Day 145: Grace's Musings

When Karen asked me to be one of her guest bloggers while she enjoyed a little break in Hawaii (wish I was there too) I was so excited!! Obviously I know how important this blog site & experiment is to my dearest friend & it kinda felt as though I was entrusted to caring for her baby for a day. Of course my head swelled with thoughts of being special enough to be invited to help that I didn’t even think twice before accepting. However, now on this first day of the guest bloggers I am filled with fear, anxiety & yes, even dread. Why on earth did I say yes? Apart from the fact that I am without question technically illiterate what on earth could I find interesting enough to write about? How could I be as witty, enlightening, funny or as brilliant as my friend, or the other guests? What if I can’t get the technical bit to work? The computer, the Internet, the pictures … ahhh what have I done to myself and to Karen’s amazing blog site? How could I have possibly agreed to something that could so easily be a complete disaster, and just to make matters worse I have no clue about blogs! I didn’t even know the term until about 12 months ago when I was in LA & enjoying an afternoon with K & George when he mentioned reading a fantastic blog entry. Of course I didn’t initially admit to my ignorance but after a while of not understanding their conversation I sheepishly asked … what’s a blog? They explained that it was a term referring to online journaling that was huge amongst Internet users and covered almost every topic imaginable.

Now I should explain that when I started high school in 1978 (an all girls Catholic convent, yes K would say that explains a lot) my desk was wooden and still had a hole on the right side that originally held an inkpot … I swear that’s true! The chair was attached to the desk, you know an all in one piece, not the best for the fuller figured girls in our class, and the top of the desk lifted up so that you could store all the schooling essentials underneath - pencil’s (I didn’t have an ink pen until year 10), rubbers (K & I had many funny experience’s of the fact that although English is the primary language in Ireland, Australia & the US it doesn’t always equate to the same translation. We discovered this about erasers at an office depot once, she was wandering through the paper section when I called out loudly – “do you need any rubbers?”), paper & various textbooks. In fact I think these desks are represented in the original “Goodbye Mr. Chips” (great old flick made in the late 1930’s, long before “Good Will Hunting”, “Dangerous Minds” or “Mr. Holland’s Opus”). Gosh I wish that I still had that desk today, it had carvings from girls indoctrinated decades before me.

Anyway, the point is that even in the late 70’s my school experience was just a little behind the times. I remember my first type writer, I was so excited to have one though my parents picked it up at a local school fete (the equivalent of a school fair, see what I mean about translations) it was produced before the arc and didn’t have any replacement tape, you can imagine how quickly my excitement turned to frustration. I managed to graduate to an electronic typewriter during my first year at University in 1983 (I dropped out of three separate degrees before finally finishing a fourth when I was 30 some 14 years later, yes I did start young) it even had an automatic erase button which I managed to break a month after purchase clearly from overuse. Thankfully Liquid Paper had been invented (White Out) but it’s hard to type a 5000 word paper with white stuff stuck to every key. I didn’t buy my first IBM computer until I was in my early-20’s and could never work out how to use it, all those F buttons, floppy disks, word perfect - it was as difficult to master as learning French (after 4 years at school all I managed was a sad bastardization of “parlez vous Francias” with a strong Australian/Irish accent. It didn’t help that my French teacher for three of those four years was a tiny Vietnamese nun whose English we could barely understand and every year she fell for the same juvenile tricks of us swapping desks, names and test answers. Though I did discover during those years of learning French that I apparently have a natural ability to roll my tongue, which has come into excellent use over the years). There were at least four parts to this computing antiquity including a screen, keyboard, various cables and a flat box that you inserted the numerous disks before ever getting anything that remotely resembled a legible word or two on screen. I eventually gave up trying to use it and left it to gather dust for many years before I finally donated it back to my old high school; I figured it was only fair to participate in assisting them to get up with the times.

My first experience of email was in 1995, which coincided with a job promotion. Fortunately as part of the new job role I had an assistant who was a computer whiz, so as embarrassing as it is to admit this today I hand wrote all my computer based responses and gave them to her so that she would arrange for them to get to were they needed in cyberspace. When I came to LA in 1997 it was the person who introduced me to Karen that finally forced me to have an email address and to overcome my fear of computers … it was an enlightening experience & one that I can’t even imagine not having access to now.

However, the point of this long missive is that although I can now use a computer with a little more competence I still harbor a deep fear of moving outside my comfort zone to learn a new computer orientated skill, such as writing a blog entry. My fear is so deep that last night I tossed & turned for hours dreaming about loosing a bunch of important papers, trying to put together a broken computer and letting down my dearest friend.

Hopefully I will manage to get it all together and I apologize to all in advance for boring the living crap out of you with my sad tale of retarded computer and internet skills. The anxiety attached to all of this writing is hard enough so there will be no amazing pictures (though I wish I had one of my old school desk) the thoughts of attempting that are just too overwhelming. If I manage to get it all together without calling George in tears begging for his assistance it will be a miracle.

Good luck to all the other guests, I look forward to reading your entries through the week.
Love Grace