i can’t make an omelette without breaking my legs
My father told me today that a picture is worth a thousand words but experience is the best teacher of all.
I’ve always enjoyed the blessing of a modest aptitude for drawing and painting and have found it my most pleasant means of communication. My visual tendencies, at first thought, seem the primary way I’ve interfaced with the world and learned from it.
As a second choice, I’ve had a certain comfort in composing my thoughts and having the chance to review them in hind-sight on the written page. Unable to effectively bundle my ideas and eject them on the fly through my nervous hiation during live communication, I’ve enjoyed the hermetic pleasure of launching painstakingly and properly arranged messages in any easily found vessel destined for others outside of my little island.
However, the almighty force known as experience usually finds me punching doors, slapping computer monitors, stomping feet, kicking chairs, clenching fists and/or screaming into thin air asking myself what vexing, unholy force suffocates me from beyond with its back-magic hex of doom.
With help from my father’s understated aside and a bit of reflection, I may indeed have a deeper understanding of things that make me who I am, for better or worse.
So I must take a moment for a brief thank you to the world of computers and technology. Not to praise its ability to make life easier by advancing the ability to express myself visually and creatively. Nor do I wish to exalt the mighty progression of digital tools and “universal” communication which hone my rhetoric, specifically my written discourse.
I would, however, like to thank computers and technology (Windows Millenium Edition most specifically on this most recent occasion) for providing me with invaluable tools for building my mental fortitude in the face of numerous (countless?) setbacks and for providing a constant opportunity to test my ability to withstand random tragedies and press on in the face of seemingly endless and fickle torture. I imagine that without such character building exercises I would be profoundly lacking in genuine humanity and humility indeed. Patience is a virtue and is most certainly worth the seemingly evil, but supremely effective lesson that experience is sure to provide.
postscript:
I would like to suggest the hope that, at some point, certain exercises in my life might be streamlined and those more pleasurable, though certainly less effective, methods for learning and growing as a person might be concentrated upon more extensively than at present. Drawing, painting and writing may be well served by an exploration of the benefits of SuSE linux and a more efficient back up scheme. A certain Mr. Bentlage may be able to assist with this exploration as well as the proper methods of partitioning a hard drive and maintaining data. SEE ALSO: Cannon Ball Adderly Quintet – Walk Tall
Excelsior.
19 June 2002, 22:33 ::
commenting closed for this article
— sugar boots 2002-06-20 10:46 #
slave to the machine age.
— rmckaggis 2002-06-23 04:32 #