Years ago when I was a teenager I read an article on Amy Grant, my favorite singer of all time other than Barbara Streisand and Doris Day. She was being interviewed on her songwriting and she reported that she often offered to drive the tour bus because driving would free up her right brain to create. She said she wrote some of her best music while she was driving.
Throughout the years I have come across studies that reveal this same idea. When the left brain is preoccupied the right brain tends to think more.
I believe this is possibly true because more times than I can count I come up with really great ideas to write about in this column, but I am on the interstate sandwiched between two Mack trucks or winding down a country highway running ten minutes late to some destination. After years of this popping up, I learned to hit something on my dash and tell Siri to put a certain idea in my notes.
Now, the problem with this is that I have quite an accent, and I talk pretty fast or pause too long for the voice to register exactly what I am saying. And because I am driving, I cannot do much about it but hope when I see the jumble of words in my notes it will ring a bell with my memory. Most of the time it doesn't. Like one of my notes says "Sherrie and car line laughing." I have some faint memories of laughing with her about carline, but it is like tiny fragments of a dream that can't be strung together.
I also tell friends on the phone while I am driving to try to remember something we are laughing about for my future columns. I guess it should make me feel better that neither can they remember a week or two out from the conversation. And if it were my children they would purposely forget because it would mean another column was about them.
I also have things spoken to Siri in my phone that relate to short story writing ideas, awesome quotes to remember, recipe titles, passwords, and shopping lists that occur to me while on the road. In fact, I must be in my car a great deal because when I scroll down this very long list, I have left a great deal for Siri to remind me about. I even told Siri to remind me that I now know how to push a button to get Siri to put things into notes while I am driving.
So, obviously I was planning to write a column about this very invention I had stumbled upon as my tech savvy world expanded in the most pitiful way possible when I am around human beings only ten years or so younger than me. I mean, I still actually ask real people how to do things without first seeking a YouTube video to show me. I still dial numbers to try to find a human voice on the other line when needing assistance and always coming up dry.
I find it a really cool thing that I can tell Siri to put things in my phone such as "Be so great they can't ignore you." Or "Fortune favors the brave" even though I have no idea why I needed to remember this in my writing, but it is still good to know. There is one I have come across that I remember hearing from a motivational speaker. It is scattered words "Speak negative evidence to prove." And I remember it completely. “We often speak negative words to ourselves and then run out to find evidence we are correct. We should speak positive words to ourselves without the need to find approval." That was a good one.
I don't know why a year ago this month I told Siri to type "Jennifer column rice" but this has proposed a challenge.
I will never be able to figure out what all of these passwords in here go to because I have likely already clicked "forgot password" and changed them. But I can take each of these notes and see what I can build on for future columns. I think I will start with "Yes Ma’am”, and “Ms. Terry" because I think "lemon lime soda, orange soda, pineapple juice and ice cream" was punch
