I have lapsed. I’m a sinner. I had promised myself, after an 18 month abstention from marijuana, that I would only smoke when preparing to enter a social situation. Never at home facing frustration or personal problems. I took a drag of marijuana joint two hours ago at home in the midst of a jiving roller-coster whirlwind of confusion and frustration. When in moments it began to affect me , the whirlwind turned into a phantasmagoric nightmare. I am exaggerating. But my ability to cope with ‘unknowns’ or what appears as ‘unknowns’, in dealing with proprietary software, and where user name and passwords are perfunctorily needed, where files need transfer and not permitted because of old operating systems in the ever upgrading ‘file-sharing’ and ‘screen-saving’ utilities. I don’t want to go on describing this rabbit-hole morass this old person is trying to cope with; this 86 year old raised in the 40 and 50s, 1940s and 50s, not to mention 1930s Europe. 1933. Five years before Kristallnacht as the Nationalist Socialist Workers Party slowly but persistently acquired political and legislative power (pretty much like now with letting Trump nearly get away with every transgression of the constitution including treason, bribery, obstruction and lies.)
It’s amazing how the American societal polarity has turned into another nightmare – agrarian vs urban (hicks vs city), highschool vs university educated, the ‘real down-to-earth’ vs the intellectual, the coasts vs mid-Western, the real vs the nerd, the amoral thieves vs the out-of-touch deep state morals.
So I’ve been coping for five hours with trying to upgrade from a self-publishing app called QuarkXPress. My version is a 3rd party version and therefore not eligible for paid tech service. So i let my think that I so deeply depended on this tool, the beauty and creativity of this app’s capabilities, that it was worth upgrading to hopefully have full functioning and support instead of limited functions and occasional glitches. Of course, I’m sorry to say, that that also meant having to cope with Indian support technician accents, their quick speaking, their melodic mouthing of English, and I, who have some hearing loss in the higher pitches, which is actually where much clarification comes in the consonants of speech, the Ts Ds Ss Gs, whatever, am further disadvantages in my comprehension, having to continually ask: “Please slow down. Please raise volume. I’m an old person of slower mental functions.” Not to mention the peculiarities and specificities of the wide world web. The WWW and all its protocols and barrage of advertising distractions.
So I was increasingly frustrated by those partial communications and that may also have lead me to make that foolish decision to upgrade especially when discounts and perks if committing now are offered. When I had transferred the money and left to dangle in space with the unresolved technical problems that lead to my phonecall 60 minutes earlier, and left to explore on my own the upgraded application, I quickly realized now that the way I’ve had blundered into that app, as far as ten years ago, has probably messed without properly creating a foundation for the self Publishing book project – where all the decisions about Font, Size, Page Configuration, Page Numbering, Paragraph and Sentence Parameters, etc had to be made in advance. I know, being manual-adverse, I blundered self-learningly into the first project and then, supposedly, simply duplicated that ‘shaky foundation’ when replicating it for the next projects. So if I originally made blunders, they would continue to live in the following twenty or more book projects that I have managed to accomplish with work-arounds and head-scratching and crashes etc. So the faults in the app are my faults likely. And most of all, upgrading would not solve the problems that required work-arounds. I needed to go back to basics. But I’m an old person in a hurry. I have limited time. Too many projects. So I am, I know, shooting myself in the foot, not stopping to breathe.
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