I played around with other WordPress themes yesterday and managed to completely misplace the one I started with. Gone. The sidebar with personal and site information now appears way down at the bottom of this page. That is not convenient. I could pay the “Happiness Engineers” to help me, but I am so offended by that title (not to mention the cost) that I will put up with this ugliness. [Why did I ever think it was a good idea to leave Blogspot?] I do not like this layout, but it’s the best I can do.

Discuss.

[NOTE: Managed to find a “theme” with the sidebar, but now the header photos do not show on the home page and are overlaid on their own page. Better, though. imo. Yours?]

Better news is that I have allowed Apple to update my software—something I resisted for so many years with a previous laptop that when it was nine years old it could not talk to its necessary replacement. You may note that I am generally not a fan of new-and-improved-to-serve-you-better.” Usually that is code for “we’ve-figured-out-how-to-make-this-cheaper-and-more-convenient-for-us.” It means there is a new wrinkle in software that requires a learning curve. But newest update returned that opening tone familiar to Macs-users for nearly thirty years. I missed it.

Obviously, I am not opposed to learning. It was, after all, my profession for most of my life. Computers, however, are mere tools, not my way of life. Technology should be useful, not an obscure and semi-secret language. When I was teaching the Yearbook classes, my students learned to use Adobe PageMaker. We were all good at computer layout, though I will say that most of my best tricks came from students rather than vice versa. One exception was from my first year doing Yearbook. We were using Word to generate copy that had to be pasted onto paper page layouts. We wanted a two+ column layout—each page divided vertically into two wide and one narrow column, and we wanted to print off a page with all the text already in the proper place. At the time, Word could not create columns of uneven width (later it could). I lay awake one night and figured out how to accomplish this. I went in the next day, sat down at our one computer and showed my Editor. “How did you figure that out?” she wanted to know. It was one of my proudest moments: I’d figured out in the dark. That was way back in 1990. Paste-up was the way yearbook pages were done. It was the way newspapers all over the world were being done. (The Oregonian was way ahead of the curve in using Macs and massive printers to create more dynamic layout.) Soon after that, we shifted to PageMaker which gave us all sorts of additional options, then to a digital layout, from fall to spring delivery, and had covers that broke ground and won awards. We met our deadlines. In twelve years and four dozen deadlines, we missed a deadline by a day twice. Each time we were early with the next one. I liked having deadlines. I have set them for myself ever since.

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I like knowing what is expected of me. I appreciate stability. But I am what is called a “creative” and like pushing boundaries, shifting things around. The parents of former students commissioned a frog carved from Alaska yellow cedar—a frog because they took me for a pot-stirrer rather than an oil-on-troubled-waters person.

They were right about that. I like change. I can instigate change. I can even endure changes I do not like. But I also like figuring things out, knowing how to control the immediate aspects of my tasks, relying on tools to do their job instead of becoming obstacles to where I want to go. I want the machinery to work as expected. I want to rely on what feels normal.

So how to get back to what people insist on calling “normal”?

Are we sure we know what normal is anymore? Four years of that horrible being masquerading as a human in charge, and the pandemic? I’m not sure there will ever be normal again for some people. There are some who thrive on chaos. Loki comes to mind. There are those who want no change at all. But now feels like a major shift for those of us who have been paying attention. On a personal level, we have had people stay the night in our home and more who shared meals with us, but we also have friends who are still sanitizing their groceries.

Crime is down overall, but violent crime is up in the U.S., murder is up, overdose deaths are up 30%. The Pacific NW is in drought. Tornados. Fires. Mass shootings. One political party has decided the only way to gain and hold power is to prevent the rest of us from voting. They are willing to do that.

This is not the country I thought I knew. This is not normal.

Maybe it’s time to rethink normal and what we hope will be normal. That’s going to take some time.

In the mean time, I feel myself drifting. I never found a reliable peer group as a writer, but I have friends through writing and through our previous involvement showing and running Afghan Hounds. Other old friends are mostly from high school. It feels muddled; my thinking feels muddy. Aging or merely out of practice? It is disconcerting. Retirement in 2019 was supposed to be wonderful, and while I miss some teachers, I had little in common with most of them. As one example, throughout my years teaching in the local high school, nearly all other teachers enjoyed high school when they were young and had played sports. Many of my teaching peers were teaching because their own high school days were literally the “best years” of their lives. They wanted to hang on to that teenage glory. It is the source of one of those lies we tell teenagers: Enjoy yourself now because these are the best years of your life!

What a terrible thing to tell a high school student. Your life is all downhill from here. Do these people even remember high school? Because, honestly, if your best years happened when you were in high school, you are in a minority. Most of us were struggling about what it would mean to be grown, to take responsibility that no one was quite willing to hand us but also expected us to be gracious in accepting… eventually. Most of us suffered through. And most of us had a real life after high school. We met people, went places, developed relationships, and thought great thoughts. We did things. We made mistakes. We cried, but we also laughed and learned and set goals. Life for most of us is nothing like the misery we endured when we were seventeen.

All of this to say that it isn’t the adults I miss from teaching. I miss students. I understood my relationship to them.

Increasingly, I recognize how awkward I am talking to people. Ordinary conversation has been so rare for the past sixteen months that I am not sure I know how to do it anymore. (To be painfully honest, I was faking it at the best of times.) I talk to Gary, of course. I have brief phone conversations with our older son. Friends in Alberta call sometimes on Sunday evenings. That’s mostly it. I was never comfortable in social situations, but now I seem to have forgotten how to manage.

And then there is the layout here which is still not doing what I want it to. I have scrolled through options, made improvements, and will likely do that again, but I want it both “free” and a one+ layout (see above). Despite coming back to revise both text and layout, several times, it’s not quite where I want it. But curiouser and curiouser.

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