneath the surface and rocks and don’t forget there are storms. Someone had to remind them, right?

Sometimes, though, I need a reminder to see the good things and not only think about the half-empty part. I got that reminder last week.

I had to swing by the clinic on my way home from work last Wednesday. In the waiting room was a younger couple. They both looked healthy and I didn’t think much about it until I sat down and noticed there was a folded up walker between their chairs. Not very long after that, an elderly couple came through from the examining room side to the lab side. She shuffled along and he barely shuffled along with a walker.

If that wasn’t enough to make me grateful, a family came in while I was waiting. It looked like a husband and wife, her mother, and their son. The wife had a walker with one of those fold-down seats and oxygen tubes coming out of her nose. The older woman who I took to be the wife’s mother wheeled her oxygen canister behind her and the husband checked her in. I don’t know what was wrong with her, if she had cancer or emphysema, or some other disease, but she looked as if she were in her 40s. Not that old to be hooked up to O2 and so weak she had to immediately put down her fold-down seat and sit.

And that’s when it was driven home just how very lucky I am.

It hadn’t been a great week. My tendonitis hurt really, really bad and so did the thumb that I’d injured in a car accident. I’d had allergy issues all week and headaches that left me crabby. Seeing this woman made me realize just how minor those complaints were.

Even my parents who are getting older and having health issues are lucky. My dad had his kidney out a couple of years ago, but he’s still a little dynamo and very active. You have to be quick to keep up with him because he’s always moving. My mom isn’t that fast, and she’s had several issues including a small stroke last December, but she can get around on her own, too.

When I drove out of the parking lot, all I could think was thank you. And I saw my glass was probably more than half full.

I know that this reality check will fade in time. They always do. But it’s good to be reminded that I have things pretty damn good and to be grateful for that.

I am totally phone-phobic. I hate it and do everything I can to avoid using it. This is one of the reasons it amazes me that people spend like every minute in their cars on their cell phones. Hello? This is the place you can go to get away from the damn phone. (I do own a cell phone, but it’s never turned on and I never think to check for messages. Once, I found a voice mail from a friend from months earlier on it. Talk about embarrassing.)

Tracing back my dislike of the phone gets murky. I know I hated it in high school because I had a job after school where I spent four hours a day on the phone, placing calls to stores. There’s a good chance, though, that I hated the phone before that because I have a vague memory of not calling my friends in junior high and not exactly being thrilled when they called either. In fact, I have pretty clear memories of giving short answers in the hope the other person would end the call faster.

Imagine that–a teenage girl who didn’t like spending hours on the phone. My parents didn’t know how good they had it.

This phone aversion has continued. For instance, right now, I have a iPod speaker dock thing that isn’t working. I ordered it from Woot, and only read their return policy after the fact. It’s basically deal with the manufacturer and only if that fails will we allow you to return the item at your cost. Um, nice. This is going to make me think twice before buying from them in the future, but it leaves me with a problem–now I have to contact the manufacturer.

I tried their website first. No help there on making the speaker dock work. They offered an email for help option and I jumped on that one. The response came quickly enough, offered a few suggestions, and then said if nothing here helped, that I should call customer service. I have a reference number.

Call! Gah!

If I wanted to make a phone call, I would have done that to begin with. I don’t. So now I’ve spent about a week trying to psyche myself up. Yes, it takes me time to build up enough courage to pick up the phone. Sometimes too long and I’ve been known to let things slide indefinitely because of my phone-phobia. Of course, I have a tendency to let anything I don’t want to deal with slide.

While I work to reach a point where I can call customer service, I have a messy kitchen, the box for the iPod dock/speakers is on top of my island. The directions are open on my dining room table. The dock itself and a couple of spare iPod trays are on my china hutch. I want that stuff gone and I can’t make it go away until I use the phone! Makes me wonder what will win out–my dislike of clutter or my dislike of the phone.

Stay tuned.