I Think I'd Prefer The Bear Attack

If you were to find yourself standing outside my house and you heard a loud, guttural growl of boundless, animalistic rage coming from inside, it would mean one of two things: either I was being attacked by a bear, or I was trying to use Adobe Illustrator.
I’m not sure which would be worse.
I don’t use Illustrator very often, for a variety of reasons – such as the fact that doing so tends to enrage me – but I feel as though I ought to.
After all, I’ve seen some people do really amazing things with Illustrator, and it’s apparent when I do use it that the program is incredibly full-featured.
But I just can’t get it to do what I want it to do, and ultimately I find that while I can’t quite get the same effect from Photoshop, I can usually get a reasonable facsimile, without all of the frustration.
I mean, sure, theoretically something might look better if it had been done in Illustrator, but in practice, if it’s done by me, there’s no chance of that happening.
The point of all this is that, as I do every so often, I took another crack at Illustrator this afternoon. I think a bear attack would have been less irritating.
People say that practice makes perfect, but they also say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
So, yeah.
After wasting an afternoon trying to be an old dog that’s somehow capable of learning new tricks, I fell back to what works and started on a picture in Photoshop. Of course, I started it far too late in the day to have any hope of finishing before going to bed, so I’ve set it aside to write this.
When I get home from grocery shopping I hate having to make multiple trips to unload the car – Wow, Jon hates something? Alert the media! [Shut up, parenthetical aside.] – so I usually load myself up like a pack mule so that I can haul everything in one trip.
Yesterday that just wasn’t feasible, and for some reason as I was heading out to haul in my last load, randomly, I thought about taking my jacket off before going to the car. I decided against acting on this peculiar thought, and made my way to the car, jacket still on.
Naturally on the way out I got snagged on the handle of the screen door and ripped a big hole in my jacket sleeve.
*Sigh*
You may think that this in an indication that I should learn to go with my first instinct, or that, like George on that episode of Seinfeld, if I were to do the opposite of what I would normally do I would have greater success in life, but you’d be wrong. I’ve found in my life that it doesn’t really matter what I do; things are just going to work out the way they work out regardless. More often than not, whatever I decide to do – going with my gut, doing the opposite of what I’d normally do, making a careful, considered decision, or just doing whatever I normally do – it’s bound to be the wrong thing.
This is why I try to get through life making as few decisions and being as inactive as possible.
I made a trip to Wal-Mart this morning to pick up a few things, and while it was busy, I think I probably managed to avoid the post-church crowds.
I ended up buying a new alarm clock. There wasn’t anything wrong with my old one, exactly, but I’ve wanted to replace it for a while. My old alarm clock was one of those iPod alarm clocks that I’d picked up a few years ago when I bought a Nano.
Despite the fact that I had a black Nano I’d bought the white clock, because I didn’t know until after I’d bought it that they made a black one. Also, as it was made in the days before the Touch and the iPhone, the clock maker decided to use the iPod’s click wheel approach to the interface, which meant that to set the time or the alarm you had to spin a wheel around and around. It was also pretty big and bulky.
So today I saw a newer version of the clock that was smaller, black, and had a much more sensible method of setting the time, and since it cost less than half as much as what I’d paid for the old one, even though it’s made by the same company, I decided to pick it up.
I’ve been looking for some throw pillows for the couch and loveseat, even though I kind of hate throw pillows. Why would I hate throw pillows? How the hell should I know? I just randomly hate things. I don’t bother trying to understand the way my mind works.
Anyway, all of the pillows I’ve seen are either ugly, expensive, or both, but at Wal-Mart they had one of those big cages at the end of an aisle that they usually have crammed full of something or other crammed full of packs of two throw pillows in solid colors for five bucks, so I picked up some black ones. I figure black goes with anything, and there weren’t any other colors that really complimented the color of my furniture.
Other than doing the laundry, that was my excitement for today.
I suppose I should get back to work on the picture that I’m not going to be able to finish tonight.