Ever wish you had taken computer courses before becoming a blogger? Perhaps you did just that.
But I, I whose ignorance assured her that she who had to be dragged into the computer age from her trusty typewriter could throw herself headlong into the hypnotizing world of blogging, went ahead, understanding absolutely nothing about computers.
I believe in doing things too soon. In striking before the iron is hot, in leaping before one has looked, in loving before one has been introduced.
Beverley Nichols in Down the Garden Path
Are you like that about a passion? And do you have your blogging degree in passion only or in a tech education?
And if you answer "in passion" do you ever suffer a crise de nerfs when technology comes crashing down around you as it did on me recently?
What do you do about it, pray tell?
Here's how I handled my own crise de nerfs , my faithful, patient friends. That is, after I had taken hours and hours of help out of my son's life, by phone and by text, to fix the major problems.
Every day after trying to fix the rest of my computer problems I would run out of the office that I grandly call My Writing Room and grab one of these books to take to my bedroom reading chair.
I believe that these books I ordered one at a time during January and thus far in February have been sent to me by the Wise Physician who knew so well what I would need during the attack on my nerves by the evil god of technology (and yes, I could name him here but won't), along with his minions Pop-Up-Ads and My-Computer-Keys-Are-Stuck-in-Molasses.
"How slow can I go?
Very Very S.....L....O....W."
And there was their pal HaHaHa who signed me out of everything I had signed into for years and then threw away forgotten passwords set eons ago.
And lest I forget another wannabe kingpin, Mr. Scrolling? That function became a test, no, a con-test to see how much time could pass before either the icon stopped spinning or my head did.
"I can't do this, it's driving me crazy," I screeched to BreeBree and James Mason as I stormed away from my desk and out of the room of torture that it sits in.
And then I sought an antidote. Either I could climb the walls or eat Rocky Road ice cream or grab one of these old four books, House & Garden's Guide to Interior Decoration.
Page by page I disappeared into the world of homes of the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.
Each time I was transported so fully to homes of those years that no LSD trip of the 1960s, if I had ever been someone who did such a thing, could possibly have offered as much mind-blowing happy feelings, such heart's and mind's ease as these four books offered.
I studied pages on furniture styles and table setting and terraces and it became as real to me as if I were personally expecting the garden club women to luncheon before showing them around my own Eden.
And at last I would emerge from that world into my own, a far gentler woman.
And instead of being the woman whose chin is dragging the ground like this poor soul who can so easily become my alter ego...
Instead of her, I would become more like my other more desired alter ego....
Thankfully, all at last seems well here in my blogging world, after the mysterious, complicated technical procedure called "Restart Computer" took place.
Who knew?
Now, dear reader, what turns you from a sad frantic maniac into a serene goddess of the hearth? Would you share a secret cure with us?
And what is it that brings on your own crise de nerfs?
[No, I don't speak French. I'm betting that phrase has stayed in my mind from an old Edith Wharton novel.]
