My son was home from college for two weeks during the holidays. I had talked to him before the break and had secured his “employment” in sound production. I wanted to make an audiobook of “31 Days to Finding Your Inner Sass”. We had discussed the process and he reassured me he knew exactly what needed to be done.
You see, my son is a Music Production major and regularly records his own work. He knows everything about recording and sound. He’s also a perfectionist- which can be a good thing or a bad thing, dependent on the situation. Frankly, I usually like this quality in my employees.
I’m not quite sure why, but I had assumed this whole process would be simple. All you have to do is read into a microphone right? How hard could it be? I didn’t realize the number of times that I stumble or slur my words when I speak. My son pointed it out to me. Day one in the studio, I also learned that you should never drink carbonated drinks while recording. Even the smallest gurgle sounds huge when you’re mic’ed so close.
This process was truly a learning experience for me. For example, I learned that the more you let me know I’m saying a word incorrectly, the more I continue to have difficulty saying the word. It was not unusual to have me repeat a sentence four times until I got it right. As you can imagine, this was a time consuming process.
On day two, I got in big trouble. I was reading Chapter 7 when my son dramatically stopped the recording, tore off his headphones, and pointed at my mouth. “Are you chewing gum?” I said nothing. He continued, “Mom, are you chewing gum?”. Finally, with my head down, I said yes. Then, with all his professionalism, he said loudly, “You do not bring gum into a studio!!” I was busted and embarrassed.
My point in sharing all of these details is to let you know that I was NOT having fun. This was intense work that took hours and hours. I hadn’t comprehended what a time commitment this was going to be until I was in the thick of it. We continued to trudge through more chapters, and my little perfectionist continued to stop me every couple sentences.
On day three, we had plans to start recording at 2:00 pm. At 1:30 pm I received a call from him. “Mom”, he said very calmly, “I don’t want you to panic, but my computer crashed last night”. I inquired into what that actually meant- did he lose everything we had completed? He shared how he was on his way to the Apple store to see if it could be fixed. I asked him to keep me posted. To make a long story short, he found out that everything on his computer was forever gone.
As we went out to dinner that night, my husband turned to my son and I and asked why we weren’t more upset. He couldn’t fathom how I had gone through this whole day without having an outburst of some kind. “There’s nothing we can do about it”. We had calmly problem-solved but to no avail. The facts were the facts: we had to start again, whether we liked it or not.
Things are going to happen to you in life. Some of them will be more than frustrating and you might feel like “throwing in the towel”. You can get involved in your emotions and how life is so unfair to you. You can go on for days, obsessing and getting yourself more aggravated. This will lead to a big expenditure of energy and a real waste of your time.
I don’t know about yours, but I decided my time, energy and happiness is way too valuable.
