Torii Kiyomitsu 鳥居清満: Man Fitting Arrow to Bow
(Edo period, 1615-1868)

"I'm hope I'll be finished by sometime next week."

I've heard it claimed that none of us know how to use the many systems we rely upon. I might use five percent of our Subaru's features. Occasionally, I'll get in trouble and have to ask The Muse to look something up in the absurdly voluminous user manual, a volume within which I cannot successfully reference anything. Even my lawn mower, broken for three weeks, remains a cipher except for the narrowest of uses when mowing lawn. The many systems on my MacBook Air remain largely vaporware, for I might employ one percent of their capacity. Whenever I attempt to do anything there, I come close to the edge of my universe. I often enough fall over into Neverland.

Just this morning, trying to capture the illustration for this story, my usual museum browser refused to find anything. I typed in the search argument, and it replied that it found no matches, so I expanded the search, but still with no success. I finally searched for something so common it should have yielded dozens of hits, but still nothing. Occasionally, one of the museums will change something in their interface without telling anybody and the developer of the museum browser will have to go in and fiddle with some setting or other. I fell back into the sometimes reliable Google Image Search®. After a few iterations, I found a museum site where I could successfully search and find this image. I tried to save it to the usual folder, but when I opened the folder, it wasn't there. I tried to save the photo to the folder again and received a message that a file was already in the folder. I opened the folder and found no file of that name there. I finally saved the damned thing to another folder and then moved it to where I wanted it. I have no idea what made this image so complicated to save.

I try to be disciplined about where I save my files, but success in saving files often requires knowledge of future intentions. I rarely know when I'm saving something where or when I might use it again. It's usually unclassifiable at that moment. Any item might later become a member of some collection, but that association has yet to emerge from the ether, so wherever I might save the file won't be right in any longer term. When the future association finally emerges, I must find where I temporarily stashed the then-orphaned file. It would help if the search function for my file lists worked, but it has yet to. There's probably an undocumented trick that makes those searches work, but I don't know where to begin to look to find the instructions if they even exist. Many features of many systems exist only as Easter Egg functions that were never documented. Knowledge of their existence is spread exclusively by rumor, and you're apparently supposed to know instinctively how to operate them.

I began to add two folders to the shared project space two weeks ago but didn't have the proper permission then. Some time since permission was granted, though nobody remembers granting it, and nobody informed me of the change. I tried and surprisingly successfully added two folders. Then I went searching for the files I'd intended to store in there. I gave it a half hour before setting that daunting task aside for later. Later, I found one of the four files I was seeking but realized that it was in the wrong format, so I’ll need to export it from its native form into a more sharable one and then upload it into the proper folder and reconfigure it again for sharing. Should I need to edit the damned thing, I'll simply reverse the reconfiguration chain, downloading this time through stages to return it to its editable source. This should be simple, but it seems so damned complicated.

It quickly exhausts me to work so Aimlessly. I sometimes imagine I understand what I need to do to accomplish something, but the systems I employ always conspire with my lack of deep understanding to create another conundrum. I often catch myself taking a break in the middle of some attempt, during which I almost inevitably lose my way back into whatever I was trying. I start over a lot, tabula rasa. In this way, I usually fail to learn how to do anything. I start over clean the next time, baffled by the same conventions that baffled me the last dozen times I tried. I embarrass myself daily, hourly, admitting that I have not yet quite figured out how to accomplish something that initially seemed as though it might be straightforward. There is no forward, and there is no back; there's just an endless track producing no progress. It requires more courage than I sometimes possess to muster another attempt. After two weeks, I've almost successfully created and populated those two folders with six documents. I'm still searching for the sources and initiating the translations; then, I'll be facing the challenge of learning how to move the files between folders for final storage. This will doubtless require even more Aimlessly wandering. I hope I will be finished by sometime next week.   

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz