Monday, November 08, 2004

Life ReDesign

Sometimes I waste time thinking about what I would have designed into my life if I had started out with a bit of foresight. Nothing major--I'm not talking about warping into some weird life that doesn't resemble mine, because I have a good life and I'm quite happy with it. All the same, sometimes I find that I'm confronting a task and that my skill set doesn't quite measure up, and I think about when I could have possibly gotten the training I would need to attack said tasks head on. The skill set most often popping up as deficient is my skill with computers.

Now I'm not a complete idiot. I am a beast on Word and I'm darned good with Excel, and I make the meanest PowerPoint presentation you've ever seen. I love to play around on Illustrator and Photoshop, and I've even created (rudimentary) classroom materials with them. It's all kind of fun, because I don't know computers very well and so I can believe that computers inhabit a world with order where the right formula can get you what you want every time. It is this idealism that sinks my soul when I come up against a task that I want to figure out for myself but that just doesn't make sense, especially if it's something frivolous that I really could do myself but I just think it would be fun to make a bit fancier.
Or like blogging for instance. I would love to know enough to widen the column of writing on this page just a bit more. Why? No reason besides the fact that I think it would look better. Or I would love to be able to put together a cool web page, but I honestly don't have the skill, especially because I would want it to look good, not amateurish.
So should I ever come up with the ability to go back in time knowing what I know now, I wonder if I wouldn't make another choice--say web design--instead of what I do now. Or somehow in addition to what I do now.
It just would be kind of cool to understand better this cute little box I sit in front of every chance I get.

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