His cover of it is

Is very sexual.

Very sexual.

Like, come on, man. That's you're you're asking for it. Although, I am I victim shaming?

You might have just

I might have victim shaming. Mean to. May he rest in peace. What a great artist. Welcome back to the manual transmission powered by coffee, curiosity, and the practice of showing up.

We're Brad and Monica Manuel, partners in marriage, business, and occasionally home demolition.

Before we jump in, if you're following us or you're listening to us, hit follow on Apple or Spotify and come find us on Instagram.

Yeah. Do that.

Hey, everybody.

Okay. I'll start. What? Hey, everybody. You start.

Welcome back to the manual transmission. This week, we spun Van Morrison's Moondance, and the whole house slid right into fall mode.

Moondance by Van Morrison. This album is soulful. It's cozy. It's great for this time of year. I really like the song Crazy Love.

Why?

I just like the song.

Because you're crazy in love with me?

Well, that too, but that's not why I like

the song. You think that our love is crazy?

Sometimes.

I thought if we're gonna look at our top 25, we're gonna explore these great albums of all time. Might as well see what the greatest Irish artist and albums were or are of all time.

I love it. Yeah. And and after you chose it and we started digging in a little bit, we learned that Van Morrison was born in Belfast in Northern Ireland in 1945. And he is he's one of the most influential and stylistically original singer songwriters of the last sixty years.

He is definitely different. We listened to the album this morning, and I decided to, while we listened to the album, pull up on YouTube some of his recordings of him in concert. He's a strange little Irishman.

Yeah. I I think I said, because you were playing it just with the sound off while we were listening to the album. I said, yeah. I like to I like to listen to it more than I like to look at him. Could you turn that off?

Okay.

Well, if you're if you're if you're listening out there, please.

Forgive me. You're great.

Your your voice is very unique Loved listening to you. Yeah. It's got a it's got a great groove. Okay.

Kinda messed it up for me. I really like the album. I and I just that's why I was like, hey. Could you just turn that off?

Wow.

The aesthetic wasn't doing it for me.

Okay. Alright. So he grew up in Belfast listening to the blues, like Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker. You can totally get a sense of blues in his music.

Occasionally jazz.

Jazz. Yeah. The r and b rhythm and blues.

Mhmm.

In fact, the band that he was part of called Them Mhmm. From Belfast. They were an r and b band. Or he wrote the song Gloria when he was 18 years old and they made it famous.

That's what I thought was so cool is I think it's really neat when someone creates something original. And I mean this 18 year old writes this song and then who like, who all who all covered it?

Jimi Hendrix covered it.

And made it his own.

But The Doors are known for their rendition, Jim Morrison's

They took it to another level.

Yep. And then Patty Smith Yeah. Which was amazing.

She I like her version the best, I think.

If you haven't seen it, you need to go on YouTube and look up Patty Smith's version of Gloria.

Yeah. That's fun to watch. That is fun to watch.

That was

fun to watch it with the sound on, so maybe that's the difference. I'll give Van another try.

Back to your Doors comment. Jim Morrison, in his creative artistic nature, he did take it to the next level.

Yeah. What puzzles me about Jim Morrison, you said you told me that part of his angst and like frustration was that he didn't like being treated like a sex symbol?

That's what I read. Yeah.

Well then why did he act like a sex symbol all the time? I mean he's like up there doing stuff.

Doing stuff?

Like like makes women think stuff and makes him into a sex symbol.

And then his leather pants down below his

Yeah. You can see the yeah. All that.

What do they call that? His happy trail?

You can see him. And he's like making out with a microphone.

His cover of it is

Is very sexual.

Very sexual.

Like, come on, man. This you're you're asking for it. Although I am I victim shaming?

You might have just

victim shaming. I didn't mean to. May he rest in peace. What a great artist.

Let's do high low.

Okay. High low. I know exactly what your low is. Actually, no I don't. I know two lows.

One's a superficial low, and one's like a real low.

Super But

your super low is probably my super low. Yeah. So you're So the one that's probably both of ours, I'll say is mine. You can

Why don't you just go? You're just on a roll.

Well, what I was thinking would be your low before I thought of the other thing.

Are we telling each other No. Their lows and highs? No. You do your low. No.

No. Go ahead. I want you to

I just think your low would be when you were taking that ceiling out and you were covered in all that crap. The insulation and the batting from the attic.

I hated that job.

I know you did because I called you in the middle of it and you were very upset.

That's why I didn't hang out on the phone with you very long.

Yeah. I was like, okay.

Like, I gotta get back to work.

See you later. Good to talk to you. Love you. Bye.

It was yeah.

Aren't you almost done now with the ceiling? Isn't there just one section left?

There's a couple of sections left. But it's almost there.

You made good progress this week.

Yeah. My high.

What was your high?

I do love making progress on the upstairs and doing the time lapse videos of us tearing down a wall or tearing out a ceiling and getting everything cleaned up and having the just the satisfaction of seeing the work.

Very satisfying. The one little thing I didn't like about the time lapse video Yeah. Is it made it look so easy. I was like that was hours of really hard work that you just make look like a magic wand was waved in like thirty seconds. Wanted credit for how hard that was.

You're right. It makes it look really easy.

It is visually satisfying but it's I I feel like in the real world it's satisfying to have done the work and then step back and look at it.

Agreed.

And then the and then the time lapse videos, a nice recap.

Well, my

high By the way, I think the reason you remember your highs so well is because of well, he talks about it in hardwiring happiness.

Rick Hansen.

Rick Hansen, that's right. He talks about if you, brains are like Teflon for good news and like Velcro for bad news, which is just a trait of, you know, an evolutionary trait of having to survive. The stakes are just not very high for missing out on some for missing a positive, but they're really high if you miss a threat. And so we've developed this keen attentional cycling to constantly scan our environment for threat. So that's a valuable trait to have.

It keeps us alive. But the downside of it is if we're not intentional about it, we can miss the positives. And so what he says is if you will cherish or focus on or kind of savor, so to speak, something positive that happened for twelve seconds, that's enough time for your brain to Encode. Take that in and encode it into the memory engrams in your hippocampus so that you can recall that positive thing. I think it's a really important practice to notice the positive things about people who are important to us, about our job or our, you know, our work or our country or whatever.

Because when things go wrong, which inevitably happens at some point, if you have if all you can remember is the easily remembered difficult points, then our brains are looking for patterns all the time. And it might go about seeking evidence to support some conclusion we've drawn in a bad moment versus if you've made a point of noticing the positives and shifting attention to the positives and taking them in. You have that to draw on to bring yourself back from a negative conclusion. And I think that comes in really handy especially if you're going through a tough time and, you know, in whether it be in a relationship or like a tough market or what have you. You know what my high was this week?

Well, had a couple of highs. I had a really great conversation with my with one of my sisters and my other the three of us, the three sisters, we went to the big oncology appointment with our dad slash stepdad this week. And even though that was a really hard appointment, being in it together with them made it. I just feel like you can do anything if you got sisters with you. But there was a really cool moment this week.

I was in the middle of a tense workday, and I don't I don't remember what meeting I was in, but it was some meeting where I was probably I probably had a very stern look on my face or some complicated problem I was trying to solve. And I got this text from you. It was pretty flirty.

What did it say?

Do you want me to say it on here? But it just

Did it have any emojis?

Manual, you can't you can take all of that out. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Not not acceptable.

I think this that's perfect. People get a sense of our

No.

True relationship.

Not happening. They don't need to know all that.

Okay.

Do you know what my low was? It was your low too. Your real low.

Let's hear it. Okay. Let's talk about it.

So there was there was layers to it. It unfolded all day yesterday. But we went to that oncology appointment. And, by the way, Carl has given me permission to talk about this on here. But, otherwise, I wouldn't be doing it.

But we went to the oncology appointment, and we knew it was going to be it was it's the appointment where they go, alright. Here's the here's the pathology from the brain tumor resection, and here's what you can expect. And the doctor, by the way, did a phenomenal job. You can tell that she's trained for this, and she's had a lot of practice. And she was so good.

So shout out to the professionals out there who do very difficult work. So she had the talk with my parents and with us about what we can expect. And I knew it was gonna be I knew it was gonna be hard, but I just wasn't prepared for the prognosis of three to six months. Mhmm. And my I had a physical reaction in that moment, but I had to stay cool.

He hadn't going in, he had told us he didn't wanna didn't want to do chemo and radiation.

Mhmm.

Just didn't wanna go through that. But we had we had a good talk through it, and she said, you know, you've got three to six months unless you'll do treatment. And if you will, we we might be able to get you one to two years. So that's obviously pretty compelling. We also talked through what the treatment would look like, and it's gonna be hard on him, but I think it's manageable enough that he agreed to try.

So, know, his attitude's been remarkable, and he's, you know, he's a fighter. And he's like, yeah, I wanna fight. I wanna try. So we're gonna try. But the part that was probably where I don't think it set in much.

Well, it definitely, like, I mean, I was processing it in real time, but I was being there for him in that moment. The part that was probably the lowest low of all of that unfolding was when I came home and was telling you.

Mhmm.

And I didn't need to be strong for him as I process so as I processed it out loud through telling you and we cried together, that was probably the moment where it really, really sunk in and I started to kind of face and think about what's ahead.

Much shorter runway than I think any of us were expecting. First symptoms.

September. September. September.

He had numbness.

September.

In his arm, in his hand.

Mhmm. Had just gotten back from a cruise.

That's right.

And said in his he had some numbness in his arm. So he went into the doctor or the Instacare and they sent him to the ER and they did an MRI and said, uh-oh, There's a mass on your brain. And so then they they had decided to let it go.

They wanted to see if it was gonna grow if it was growing.

They didn't wanna biopsy it right then because it was in a delicate part of the brain, and that presented a lot of risks to biopsy it. So they wanted to give it a month and see if it would grow or start to resolve itself because they weren't sure if it was like a brain bleed or a tumor. And when they did the second MRI a little over a month later, it it had grown a lot. So they knew.

So It they was primary brain cancer Yeah. Glioblastoma.

Immediately scheduled the resection and had a great outcome in the surgery itself, which is great. But it's the most aggressive form of brain cancer, and it's already just two weeks post op from the surgery, it's already growing back. So it sucks.

Yeah. Yeah.

I gotta tell you though, his mental approach to the work of what this is is incredible. And the family, and the way everybody has just very quickly understood and organized priorities and stepped up and done all the things that are needed. There's a lot of logistics around something like this. And everybody's just unselfishly, unerringly really stepped in and been amazing.

He has done a phenomenal job his entire life of protecting his attitude. He he's constantly consuming

Personal development, professional development books.

He is one of the most faith filled individuals I know, and everything else in his life is centered around family. And so it has been incredible to watch how he's navigated this. I mean, this is some really tough news to get so quickly in life.

And he was cracking jokes in the appointment. I I love it because I have a as you know, kind of a morbid sense. Like, when I was well, I have a very juvenile sense of humor as it is. But when I'm dealing with something really hard, I kind of have a morbid way of coping.

Mhmm.

Yeah. So I love that about him. I relate to it.

He's he's he's one of a kind.

Yeah. He is. We were talking about all the things that are are needed and what we were gonna do and the thing. And he's having a hard time accepting the amount of help he needs to accept. But the one that he got excited about, was like, hey.

I mean, look, if you just wanna go grab some lunch or play cards, he he just lit up. He's like, yeah. Let's play cards. What's one small quiet act of love from this week that stayed with you?

One

Don't breathe in the microphone. Small. You're being annoying.

You know, you have been extra lovey dovey this week. It reassures me that you like me, you love me.

Always affectionate.

You are. Always. But, I mean, has this week been a little bit different? Mhmm. Intentionally?

Not intentionally.

You got the hormones going on?

That could be it. That could be it.

You got the libido jump?

Okay. I had to look it up.

Is it real? Yep.

I I had to ask the internet because I didn't know what the heck. But, and I shared this with my sister because this is important information for women to understand. It said that while the general trend is downward, hormonally speaking, that what what's problematic and difficult, before you get to the other side is that it's like a wild unpredictable roller coaster. And that the highs and lows, the highs are such that you have more hormones than at any other time in your adult life. So they'll spike wildly and then be dead the next month.

So it's a bit of a wild ride.

Uh-huh.

That's probably behind some of it.

Interesting.

And also, I mean, was a wasn't a bad week, but it was a trying week. There was a lot to do. A lot to process. A lot to navigate. A lot to handle.

So I don't know. That's how I was coping maybe. I don't know.

Okay.

If Moondance teaches anything or just taught me anything from chilling and listening to that vinyl. It's to slow down long enough to feel life. So what's one moment this week that you want to savor and take with you?

I think I'm going to remember last night you coming home after having gone to the oncology appointment yesterday with the family, having to go back to work, and I caught you on the phone right when you got back to work. And I got a very good sense of, like, how fragile you were emotionally with the news, and you were trying to manage that, obviously, being back at work. So then I gave you your space for the rest of the day. You went, put your head down, got a ton of stuff done on a Friday. And then when you finally were able to come home and share what had happened, I just I felt like it was, like, a an important moment in our in our family's history, our family, and and and just our experience as a couple.

Something that's hard like that that is emotional. But when you do, it's, I mean, it just kinda feels like time slows down.

Yeah. That's the moment I was thinking of. Because you're not the most emotive No. Of people. But as you were listening to me, I could tell the impact because while your face was placid, a tear just ran down your face.

And, yeah. That's a moment that I think I'll take with me forever.

Tough news.

Yeah. Yeah. I thought we had more time. I mean, was either way I knew it was not enough time and gonna be hard but I didn't expect to hear three to six months. Again in the in the oncology appointment was telling the doctor how he didn't want to talk about it when he first found out.

He's like and Monica asked me to just, she's like okay we don't have to talk about it just come over and we'll just hang out. He's like and then we talked about all of it. And he said, and he recounted again, you know, she's she just how did they

say how they

Well, she's

cut open the skin and then they make marks and drill holes and cut the skull out. Then But the way he he did they slice into the dura mater and then they peel it back and

I did go through all of

that with You went step by step.

I did. But he he told her, he's like, she she has this thing where watched all these brain surgeries and her husband was like, no, don't do it. And he just said, that walk through made him feel so much better about all of it. He's like, it just normalized it for me and helped me to have something concrete to walk into the unknown with. With a little bit of known and the plan.

And he just, I've heard him tell that story so many times. But just to your point about knowing how something works, I think that's why we

It removes uncertainty.

Yeah. It just in in in a scary, completely out of your control situation, if you can bring us some semblance of control. I think that's why superstitions work or are so appealing. I don't if they don't work, but they, you know, they're they they help people because it in in a high stakes situation where you don't have a lot of control, a superstition makes you feel like you have some semblance of control. Really, none of us has a whole lot of control over much, but we like to feel like we do.

Mhmm. Well, may your coffee be strong and your conversation stronger.

That's it. We're done.

And if you wanna start 2026 with clarity and intention, you can join us on January 2 for our free goal setting session. It's one hour. It's a great group, and you can go into the new year with a clear vision for your year.

Yeah. We'll put the link for registration on our Instagram page

K.

In the bio so you can register there. And, yeah, hope to see you there.

It not really a New Year's resolution type of things. More just like, let's reflect on the year we've just had. Let's think about the year ahead. You know, get aligned, grounded, set some set some objectives for the year. I always love that time of year, and I like the way you facilitate it.

Thanks. I'm excited for The way that we have learned to do goal setting, it's more about awareness. Like we use that wheel of life and it segments out your life into eight different kind of buckets. And through the exercise, you get to analyze your perceived satisfaction.

With the various areas of life.

Right. Goal setting in that way is important, but I think it's more important to do it with others. If for nothing else, a level of accountability.

Yes. There's definitely a level of, like, somebody else seeing sharing your goals

Right.

Is a is a huge impact makes a huge impact on whether or not you'll actually see it through. That account accountability is great. But I also think that the shared humanity of realizing everybody's somewhere trying to go somewhere else or dealing with something or desiring something and that humans just need connection and that's a fun way to facilitate connection. But I always love the part that you're talking about with that goal setting exercise where you you kind of answer questions and you have this wheel and then you kind of zoom out and look at it. And I always feel like that moment where you you choose an area to focus on and you talk about what would take it from here to there, it's always interesting that decision point of do I lean into the areas that are low?

Or do I lean into what's going well? Or both. You know, and what do I, you know, what do you do first? What do you do second? What's the next?

The most important step a man can take is the next one. But also there's this interesting concept of balance, like, is balance what we want? Do we, maybe it is, but I don't know that anything extraordinary really comes out of balance. I've taken more of an approach, and I know you have as well, but I think you've mostly supported me through my crazy sprints. But I've kind of just communicated, alright, I'm gonna lean in in this particular area for a while because I see an opportunity, and I'm gonna go after something, and so I'll communicate with you, hey, here's a season I'm gonna come purposely out of balance in these other areas.

I'm gonna lean in over here. Which is a lot easier to do with autonomy when the kids are out of the house, but when they were younger, we were out of balance in support of them. Like we laid it all out on the line especially through the years where they were pursuing college scholarships, you know, and and athletic and academic pursuits that were highly competitive. And so we really leaned into that and let go of some other things. And then the season changed.

But I guess what I'm saying is there's seasonality, there's opportunities that you may just kinda let another area be for a while.

Yeah. I don't think we've I think we have, for a long time, have realized that work life balance is not a real thing. It's it's it's selfish.

There's work and then there's life. There's life.

How do they work together? How do they how do they blend and weave together in a way that feels right to you. And so to your point, we have we have done that. We have worked for that. You said that about the kids, and we were out of balance.

I I totally believe we were out of balance early on. Knowing what we know today, would you do it different?

I can't look back at there are, like, things, you know, things I've said or things I've done where I'm like, what an idiot. I would do that differently. But big life choices, it's hard to say I would change any of it because even the ones that were ultimately pretty moronic, they still led somewhere that brought us here. Mhmm. And I wouldn't I don't I wouldn't risk changing anything that would, like, mess up where what life is today.

It's too good.

Life is too good. You learn so much through the crap. So easy to say on the other side of it, but I just think there's so much value in failure and, trials. And so I don't want them all the time. But for example, another time we were way out of balance was respectively over the last eight years between us, we've gotten four degrees.

And so while working and supporting our kids through their degrees, etcetera. And so, like, I remember when I was in my last year doing two degrees at one time, I took on a new job in a new new field doing a totally new role because I was asked to come and do something I'd never done before. And I was traveling to India and taking finals twice has happened. I don't know why I wasn't smart enough to avoid this, but twice it happened where I was taking finals during a layover in Paris coming home from one going to India and one coming home from India. There's nothing rational and reasonable about that, but we just I I knew I was gonna push hard for a a a season to accomplish something, and I'd rest later.

Have you rested yet? Do you already have designs on 2026?

Besides finishing this house and making it awesome?

That's a pretty big goal.

But,

yeah, besides that?

Yeah. I I don't and I haven't really, like, thought about it in a concrete way. There's definitely some some headings that I've already started that will continue through 2026 professionally, and I I was I've had the goal for quite a while now. I used to, as you did, run a lot. I used to go to yoga a lot, and the last several years have been like one major, major life change after another.

And I've just fallen out of the rhythm of, you know, regular, workouts and feeling good in that way. And I've been able to kind of find a groove the last couple weeks and just make such a difference in my how I feel and my mood. And so I think that's gonna be a a big goal is just make returning to that lifestyle of regular physical fitness. I think that's helpful, especially for those of you in your forties and fifties, you know, perimenopause is a bitch. So I think it helps with that.

Amen. Yeah.

You said that like you have some experience living with someone going through perimenopause. Perimenopause. That's weird.

So weird. K. Well, good job, Monica.

Good job, Brad.

Another one in the books.

See you next week.

If you wanna start 2026 with clarity and intention, join us on January 2 for a free goal setting session. Hope to see you there.