Description

Hello, Welcome. I’m Renée Valentina and this is Musing Interruptus. Musing Interruptus is a podcast for sharing thoughts and stories and enjoying idiomatic phrases and words. You can read along; the transcription is in the description of this episode. The idiomatic expressions are in italics. Try to get the meaning from the context and then look them up to see if you were right. If you like it, share it, but more importantly, continue the conversation. The background music is called Charcoal Lines by Blue Dot.

Today, Quick, A Distraction!

Once I heard a psychoanalyst say that not everyone will feel better or freer after working on their traumas. There are things we have to learn to live with. That seems true about many things. And, it is our job to make the most of the time we have. While we decide what is the best use of our time, we might want to free up our thoughts.  What better way than by not paying attention? Avoidance!  A magician uses sleight of hand to fool you. Why not cut out the middleman and take care of it yourself?

You can do a great many things to create a distraction from your thoughts!  Evasion is the easiest thing to do. You can pretend everything is ok, repress, repress, repress. A great illusion of control. Drugs are fun. Medicinally of course. Antidepressants, uppers, downers, dissociatives. However, the consequences they have can be prolonged, creating a bigger problem in the end. 

If you lose your head, you will probably create havoc and commotion, that makes a mess!!! Then you have to clean it up. There you go, a double distraction for you. 

My mother would say, find something to do! There is always something to do. Being bored is a sign of low intelligence. You need to be able to entertain yourself. Whatever the measure of my intelligence, I was sure to never let on that I could be bored out of fear of being labeled - unintelligent-. So, you can see, coming up with ideas is part and parcel of surviving my mother. The ultimate voice in my head. With her there, I could never be bored anyway.

If you insist on outside stimulation and distractions, there are thousands of things to do. Take a walk and bump into neighbors, you’ll get some distractions. People are always happy to talk about their dog’s personalities. Which are projections of their own personalities. So, you can see the fun in that. If you are wondering about my dog Penny, which I’m sure you are, I’m happy to tell you that she is sweet and rabid, with a hidden intelligence and beauty that grows on you. Her charisma has no parallels. Many have described her as being verbose and charmingly cocky. 

Now that you have come back from your walk and mapped out the houses of the crazies, the narcissists, manics, depressives, and the potentially sociopathic, you might be inclined to venture out a bit further. Consider paying someone to distract you. You can go the professional route. Nobody gets hurt at the movies. Unless you get emotionally invested. It is all about someone else’s story, maybe even fantasy. The cool thing is, once the lights come back on, you can stop feeling. The act of suspending disbelief has concluded. You can go back to your life. If you are smart, you go to the movies with someone else and have coffee afterward to talk about every last detail. There you go, a double distraction, double points for you! I’m going to start calling you Distracticon. The next best thing is soap operas. Those are stories histrionically acted out for you, with background music that tells you how to react or what to anticipate, just in case you get distracted from the story. Again, a double distraction. This is too easy, Distracticon!

Some great stories come from late nights of music, drinking, and other stuff.