ARRRGH...but, yay?

I feel guilty when things make me happy during this troubled time.

Nonetheless, may I crow a tiny bit?

I once had a professor I highly respected tell me that my advantage was that I could think almost-but-not-quite equally well in the left and right sides of my brain. He further opined that that was also why I have moments of almost transcendent klutziness. Dr. Chuck (not your real name), you r0xx0r. Sorry I was such a smooth criminal that I got away with (accidentally) lighting paper towels on fire in the lab and usually managed to put them out and hide the evidence before you could figure out where it was coming from. (Well, not so much sorry as "sorry I kind of suck at lab without a less-fearful partner." You never should have split me and Virginia Hippie up.)

I'm not clumsy all the time. I can do certain things that require fine motor skills. I just have screwy kinesthetic senses that get worse the closer things get to me. I am going to start telling people I have kinesthetic myopia when I don't want to do shit. Mostly it just means that I have bruises in weird places, almost exclusively on the left side of my body, but my mom swears to God that when I was four I used to aim for the open part of a door and hit the closed part so often that she got worried about me. (Coincidentally, that's the year my daycare worker, who had been trained during the period when lefties were reoriented as a matter of policy, got me to start using my right hand. Weird.)

The left brain/right brain thing may be overrated to a degree -- everyone uses both hemispheres, they just don't usually do them equally well. What occasioned Dr. Chuck's comment was a problem on a Precalculus test where, lacking the correct equation, I vectored the problem and solved the triangle on what would have normally been incomplete information, but we were allowed to use our graphing calculators, so I used trig, because at the time I was tutoring remedial geometry.

It's not the problem, I guess, it's how you solve the problem.

I can't solve the problem of my cat. Only God can do that and I trust God.

I can, however, make my life better, and stop being conquered by bullshit.

***

I can't deal with machinery.
That is one of my great failings.

Machinery hates me. I can hook up a computer, and I give people advice all day about what hook-ups they require for their electronics, and I have the theory, but that shit conquers me.

So I hadn't programmed the VCR to the Universal Remote, because the brand name is gone from it. But I have the possibility of some part-time work coming up which will require me to have a VCR (no, Sars didn't hire me as a recapper -- this is much less glamorous, transcription stuff for closed captioning on a piecework basis, but it pays over twice what I'm making now and will be some nice extra experience on my resumé. It's ironic that I generally would rather read about TV than watch TV, and I may be working for 2 different networks soon.)

I refuse to sit in the damn floor with my wireless keyboard in order to manually start and stop my VCR, because that would drive me fuggin' bugshit.

So I read the directions VERY carefully, put on something with a regular beat, and methodically pressed CHANNEL UP (after some other buttons that were required to use the search feature) somewhere in excess of 150 times to locate the code for the unidentified VCR.

This is a big accomplishment for someone of my severe antimechanical inclinations. I can use tools, although I'd rather not deal with the saw portion of the experience if I have an assistant, and ever since a girl named Natalina drilled my finger with a Makita when she was flirting with the male lead in Cinderella during a tech call, I have very little fear. But electronics fuck me up. I straight up break watches, small clocks, and most things digital. My computer hangs on by the bare threads, and anything more complicated than defragging I delegate to one of my associates for considerations.

So I can start and stop my VCR from my chair now and I'm about to have 2 work-from-home jobs. Can my future get any brighter?

Oh yeah. I'd like my cat back, universe, if that wouldn't be too terribly much trouble. Sending me a million assurances that he's OK and some fairly strong evidence (where the fuck is CSI when you need them?) that he's within sight of the house holed up, that is Not. The. Same. as having him here where I can feed him and love him and then take him to the vet and chip him.
OK? OK.