I have just found my UWM Spanish equivalent.
I’m not a graphic design person. Despite my hobbies, I’m not creative in that take a blank piece of canvas and create something. What I make is something that has already been designed and then presented for manufacture with a nice set of complete directions. I don’t want to think about how to adjust the kerning between the letters. I really don’t care as long as it is legible. And, hey, more power to the people that care. If it weren’t for them, we’d have directions written in wing dings. Or comic sans. I learned last night that comic sans is the bane of the font world. I kinda like comic sans, but that’s another story.
As I realized last week and then this week, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing on a mac. Everything is different. I had to ask the person next to me last night how to cut and paste. An action I can do in my sleep on a PC. There’s no “back” button. I really don’t know how to do that yet. There is no obvious way to see what is hidden behind my active window. And, most frustratingly of all, the touchpad on the mac doesn’t tap like the PC touchpad. You have to use the button on the touch pad. I’m pounding the living daylights out of the touch pad thinking I have a defective machine, and Josette, the girl who was sitting next to me, gently grabbed my hand and said, “use the button.” She has a mac of her own, so she was sailing through the assignment and I couldn’t even get the program open. Which brings me to InDesign.
Last semester, I took Eng 435 Professional/Technical writing. In that class, we had to make flyers using InDesign. See my previous blog rants about that… Anyway, I didn’t realize we were going to use that program for Document Design. If I had known that, I would have made an effort to 1 – familiarize myself with a mac, and 2 – familiarize myself with InDesign. Now, I realize that younglings would not do such a thing, but this old dog would. Just because I’m slower than them, probably not as tech savvy, and no where NEAR as flexible in learning as them. I am not the only one who has no experience with mac and InDesign in this class, yet when I look around, they are buzzing through the lesson without care.
At one point last night, I recognized my old feelings of panic and anger rising up again that I haven’t had since Spanish class. Will this never leave me now? I stopped what I was trying to do (open a document), took my glasses off, put my face in my hands, and breathed deeply for a minute. I managed to not burst into tears and go running out of the room. Mike, the guy next to me leaned over and asked if I was ok. I said yes, it was just a bit overwhelming and then the next thing I know, the teacher is kneeling next to me asking what’s up. So, I told him. That I had never used a mac before, that I’m woefully ignorant of anything called InDesign, and that I’m in over my head and I know it. And, once again, I’m in a situation (out of my control) where I need this class to graduate. The little voice in my head keeps saying, “but college isn’t about panic and anxiety, it should be about learning and wanting to learn. Not being frustrated into a public meltdown…” Yeah, something like that. The little voice in my head can be incredibly naïve. The teacher said that he didn’t care for macs either and I had already noticed and eye up enviously his Dell PC that he was working from. My little net book is not powerful enough to run InDesign, so no, that’s not going to happen. Nor am I going to buy a new laptop just for this class. However, Adobe does have a student version of InDesign that I can “rent” for $20 bucks a month, so I can at least work on stuff from home. I had imagined just moving in to the UWM library and using the macs there.
So he tells me to hang in there, that it will get better, that what I have completed on the assignment is good, and blah, blah, blah. Excuse me if I’m a little gun-shy of that line of talk. I still have fresh, searing memories of Spanish class and low self-confidence, and I’ve already come to the realization that this is very much like learning a foreign language. It is its own language and has its own rules. And while I did ok in Spanish class, the toll it took on me was exacting and more than it should have been. I was lucky I had an understanding and great teacher, otherwise I'm not sure what would have happened. I hope the same holds true for Eng 439.
14 weeks to go. Is bad that I’m already counting the weeks? Maybe I will take Skippy up on his offer of a “fun and easy A” class, yet.
