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This is gonna take a while...
May. 17th, 2006 07:22 pmI'm again attempting to watch a baseball game, in the hopes I'll come to understand it. This time it's the White Sox/Twins game from sunday night.
I'm starting to understand some of it, so I'm hopeful that I'm not wasting my time here. But I'm seriously not enjoying the presentation Channel Five put together - it's your usual scenario; two guys sat at an anchor desk (not Dan and Casey, alas, but we can't have everything...) discussing the game and the players, but I really don't enjoy listening to them. Last week wasn't so bad - I recognised the American guy from the one time I taped Radio One DJ Colin Murray doing exactly the same presentation (even down to the studio and camera direction) for Five's NFL coverage, and he's cool, but the British guy's a twit. He knows what he's talking about, granted, but he also tries to be funny and it doesn't work. This time his co-host's another American who used to be his regular co-host at one point, and now hosts MLB.com, and the number of times he pulls 'this guy's an idiot' faces or makes veiled disparaging comments....I hate when they pull away from the game for these guys.
I'm also getting distracted by a certain ginger child who is refusing to go to sleep. He refused to eat his tea this evening, picking at his carrots and then telling me he wasn't hungry, and now of course he wants something to eat. Even though I told him that if he left his tea he wasn't getting another scrap tonight. So we've been arguing for the last half an hour and I've put him to bed without his story, but he's not going down without a fight. *sigh*
On an unrelated note, I've been contemplating going back to speech therapy. I often feel a little guilty that I can't take incoming calls at work, though calling other insurers is not a problem. I think that's mostly because there's something of a script to checking people's No Claims Bonus entitlement, and they have to provide good customer service to me. I certainly wouldn't want to try to discuss my queries with someone who stammers, so why should I make anyone else?
It's very much linked to my emotions and confidence levels, though that doesn't mean that I'm completely fluent when I'm calm. If I have to explain something to a manager, no matter how comfortable I might be with that person, my tounge can get completely tangled in knots for a good thirty seconds or more before I can reign myself in, take a deep breath and start again. And even then, it can be a struggle to force a sentence out. I've been getting that increasingly often with my parents too, and you'd think they would be the two people I'm most fluent around.
The problem is that I didn't enjoy the year I spent in therapy, when I was sixteen. When my mother first approached our family doctor about my speech, he dismissed it - as he often does with things he considers insignificant - and told her I'd grow out of it. I brought it up again with a different doctor when I was fifteen, who got me on the list for a consultation with a therapist, but by this time I was considered an 'adult' where this was concerned. As a result the majority of the therapy is emotional, working on your self-confidence and stuff. It was too much like being in therapy for me - I was only sixteen and that really didn't sit well. Plus she made me attend regular evening group-meetings, which were dull and embarrassing. It was hard enough talking about my issues one-on-one, but with a group of guys at least ten years my senior? No thanks....
But still, I'm increasingly wondering if I should give it another shot. Trouble is, I would have to approach the same woman I saw when I was a kid. *sigh*
I'm starting to understand some of it, so I'm hopeful that I'm not wasting my time here. But I'm seriously not enjoying the presentation Channel Five put together - it's your usual scenario; two guys sat at an anchor desk (not Dan and Casey, alas, but we can't have everything...) discussing the game and the players, but I really don't enjoy listening to them. Last week wasn't so bad - I recognised the American guy from the one time I taped Radio One DJ Colin Murray doing exactly the same presentation (even down to the studio and camera direction) for Five's NFL coverage, and he's cool, but the British guy's a twit. He knows what he's talking about, granted, but he also tries to be funny and it doesn't work. This time his co-host's another American who used to be his regular co-host at one point, and now hosts MLB.com, and the number of times he pulls 'this guy's an idiot' faces or makes veiled disparaging comments....I hate when they pull away from the game for these guys.
I'm also getting distracted by a certain ginger child who is refusing to go to sleep. He refused to eat his tea this evening, picking at his carrots and then telling me he wasn't hungry, and now of course he wants something to eat. Even though I told him that if he left his tea he wasn't getting another scrap tonight. So we've been arguing for the last half an hour and I've put him to bed without his story, but he's not going down without a fight. *sigh*
On an unrelated note, I've been contemplating going back to speech therapy. I often feel a little guilty that I can't take incoming calls at work, though calling other insurers is not a problem. I think that's mostly because there's something of a script to checking people's No Claims Bonus entitlement, and they have to provide good customer service to me. I certainly wouldn't want to try to discuss my queries with someone who stammers, so why should I make anyone else?
It's very much linked to my emotions and confidence levels, though that doesn't mean that I'm completely fluent when I'm calm. If I have to explain something to a manager, no matter how comfortable I might be with that person, my tounge can get completely tangled in knots for a good thirty seconds or more before I can reign myself in, take a deep breath and start again. And even then, it can be a struggle to force a sentence out. I've been getting that increasingly often with my parents too, and you'd think they would be the two people I'm most fluent around.
The problem is that I didn't enjoy the year I spent in therapy, when I was sixteen. When my mother first approached our family doctor about my speech, he dismissed it - as he often does with things he considers insignificant - and told her I'd grow out of it. I brought it up again with a different doctor when I was fifteen, who got me on the list for a consultation with a therapist, but by this time I was considered an 'adult' where this was concerned. As a result the majority of the therapy is emotional, working on your self-confidence and stuff. It was too much like being in therapy for me - I was only sixteen and that really didn't sit well. Plus she made me attend regular evening group-meetings, which were dull and embarrassing. It was hard enough talking about my issues one-on-one, but with a group of guys at least ten years my senior? No thanks....
But still, I'm increasingly wondering if I should give it another shot. Trouble is, I would have to approach the same woman I saw when I was a kid. *sigh*
