Running Aground in Digital Waters

My computer is trying to kill me. Video files have disappeared; uploads take five hours; gray highlights appear at odd intervals in texts; and familiar pages hide command buttons that had once been easy to find. My laptop is raising my blood pressure. A tension headache throbs in the back of my head...

I recently took an on-line course designed to teach me how to teach on-line courses. I managed to get 100% on all sections after several attempts. I would’ve been content to drift by with a lower grade, but my meticulous instructor, who picked through my offerings with a fine-toothed comb, prodded until all parts met the school’s complete satisfaction. One item I had neglected to cover, until nearly too late, was a quiz testing my ability to remember and categorize information from a video. The spellbinding video described the school’s process in designing the on-line teaching course in which I was enrolled. Had to watch it three times. I regret each viewing.

I’m trying now to make video demonstrations for a Drawing I class. I also have to edit closed captions attached to the videos for grammar and errors in transcription. I’ve discovered, while listening repeatedly to the playback, that I have a hoarse, somewhat nasal voice that honks, when stressed, like a goose with emphysema. I mumble, slur words, and say the word “so” much too often. So, how will I find time to take a communication course in camera-ready elocution?

I’ve slowly begun to get accustomed to using “Canvas”, our school platform, to edit and post items on a course outline. The name “Canvas” remains a mystery, however. I haven’t noticed any similarities between using its functions and painting on stretched linen. None whatsoever.

I have to genuflect before built-in absurdities in the program. For instance: when posting an image on an assignment page, I have to enter an “alt text”. An alt text describes the image to the visually impaired. Folks need to be able to see to take a drawing class, but don’t try telling that to Canvas.

I’ll conform to my job’s expectations and develop new mental calluses. But right now, I feel like I’m sailing into a digital whirlwind. The 1s and 0s have no bad intentions but blow about inside my head in confusing gusts and swirls. I hope the storm calms once the semester begins.

*I am grateful that my school has shifted most courses from classrooms to on-line modalities. I won’t have to enter Room 148 this semester wondering whether my students will be the death of me.

The Reset Button

I wish I had a reset button on my computer when all the presented options look confusing or bad.  I have learned that  a “help” message offering to send my PC back to the default factory mode is a veiled threat.  It warns that I’ve already slid too far down a slippery slope.  If only I could go back to the moment right before I tried to download a new program…If only I hadn’t clicked on an icon never seen before…If only I had backed up my files on a memory stick before I clicked on an icon never seen before…

I come from blunt people who sometimes speak their minds before considering consequences.  When I see my wife’s eyes pop in disbelief, I wish that I had kept my mouth shut.  Reset, please.  Sometimes my temper gets the best of me when multiple stressors visit concurrently.  I blurt out my irritation to a bystander.  Forgive me?  Reset.

Sometimes a scripture verse or a portion of a pastor’s sermon helps to reset my attitude when I feel storm clouds gathering.  “Cast not the first stone,” comes to mind when tempted to pronounce judgment on people.  “Fear not,” and the 23^rd Psalm have been making regular appearances lately.  Reading the Sermon on the Mount, Isaiah, and the Psalms offers many chances to slip out of anxiety ruts.  It’s comforting to know that older generations faced similar troubles and found “a balm in Gilead”.

God sometimes hits a reset button to redirect our lives.  A voice whispers to us during moments of contemplation.  It prepares the mental ground to grow more nourishing crops.  A new way of thinking emerges.  We see possibilities that hadn’t been apparent moments before.

Sometimes God sends us someone who sees us in a different light.  Their responses hold up a clearer mirror to our speech and action.  These reflections give us a chance to become new persons making fresh choices.  

Sometimes God abruptly and radically changes the circumstances of our lives.  We are reset.  Familiar strategies no longer work.  We stumble along until we adapt. 

Such is the case right now.  It’s normal to feel anxious and bewildered when facing unforeseen obstacles.  God grant us guidance and understanding as we learn to walk this path. 

My Feet Hurt

Quantum Cubist Self-Portrait, graphite, 12×9″

Woke up at 5 for reasons unknown and watched a grainy black and white youtube video of the 1952 Yankees/Brooklyn Dodgers World Series.  Jackie Robinson played second base for the Dodgers and Roy Campanella played catcher.  Young Mickey Mantle led the Yankees to victory.  The batters swatted at pitches with wide, flat swings.  Baggy uniforms billowed and made the athletes seem slow of foot and wide of ass.

Drifted off, woke to my alarm at 7:30 feeling much groggier than I had at 5.  Stumbled through making breakfast, cooking lunch to leave behind for Judy, and packing an apple and a sandwich to take along.  Felt rushed and slightly hassled as I drove to work but arrived five minutes before the doors automatically unlocked at Valencia Building 3.

The classroom was only partially wrecked from the last class and the Friday clean up crew, so it took just ten minutes to move easels and chairs into position.  Set out three models of human skulls on upright wooden boxes for my Drawing I class.  Arranged a complex still life (a skeleton, fabric, bricks, boots, cow femurs, an angel statue, and a lamp shaped like a horse’s head) on the gray stage for my Drawing II students.

2/3 of the students showed up on time.  Did a brief intro for Drawing I and then switched to Drawing II.  I showed them Picasso’s early cubist paintings, had the students draw 9×12″ boxes and divide them into 8 sections using curving lines.  Told them to draw chunks of the still life in each area.  The kicker was this:  each time they drew another section they had to move to another position.  Cubism=multiple viewpoints rammed together into one shifting, churning space.

Cubist Still Life, graphite, 8×6″

Drawing I drew skulls and learned portrait proportions.  Then they drew me and themselves, and after lunch they paired up and drew each other.  Usual mistakes:  eyes drawn too large, faces elongated, heads turned into bowling balls with facial features attached haphazardly, noses shortened and shrunk to Michael Jackson proportions, necks too spindly to hold up a head, mouths too small and narrow to chew a hamburger, brains shrunk to subhuman proportions, facial proportions of the drawer transplanted onto drawings of other people.  Students struggled for a while, but improved.  A poor student surprised me by drawing an accurate portrait of another student after having butchered my face.

 

Gave my usual speech about proper etiquette when a model is present (our first model comes next week).  Told them not to make remarks or jokes about the model, not to touch the model, not to fraternize (the model is not a future date), not to photograph the model, and in short, to treat the model with respect.  These rules are based on bad behavior by previous students.  I concluded: “If you have an issue following these rules, then I will have an issue with you, and then I will issue you out the door.”

Two students stayed after.  One wanted to show me her latest work in computer graphics.  I gave her a few color theory tips.  The other wanted to convert me into becoming a computer artist.  Told him that I like the tactile experience of working with my hands, of making things out of physical materials.

He persisted, so I trotted out my standard and most effective argument.  I asked him, “Would you rather make love to a woman or look at porn?”  He stammered and said, “I’ll have to think about that.”  Discussion ended.

Put away wooden boxes, still life props and skulls; arranged easels in a circle around the room; erased the blackboard, locked the closet, turned off the spotlights.  The weekend cleaning crew came in while I packed my bag, and I told them that the paper towels were out in both dispensers.

Trudged through the building and met two students in the lobby.  We cringed greetings to each other sharing the hope that neither student or professor would feel obliged to start a conversation.

The day had turned hot and muggy while I worked inside, and the walk to the car seemed long.  My teaching adrenaline faded away, and the effects of walking on concrete floors became apparent: my knees felt numb and my feet hurt.

 

The Digital World

A college buddy had a ’68 Rambler with a slant six engine.  He opened the hood and told me, “I love this car.  There’s a foot between the inside frame and the engine on all sides.  I can reach everything…Easiest car to work on ever!”  I studied the motor and identified the distributor cap, the carburetor, oil cap, plugs, generator, and  the coolant hoses.  I didn’t know how to fix one damn thing but had hope that I could learn.  Everything was clearly displayed.

That hope died in 1989 when I bought my first car with front wheel drive, fuel injection, and a computer guided motor.  I pulled over one day when the car began to crawl along at a maximum speed of ten miles per hour.  I opened the hood and scanned a densely meshed jumble of wires, hoses, and vaguely formed metal shapes that filled the engine compartment.  I could barely find the engine housing, and little else looked familiar.

I took the car back to the dealer, and the mechanic told me that my computer chip had decided, for unknown reasons, to go into “emergency creep mode”.  I had bought the car two weeks earlier for three thousand, and a replacement chip the size of a postage stamp cost me an additional two hundred.

My wife bought a p.c. around 1995.  She taught me a few functions, and then let me figure out much of the rest (I was an impatient student easily angered by the eccentricities of a machine I intended to use as a glorified typewriter.).  The computer confronted me with cryptic messages from time to time.  I hated “bad command” the most as any attempt to deliver a “good command” would inevitably lead me into a maze of contradictory and obscure instructions.  A friend of mine followed these instructions on her computer until she erased the hard drive, so I knew better than to trust the intentions of computer designers and code writers.  My response to “bad command” became a short message inviting the computer to perform proscribed sexual acts upon itself.  The computer predictably responded with “bad command”, but I felt satisfaction in knowing that my last action truly warranted censure.

A student walked into the first class this semester thirty minutes late. She didn’t join the group gathered in the middle of the room, but leaned against a table and pulled out her phone. Her face settled into a familiar smug expression: she had entered her digital domain where her preferences were anticipated and reaffirmed. My explanations about items in the syllabus became a distant yammering that she easily tuned out.

I came to a class policy banning the use of cell phones for texting, surfing and video streaming, and paused to watch the late arrival punch buttons on her phone. I said, “Tardy students should pay attention to instructions and put their phones away.” The woman didn’t look up. I said a bit louder, “And late students should learn how to take a hint.” She ignored me still. I muttered, “Well, I guess not.”

 

 

 

Digital Defenestration: The Urge to Toss My Computer Out the Window

My dad taught me at an early age to take personal offense when inanimate objects failed to perform up to expectations.  He spent many an afternoon in our garage cursing carburetors that no longer allowed moderated amounts of gasoline into our cars’ engines.  A nail that shot sideways when hammered instead of embedding itself further into a plank could have the legitimacy of its birth questioned.  “You dirty son of a bitch!” my father would swear.  A wheelbarrow full of cement that tipped sideways before reaching its destination would be the recipient of a string of Anglo-Saxon oaths all ending in “ucker”.

I’ve proudly carried on this tradition, much to my wife’s dismay.  She thinks that it’s unreasonable to get overly excited by anything not related to a loss of life, love and limb.  She leaves the room whenever I drop a fully loaded paint brush onto the carpet, hammer my thumb, or break a piece of equipment.  And she’s particularly unsympathetic when I take umbrage with my computer.

I think that it’s perfectly reasonable to feel betrayed when the computer decides to arbitrarily refuse to perform a task it’s done several times before.  I click on a window, follow a command, wait patiently while a little wheel spins and spins and spins on the screen until…nothing happens.  The uploaded picture is lost in the ether, and I’m invited to try again, or to wait until later, or I’m told that the file didn’t meet specifications.  The computer and I both know that I photoshopped the shit out of that image until it fulfilled all the requirements, but the laptop refuses to admit its fault.  It’s like the bad girlfriend I had thirty years ago who put the blame on me when she kissed another guy.  I try again with the same results, and now I know that the lying weasel is just messing with me.  “Go ahead,” it hisses to me.  “Change the proportions, the DPI; save it as a TIFF, as a jpeg, as anything on the menu.  I’ll spin my little wheel and make you sit there for five minutes, ten minutes, and just as you start to get your hopes up…wait for it…wait for it…I’ll bomb you with a stop sign icon and invite you to start all over.”

I agree with my wife that getting frustrated with a tool, a piece of technology that is generally helpful, is a bit silly when compared to the bigger problems that we face.  I know that it’s rude to break the peaceful quiet of our home with a string of heated curses.  But the little bastard winds me up gradually, and after an hour or two of frustration I lose all perspective. I start to hammer at the keys and jerk at the mouse.  My hands begin to itch with the urge to pick up the laptop and hurl it through the window where it will land cracked and dented on the driveway.  I long to see the background image crackle and die on its splintered screen.

I would never do that, of course.  The little fiend is way too expensive to destroy in a feckless moment of rage.  And it does have consistent good graces:  it plays movies with a high resolution image and allows me to listen to music from bands that I’ve newly discovered.  But it is a treacherous machine, one that promises much but delivers only when it pleases.  If only I knew the key to attuning myself to its whims, to soothing its electronic crankiness.  If only there were a minor god that accepted alms in return for a life of digital tranquility.  I’m willing to convert.