An Ewok at the Door

There's no other way to put it. Standing outside the front door, in a navy blue hoodie with a muffler wrapped around his face, our IT guy looks like an overgrown ewok. As unpleased as I am to see him - these website sessions are like learning Arabic from someone who thinks and speaks at the speed of light and assumes I can keep up - it still makes me smile.

I've never enjoyed having to do things I don't do well and combined with the fact that brilliant people have a knack for making me nervous, I find myself wanting to wish away the next couple of hours. Computer literacy has always intimidated the hell out of me and everything I've ever learned has been through trial and error or stubbornness and luck. Website design is hard and complex and in a language I can't make heads nor tails of. What is second nature to our IT guy might as well be Mandarin to me. Despite my having expressed these sentiments a dozen times, he waves my uncertainty away and assures me I'm one of his best students. I tell him I feel fortunate to get a word every now and then and he tells me I'm a natural and laughs. I am not especially reassured.

We muddle on for the remainder of the morning with me taking as many notes as I can and hoping they'll make some kind of sense when he's gone.

It strikes me as odd that once upon a time I loved to learn and now I find it an exhausting and nerve wracking experience. I wonder if it's not that my memory banks are full of trivia - a half dozen telephone numbers that mattered when I was ten, the piano lessons I took at eight, the lyrics to “Calendar Girl” by Neil Sedaka, “100 Pounds of Clay” by Clyde McPhatter or from when I was a little older, the complete score to “The Music Man”. All that is fresh and readily accessible but I can't remember three simple steps to add an image to a website unless I've written them down.