On Garden and Other States.

I’m just watching the film Garden State again. I remembered liking it when I watched it several years ago, and since I don’t have much else to do after darkness has fallen I thought I’d watch again. I particularly like Natalie Portman, you see. I could never have had a relationship with her because she has no ear lobes and that would have been a deal breaker, but I like everything else about her.

Watching it reminds me of the time when I was a young dude (bloke? guy? I get confused over which version of English is most comfortable after watching an American film, and isn’t that quite some admission?) And how I used to subconsciously adjust my persona to suit the girl of my immediate interest. I thought that if I admitted to the fact that what I most enjoyed doing was sitting alone by a lake of mysterious countenance, watching my fishing float bob gently among the reflection of summer trees on the quiet water, she wouldn’t be interested. But what could I do, since my second favourite activity was attracting the interest and approbation of attractive girls (with perfectly formed ear lobes)? So pretend is what I did, and maybe that’s what we all do when we’re playing the game of life.

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And talking of life, I’m becoming quite concerned about some of my body’s latest malfunctions and feel I should really see a doctor. The problem is that I have another issue to get settled first before I commit myself to appointments, and it isn’t being addressed because people have an irritating habit of not doing what they say they’re going to do. I sometimes think that I’m the only person on the planet who always does what he says he’s going to do, which is one of the reasons why I rarely mix with most of the other people on the planet.

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But I did have one resounding success today. That’s pretty rare, so I suppose I should probably tell the tale. It goes like this:

I’ve been having a problem lately with my blog formatting, so eventually I got around to posting it on the Blogger Help Forum. It was answered by a man called Adam (from Poland, apparently, according to the evidence of Blogger stats, although his English was impeccable apart from the fact that his spelling was American.)

Anyway, Adam began his reply in the way techies do – assuming you’re perfectly competent in navigating the circuitous routes of some location you didn’t even know existed, much less having been brought up in a state of familiarity with such places as young people are these days – so I replied as follows:

In common with a lot of people who weren’t brought up with computers, I’m a complete dunce when it comes to computer technology and language. I’m not even sure what a navbar is, but assume it’s the line of buttons at the top of the page. It used to have several buttons there and I clicked on ‘Design’ to take me to what I think is called the dashboard (posts, stats etc.) I now access it by clicking ‘Sign In.’

As for the edit tool, I can still make edits to recent posts by going to the dashboard, reverting to draft and then re-publishing. This is very difficult, of course, if I want to edit an old post which might be a very long way down the list of posts.

The thing is, you see, I’m simply not conversant with the relationship between the various tech giants whose products all have to work with each other. I’ve had problems before with incompatibilities after a new update from Firefox. On the other hand, the problem with the navbar and dashboard has happened before and has turned out to be a glitch in Google’s Blogger software.

What this comes down to is that, along with many others, I expect to enter a URL or click on a link or bookmark and receive the web page in full working order. Mostly it does, but if it doesn’t I’m lost, and instructions to do this or try that are little more than gobbledegook to we non-techies. That’s why we come to you in the hope that you’ll be a good Hermione Granger and perform the necessary magic to put it right.

This intends no criticism of you. It’s simply an aspect of today’s highly technological society for which we older people were never trained. And it’s a particular problem for those of us who, like me, are highly right-brained. We can deal with philosophical discourse, but get hopelessly confused with even the simplest workings of computer hardware and software.

And so, if this issue can’t be fixed, or at least explained in simple language, my only recourse is to carry on as I am and hope it gets no worse. Thank you for your time and attention.

(I wonder how often such lengthy and impassioned tomes as that find their way onto the Blogger Help Forum. I further wonder whether Google will have it framed and hung on a the boss’s wall in Silicone Valley.)

But Adam was not to be dismissed so lightly. He was persistent, and today he sent me a link to an entry in the Mozilla manual which might be entitled ‘How To Stop Firefox Screwing Up Your Favourite Websites Even Though We’re Only Trying To Protect Your Interests. Sniff.’ He thought it would probably solve the problem, and might just be manageable for a dummy like me. And it was (just about.) And it worked. And everything is now back to normal, so I wrote back to say thank you. And he wrote back to say ‘thank you for writing back.’ And isn’t that how life should be?

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But I’m still keeping A Fairy Tale of New York on the back burner. It simply wouldn’t be fair to waste something as funny as that on a mind still sadly out of tune. One day, maybe.

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Is anybody still awake and reading this?