Guys, before I get to writing this I need to tell you that I’ve hit upon a really weird time in my blogging career in that I’m keeping this little notebook of ideas for future blog posts, and I’m really excited because I feel like I am FINALLY planning ahead like an adult and I’ll never run out of blog fodder, but then I feel like I probably just jinxed myself and so I take it back.
Anyway, the problem with keeping this little notebook is two-fold:
1. I have to remember to keep the notebook on my person and, for someone who hates to carry a purse (in spite of the 40 I own) this is a struggle. My lady office-wear rarely has pockets. This is further made an issue by the proliferation of post-it notes on and around anywhere you might find me for any length of time. I currently have 2 separate post-it notes with ideas scrawled on them on my desk. Not to mention the random word file I just found on my work laptop titled “too much background” (which isn’t even about Spencer!). I’ve even emailed myself strange one-liner emails with no title. I’m going to lose all kinds of ideas operating like this. I will never be as smart as Dahl, what with writing his idea for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on the dust on the hood of his car. (Or was that The Glass Elevator?)
2. I have the handwriting of a serial killer and a strange penchant for unreliable, inconsistent shorthand which means that months from now I will open the notebook and find something like, “Evil Gorilla Monkey Accountant” and have no idea what I was supposed to write about. (FYI, that’s not an actual topic I have written down, I don’t want to blow any of the topics I have stored up by tipping my hand.)
Anyway, this post is really just an expansion on my last past in a way. See, I acquired the Thesis Theme for the blog, because I was told that it’s very “flexible,” and “adaptable,” and the “easiest” way to make my blog look all spiffy and professional and not like every other blog run on WordPress ever written. What everyone failed to mention was that I would need to know how to do more with html and css than, say, make something bold in order to change the font size on my side bar and get rid of those fucking archive blurbs at the bottom of the page. In fact, I needed a tutorial to get Mr. Turtle back as a header! And I had to actually upload it to our web space and find a url that wasn’t the url that I was used to finding and… well, Spencer intervened on that one before my head exploded. (And then he went and got me some orange juice so that I could make myself a screwdriver and temporarily forget it ever happened.)
Today, while eating my salad at lunch, I started looking online at tutorials, thinking that, surely, someone somewhere on the internet would understand that not everyone who writes a blog has a degree in computer science (is it even called that anymore?) and that some of us were mere mortal creative writing majors. It turns out that isn’t so. And all of the things on the internet titled “Thesis Tutorial” are actually written in ancient Greek. I am appalled.
I messaged my BFF, Ben, and essentially said as much. Ben actually works as a sort of code monkey (or something… he does something with computers that’s more advanced than the glorified pointing and clicking I do) and he graciously asked if I needed help. I said yes, and that I hope this little adventure works out better than when he tried to teach me geometry in the 10th grade. The conversation then took a turn for the vaguely ugly as there was a pregnant pause in the chat window and he responded with this:
“Oh, you want me to teach you? I could… teach you… or I could just do it.”
It was at that moment that I realized my best friend would rather spend a few hours of his time designing my blog than spend days answering my progressively frantic questions as I pointed, clicked, and typed my way to destroying my blog entirely.
You see, I am not a good student. I’m smart. I catch onto most things quickly (math is not most things). But, I am a TERRIBLE student. I have a short attention span (the possibility that I have ADHD has been raised on more than one occasion by more than one person), and I am very good at derailing people. (Coincidentally, this is actually why I’m a good sales person – I can distract anyone into doing anything and make them think it was their idea.) This why when Ben tried to teach me about something having to do with angles, surface area, and … you know what? I’m not even going to pretend to know because I was really lucky to get a C in geometry that last quarter, because while Ben was holding his hands in an angle and bobbing his head between his fingers to reference that space up at the top (whatever that is), I was thinking that we should probably get on the phone with Brett Shaw (a boy we both thought was pretty adorable) and invite him over to watch MTV or Rescue Rangers or maybe get something to drink from downstairs… anything but learn whatever the point of a Proof was.
FYI: There is no point to geometric proofs. At some point I will make it back to my high school for a reunion just to tell Mrs. Delvecchio that not once, ever, in my life before or since that chapter and test have I ever used that information. Thank god I didn’t bother to learn it, that’s valuable space where I was able to store song lyrics and several movie lines.
The fact is that I have the attention span of a rabid squirrel on crack and no one should be forced to teach me anything. I should be forced to teach myself things using only books and schematics.
Anyway, Ben is busy and finishing up at his actual job so he can go back to school and get his masters in Theology and become a man of the cloth. I’m very appreciative that he’s offered to do this for me; he’s the best bestie a girl could ask for. (Also, this will fully pardon him from when he made me a 100% guarantee that if I asked Brett to the 8th grade dance he would say yes.) (Newsflash: he said no.) (It’s okay, Jimmy Wilkes asked me and we had a nice time.)
Because I have no real ending for this post – here is the full Mr. Turtle picture. I hate posts with no pictures. I figure you might, too.
