An unfilled pothole

I’ve found ways to cope with many of mid-life’s little potholes. Exercise helps. So does my mid-life brain compensating device.

But I have yet to figure out how to deal with the fact that, sometimes, when I open my mouth, what comes out is a cross between intelligent comments and the language of an alien planet. This never used to happen–the connection between my brain and my word-forming parts was four bars all the time. Now I occasionally get packet loss.

(Ooooh, a dorknology analogy. Which I probably won’t do again, because I feel like I have to explain this one. The Internet comes in packets. When you have a dropped connection, like when Skype suddenly says buh-bye when you were least expecting it, that’s packet loss. I think. I could be wrong. Which makes my dorknology analogy not only somewhat obscure but also possibly fallacious. So I probably won’t do it again, even though I liked using the word ‘fallacious’ just a second ago. Those are the kinds of words I get to use when I write for money. Which tells you that you probably don’t want to read anything I write for money.)

I don’t mind if this happens when I’m, say, sitting at the dinner table or talking to a friend. I hate it when it happens on the phone with a client. Or, even worse, a group of people.

I was recently on a conference call, and someone asked me a question. I intended to say something like, “I think you’d have a better chance with a public health journal.” (Shows you how fascinating my work conversations tend to be.)

What came out was something like,”I think you’d have a chetter bance with a hublic jealth pournal.” Then I tried to correct it, and it came out, “A better chance with a public hooth jeernal.”

You get my drift. All I can think at the time is, at least they didn’t hire me because of my speaking skills.

Tagged as: Mid-life