The local community college is offering Spanish Conversation 1 this fall, and Hubby and I have decided to sign up! It should be fun doing a class together. It starts September 19 and runs for 8 weeks from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. I wonder if we'll be the youngest people in the class? I was one of the youngest a few years ago when I took Italian Conversation.

Over at theferrett's journal, he's been talking about the Dale Carnegie book How to Win Friends and Influence People, which has been around in some form or another since 1937! Amazing, isn't it? I want to talk more about the book when I get through more of it, but this is something I discovered about myself.

Knowing that I have piles of books lying around the house that haven't even been cracked open once, I decided I would get the audiobook version and listen to it on my iPod going to and from work. I'm about 2 hours into it so far. I like it pretty well so far. But what I'm noticing is that I'm probably absorbing more listening to it. There are a lot of folksy anecdotes that I probably would have just glossed over if I'd been reading the book. The narrator reads much slower than I would read the print version. But I'm sort of a captive audience, so I'm hearing and processing more of it.

Also, I've been listening to it in the morning, so I'm coming into the office with all kinds of friendly Dale Carnegie type thoughts to start the day. I'm thanking the parking attendants, I'm greeting people with a smile and by name. I hope it's having a positive effect on the people I'm encountering, but it's sure having a positive effect on me.

I wonder if I was always an auditory learner, or this is something that's developed as I'm getting older? Anyway, it's kind of fascinating!

And the book so far has covered a lot of the basics: don't criticize people; be genuinely interested in them; smiling is important; learning and remembering names is very important. All the basic stuff we kind of already know, but often let slide. Also, being empathetic and trying to find what's in it for the other person is big. For example, this morning I got a list of securities from a client to update to make sure the securities were assigned to the client's firm. Half the list had already been checked. So yeah, it was a waste of time for me to find these and check to see if they'd been updated. But the team in charge of this doesn't care about my needs. So when I e-mailed the team leader, I couched it in how can we show the clients how to check for themselves, to save them time from having to go through and make up a list. There was nothing about my needs in it, just the other guy's. I need to think about that other ways I can do that. I spend a large part of my day calling other people to get information to answer client questions. Those other people don't care about what I want, so how can I interest them in helping me? I'll think about it more.

Sorry I didn't get to post last night. Right after dinner, we went to our first-ever condo association meeting. They had an engineer from the township listening to suggestions on more safety for the pedestrian crossing between our entrance and the train station. I'm glad we went, because we really should be more involved in what goes on, but my God, it was dull. It was basically a 30-minute meeting stretched out over an hour and ten minutes. Once I read about a company where they would only have their meetings in rooms without chairs, and you wouldn't believe how short and focused their meetings were. That's what we needed here.

After that, I really needed to do some reading for tonight's class, so I read Chapters 12 and 13. Chapter 12 was all about sugars and carbohydrates, and 13 was all about diabetes. Guess what: sugar does not cause diabetes. Ummmm, I need to check the book again about what does, but just so you know.

Last week's class and this chapter about carbs have actually raised a few concerns for me, and my goofy aunts' reaction to me this weekend didn't help. I will address these in the long-awaited part 2 post, when I get a chance. Oh, but just to make this part food-related: at the meeting last night, they provided coffee and Dunkin Donuts Munchkins. Guess who did not have one? Yeah, that'd be me. I'm good.

You scored as Psychology. You should be a Psychology major! </td> Psychology 75% Linguistics 58% Engineering 58% English 58% Sociology 50% Chemistry 42% Mathematics 42% Journalism 42% Anthropology 42% Philosophy 33% Biology 25% Art 17% Theater 17% Dance 17% What is your Perfect Major? created with QuizFarm.com

Oddly enough, I nearly switched majors from English to Psych in my sophomore year of college. Unfortunately that was the semester before I was all set to go to England for junior year. So basically the choice became either stay at school and do the core requirements for a Psych major, or go to England and fulfill a dream I'd had since I was 15 years old.

Also isn't it weird how Engineering tied with Linguistics and English? The hell did that come from?