March 14, 2024
I’m at the Honda dealer getting my car worked on. It’s just a regular oil change with a tire rotation and new windshield wipers added. There is a TV on in the waiting area with a house buying show on it. Music is playing in the background much louder than it usually is. It’s only a problem for me because the TV and music are at the same volume. Neither are that loud. There is just too much competing audio for my one good ear. I’m writing my thoughts to distract me from it.
The plan has been to record my audio cassette tapes into digital audio for a while. I’m finally doing it. There has been a dual tape player in my office for years, but I haven’t hooked it up. Now I will hook it up after all these years. I just hope it still works after all these years. I tried to use my VCR interface to record just audio, but it told me there was a missing video signal when I pressed record. It worked enough that I could hear audio coming from the tape machine. That was some good news. Looking online, I found that my 2.0 model did not do audio only. The 3.0 model added that feature, but it was even more expensive than my existing model.
I did more research online and found cassette players that you could connect to a computer, but nothing was exactly what I wanted. Eventually, I found a dedicated audio interface that recorded to flash drives. The flash drive worked well for my VCR interface so I knew it would work. Just this morning, I started my first tape recording. The audio interface didn’t have a timer to shut off the recording, so I set a timer on my phone. The first tape was from 1989. I always remember it as the year I graduated high school. For those of you who were born after 1989, I ask you to calm down. You’ll be old someday.
I finished making my breakfast and was walking by my office, and I heard a loud screeching noise. It was coming from my tape player. I stopped the tape, but that didn’t stop the noise. I turned off the tape player, and the noise stopped. My only choice was to give up trying to record until later. I did some research on how to fix a screechy noise coming from a tape player. The first video showing you what to do had the tape player taken completely apart. I really hope I don’t have to do that. Hopefully, I can find what’s making the noise and grease that gear. In the end, if I don’t get it fixed, I’ll move on to my next option.
March 16, 2024
I’ve been listening to a trans women’s book who explains different aspects of being a trans person. It’s called Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us. I’ve listened to many authors in the LGBTQ community, but I believe this is the first trans person. Listening to diverse voices has become my goal of listening to other people’s stories. Her story is only slightly different from any other marginalized group experience. She recognized the loss of privilege she formerly had as a man. Really, she didn’t notice it until it was gone.
As with other people who are not in a majority group in the U.S., one of the main issues trans people deal with comes from people in the majority wanting to label them. We want to label everything with one of two labels. You’re a man or woman, black or white, Republican or Democrat, and right or wrong. Every one of these categories is an incomplete list of the true scope of people. The apt analogy she gave was seeing a rainbow in black and white. People are much more than one thing or another. We are all rainbows trying to pick what colors fit our lives best. Judging other people’s color choices is a waste of time and harmful to all of us.
Thoughts from Life 
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