Have you ever gone back and listened to old answering machine tapes? Everything is digital now--I retired my tape answering machine when I turned off my land line phone. Not able to sleep, I just listened to both sides of the microcassette inside the high school graduation gift from my boyfriend. (The gift that was supposed to record his attempts to reach me didn't turn out to record many attempts over the years. Ha) I heard the voices of friends from college, friends in town, friends I'd unfortunately lost touch with, my parents, my aunts, and my brother before his voice fully changed. Yeah, I even had instances of the voice of the one who gave me the machine. The most precious recording, however, is of my Grandma Burton singing "Happy Birthday" to me with two of my aunts. It's a dear gift to hear the voice of the one I miss most--a voice and words she wasn't able to gather long after that as her Alzheimers worsened.
It's funny--the content of some of the messages gave me distinct clues as to when the were recorded (year, month). I still had some messages from the Systems Analysts I worked with from 1999-2000 on our disastrous conversion to PeopleSoft Ledger (disastrous mainly for those legacy systems like Budget that were making "just in time" changes to produce what our users were accustomed to seeing). Blah blah. Now it's as if none of that happened and I didn't work there. At the time, it occupied numerous hours, all days of the week. It's so strange to hear job & jobstream names rattled off of which I have little/no recollection. Hard to believe that was 9-10 years ago...
Just another exercise that pours a little salt on emotional wounds I've chosen to reinjure lately. I think I do this out of shear boredom. So stupid. I need constructive activities...and the energy/pain relief to do them. Whew...
