Saturday, July 8, 2000

3:29 a.m. Ah yes, but the learning curve is steep and the intellectual potholes are deep and I'm failing about as miserably as a person can fail. I am mortified, actually.

When I tried and tried to learn Director many years ago, I found it strangely alien to my way of thinking. So alien, in fact, that even when I try to describe my frustrations here, I can't find the words. Panic has set in, and it might be a good idea to change the subject.

I could talk about the sound I hear every night in my office. It's over by a row of windows on the other side of the room, and one of the windows is slightly open. At first, I thought it was maybe some birds, eating bird seed. It sounds a little like a small tapping, tiny crackling, wee crunching ... or maybe a hard-bodied beetle hitting the window ...

... but it goes on all the time. If I go over to the window and listen, it stops. You hear it more at night, obviously, because all the house sounds have quieted down. However -- and here's where I'm starting to get worried -- what if it's bugs eating the house? Termites? Chewing ants? Could be.

I'm going to have to investigate. I also thought it might be squirrels, but no squirrel I've ever seen or heard stays in one place very long, and this sound, I tell you -- this sound goes on all night long.

Oh well. At least some creature is getting somewhere tonight in his God-given mission.

Tomorrow, I'm really going to have to declare defeat and abandon all hope of creating a snazzy graphical moment. I can *almost* do many things in Flash, but -- and here's where I get really mad -- because the interface has none of the things I've come to depend on in all my other Mac programs ... there's no way to delete some stuff, for instance, and start over ... there's no way to figure out what you're doing wrong ...

... but you know what? I'm not going to rave and rant and rend my garments because I'll only have to repent and mend them later. I'm going to step away from the time lines and the symbols and instances and why why why does Director have to call everything by another name and then spin cryptic references as arcane as a scripting language? Why does it have to be so complicated?

Why can't a woman be more like a man? Why do people buy opened melons instead of closed ones? Why do I promise more than I can deliver? Why does my hair hurt when I take it out of a ponytail? Why did I think I could learn this program overnight, with no manual?

Why ask why?

Indeed. Fish gotta swim, bugs gotta chew. And I can't get one lousy butterfly off the ground here.