it goes on

[calimac]

I hope my last post didn't alarm anyone into thinking I was in a terminal funk. It was just the news of the day. Deaths and funerals and dislocations will always happen; if they don't require any major action or decisions on your own part, just keep your head down and keep going. That's the way to get through life if looking up and getting a real view of the situation is too bleak.

So I got the newest book to review in the mail today. It's a cultural/historical source/inspiration study of Tolkien, and it's supposed to be written for lay readers. In such cases, I always picture the person on the MythSoc mailing list years ago who wasn't quite sure of the difference between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings, and had trouble retaining it after explanation. That person would find this book utterly bewildering; even I am only understanding it because of additional knowledge that's not provided by the author.

A friend undergoing major life changes hasn't replied to an e-mail suggesting a concatenation. Another who knows one well suggests that a text message to one's phone might produce more responsiveness. Oh, great; I don't know how to do that. Occasionally I receive text messages on my phone, and I don't know what to do with them, either.

Part of the problem is that I don't want to have to learn to do any more new things than I absolutely have to. Even little, simple things, because they add up. My old brain is too stuffed with decades of things I've learned to do in the past that have become obsolete, or at least quaint. I ought to make a list. Among the obsolete or quaint things I can do are:

• Drive a stick shift car (has that ever proved useful on various distant past occasions and visits to the U.K.);
  
• Tie a men's long necktie (visits to the wardrobes of my contemporaries who wear ties as fashion accessories has revealed that they usually keep them knotted and just slip them over their heads; this at first astonished me);
  
• Write a simple batch file to open a program in MS-DOS (saved a lot of extraneous typing, and I used to do it for friends' computers too);
  
• Hand-tag a simple static web page (all the pages on my personal web site were created that way);
  
• Properly alphabetize and file library catalog cards (and those alphabetization rules were complicated and full of conditionals);
  
• Clean and play an LP (a very quaint procedure by today's standards);
  
• Fold a standard gas-station map (a rare ability even in the day, apparently).

What can you do?

Comments

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

I can mix chemicals which were in acid mixes. I can deprocess computer chips with aluminum wiring. (Now they're made of copper and it's a whole different ball game.) I have a whole bunch of obsolete technical skills from the semiconductor industry.