....in a word, frustration!!

"Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do." - Pope John XXIII

"People need trouble -- a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy." - William Faulkner

“To live for results would be to sentence myself to continuous frustration. My only sure reward is in my actions and not from them.” - Hugh Prather



Sorry, folks! It seems like I'm taking another hiatus, I suspect, but that's not true! It's my (fill-in-the-blank-with-a-really-nasty-adjective-here) computer that is causing me nothing but grief.

F'rinstance, I can't reach some of your sites (including yours, Matty). I keep getting the error page saying the page can't be found. I've tried countless times to leave comments on various blogs, and have been unable to (my computer either freezes, or the comment spins off into endless cyber-space somewhere!).

You'll notice the quotes above are hotlinks, but they've never been before. That's because it's the way they "copied over" from the site where I get the quotes, and I spent about an hour trying to figure a way to just make them like I always have. No luck.

You'll notice that my pretty little separator line of leaves isn't in this blog. I know I can just copy the code from an earleir blog and paste it here (or can I, given the quote problem?!!), but dammit, I shouldn't have to do that! Anytime I try to add a picture, I get the window that informs me that my image has been successfully added, and as soon as I click "done" it'll be added to my blog. Problem is, the blue word "Done" that I need to click on never shows up, so all I can do is close that window without uploading the pic. AAAARRRRGGGHHH!

I'm in the "compose" window now, and normally I capitalize and italicize the quotes. Can no do today. You see, there's an information bubble sitting over top of the "italic" and "bold" buttons, telling me that Blogger now saves drafts automatically. Sure, there's a little 'x' on the bubble, presumably to let me close it to get at what's underneath. Not so, it won't close.

When I try to "save Now" a draft, in order to come back and finish it off later, it's nowhere to be found in my draft list when I come back later.

When I try to sign on, I always get a message saying a certain class is not supported. Bloger also tells me occasionally that my cookies are disabled, and then I immediately sign on a second time without changing anything, and it works fine.

Most things, I have to click on twice to activate them. i.e. the "run" arrow on a video clip, or the "add a comment" link on a blog.

All new windows (i.e. mail, internet, etc) that I open, open as windows that take up only about an eigth of the screen, and I always have to hit the "maximize" button. Didn't used to have to do that.

When I shut down at the end of the day, and I get the message "Windows is now shutting down...". Well, a lot of the time "uh-uh"! It just freezes. Ctl-Alt-Del does nothing, none of the function keys do anything. The only "cure" so far that I've found is to pull the plug, and I'm sure that's probably not too much good!

There are literally dozens of things I'd like to learn, and have been keeping a list, but I'm not much good at on-line help systems. I find them ambiguous, and they spin you off in dead-end searches unless you know exactly the problem you're trying to solve (and that's often the problem...you don't know, that's why you're in "help".!).

...and just out of curiosity, howcum I occasionally get replicate copies of pics which I've saved get automatically generated, and automatically named "copy of .....". Sometimes, they actually are a copy of the same picture on the same file, sometimes they're unique. Sometimes, it gets to be just too much for me to deal with!

As usual, I babble here, but I just wanted to let y'all know that I'm still here. I'm just temporarily (I hope) so far above my frustration level, that it's not worth the angst!

Whew! It's good to get that out!

(P.S. Mackey, special props for your blog of the 28th about not judging people. It is so hard to do, but it's the only thing that's going to work in the long run, if anything is. And you're also right in saying that sometimes, those folks want to tell their story. Many times, instead of handing a dollar to a panhandler or street person, I'll take them for lunch and a bit of a visit. Mostly I ask a few "prompting" questions, and then just listen; the stories usually start to flow. On a couple occasions, they were "ready enough" that I was able to take them into AADAC and hope that they could get started on a program. I guess what I'm trying to say is the same thing you say so well. Treat everyone with dignity and respect. You might not approve of a person's actions, so go ahead and judge the actions, but no one ever has the right to judge another person. Sure, we all do it, but with on-going reminders like yours, and as Red says in his comment, naive as it sounds you CAN (and I believe MUST) change the world. Your corner of it. Even if it's only one other person, and even if it's just small or perhaps even unknown.

Preachy, today, aren't I? I was contemplating interrupting or discontinuing my current series of blogs anyway. Three main reasons: 1) I'm not convinced anyone really cares! 2) I have a couple new (somewhat controversial) topics I wanted to raise, mostly to get a discussion going. 3) I'm finding that re-living some parts of that period of my life by re-reading some of these notes is quite painful...more so than I at first thought. I still don't know if I should just destroy them, or if this re-reading is cathartic and a twisted form of self-introspection! For the time being, I'm going to keep on. My compromise is that I'm shredding most of them AFTER I read them one last time!

Anyway.....

Peace to y'all

Take care

Posted by Evydense on Friday, November 30, 2007 at 9:55 p.m. | Permalink