Neuroplasti City
Apparently, I don't live there anymore
Thirst for knowledge was a big thing for me for most of my life. I went back to college in my 40s for that very reason. I started my higher education in health care, becoming an EMT and a medical transcriptionist. I did not go on to paramedic level because the time investment was too great with three young boys at home.
When I picked it up again decades later, I started out as a psych major and once I was close to that degree, I realized that the in-fighting in the field was going to make me crazy and resentful, so I ditched it and copped out with a degree in Religious Sciences, qualifying me to work at any Starbucks or boba shop in the country provided I could remember how to run a cash register. Of course, when I jockeyed a register, it was in 1981 and was an old NCR machine.
It didn’t have a crank on the right-hand side to pull down every time you made an entry but it wasn’t far off.
Somewhere along the line, my brain got full or something and I lost interest in learning new things and, in fact, became quite stressed and anxious when I would be forced to learn new steps or techniques. I have tried for years to learn to play piano with no luck. It just doesn’t stick.
In 1999, my son taught me website design and maintenance. Since then, I have learned Joomla and Drupal and Dreamweaver and Micosoft Expressions and that is aside from the platforms like Angelfire, Homestead, and Geocities that I also learned. After html became (almost) obsolete, I learned Cascading Style Sheets and Wordpress.
Right about there, everything stopped because I knew enough to do the things I wanted or needed to do. Anything else was just fancy. What I knew kept me from needing to hire a professional to build out or manage my websites, including the one for Crossroads Occult, which is our primary business.
This past week, *something* inside the coding for the Crossroads website broke and Mercury Retrograde stepped in and instead of Cascading Style Sheets, we now had Cascading Problems that kept compounding one on top of another on top of another. It was like playing whack-a-mole because as soon as I would resolve one issue, another one popped up.
It started with someone saying they could not access the site. Then someone else said the same thing while I was trying to duplicate the problem person #1 reported. Pages only loaded halfway. Images were rearranged. Component blocks were no longer separated. I mean, the thing was just broken.
After spending probably 7-8 hours working on different fixes, I decided to rebuild the site from the ground up in a subdirectory of the domain. (Fascinating reading, isn’t this?) That sounds simple except that we have literally hundreds of items on the website and for a rebuild, each item must be relisted individually.
As I got into the process of rebuilding, I realized how long it had been since I constructed a totally new site and quickly understood that I was forced to do the unthinkable. I was going to have to learn new things.
After two days and two nights, I got the site rebuilt and even took care of some deferred maintenance that I had neglected to take care of on the old site. The new site was much nicer, I was very proud, and life was good in the world.
Until the next day when the site went into a (get ready for tech talk) “redirect loop” requiring emergency response on my part.
Long story long, this past week, I had to learn new things and it was as awful and stressful as I imagined it would be. I had to learn Pagelayer (a website creation platform within Wordpress) to build the site I wanted and I kept making the same errors over and over. Muscle memory takes forever to develop when we’re old, doesn’t it?
Important caveat: If you feel inclined to say, “You know, I’m older than you are and I have not had that experience. My thirst for knowledge is stronger than ever and I drink in new things like a sponge,” please know that while I will honor that this is your experience and respect what you have said, I will no longer love you. It is what it is. You have been warned.
Once the redirect loop happened, I had to (very quickly) learn how to clone a website, which is different from migrating a website. I could either take hours to figure out cloning the website or days to remake the entire website… again.
It took a lot of trial and error, far more “error” than “trial,” but I got it manage, so if you are keeping score, I managed to learn a new website building platform and how to clone a website. For this moment, in this precious minute of this sacred, protected hour of this holiest of days, the website is up and mostly viable. I still have to add a whole bunch of classes to the Classes page so people can order them at a deep discount if they wish and that will happen this week.
Learning these new things forty years ago would have been a snap but learning them in my 60s was like trying to nail Jello to the wall. The dumbening is in full effect.
In the middle of all of this, I took a break and went to see Freakier Friday with my daughter and it was just so much fun. I love that they brought back the same cast after 22 years and they were all just precious. I learned from Delena that the correct term (referencing Mark Harmon) is G-PILF. “GrandPa I’d Like to F***.”
We’ve gotten there, I guess.
Chad Michael Murray looks wonderful. I will leave it at that.
The new influences are Manny Jacinto (Jason from “The Good Place) who is all leading man handsomed out and Sophia Hammons as his daughter, the potential step in the situation.
When Lily (Hammons’ character) goes into Tess’s (Jamie Lee Curtis’s character) body, all of the complaints she had about the physicalities of being old really landed with me. I related to every single one.
It was a nice reminder that it is not just me feeling these things, which is also a reminder that although it might exacerbate the situation, it is not all about my weight.
As many of you know, my husband is 15 years younger than I am and is a bastion of physical fitness. Right now, he and his friend are out paddleboarding at Salmon Falls. Yesterday, he and Dylan (our adult son) when to their every Saturday fencing class. He goes to the gym 4-5 times a week. Yesterday, he was outside in 100+ degree heat chopping wood for the coming winter. He actively gardens. He planted a vineyard on our property this year. He gets on the roof and cleans our solar panels… that he helped install.
He eats a giant salad almost every day because he wants to. He has some injuries from being in the military that he has to accommodate, but he does so and still manages to live the life he wants to live. He can’t do everything he wants to do because of those limitations, but he finds other things he can do that he loves.
He cannot fathom how or why a person who could avoid physical infirmities wouldn’t do so, especially when they already have physical infirmities that they cannot avoid. I get that and it makes perfect sense. My spirit has yet to figure that one out.
At 48, he has started to feel the aches and snaps and pains creep in and I do feel for him. I imagine it is harder to accept those when you have worked so hard to avoid them. One day, you’re moving around like Cirque du Soleil and the next, you sound like a bowl of Rice Krispies when you are trying to get out of bed.
For him, it’s the physical changes but for me, the loss of memory retention and ability to assimilate new information is just devastating.
The benefits of aging are abundant, at least to me. By no means do they escape my attention. This week, however, I feel physically exhausted from having to learn something new, much less two or three somethings. I will be in my bed with a cold rag on my forehead for awhile.
