Never Straight Paths

I often tell my art students that in nature you will never find straight lines. Emerging artists always draw edges of people, or tree limbs, or animal legs robotic-ally straight. But in reality, there are always subtle curves. Everyone then says, "oh yeh, what about tree trunks?" but I assure you that no tree trunk is completely ruler straight. Straight lines are man- made inventions.

Despite that, I never seem to follow a straight line in the world of man-made gadgets. My paths always veer and turn, and even come back on themselves. I want to take the short, and straight, and narrow road, but inevitably, especially if the road involves computer knowledge, I end up doing loopydeloops.

All I wanted to do was export my contacts from my computer onto my iPod. You would think the folks at Apple if they can put a little man inside that little box that controls the voodoo that makes marks appear with exact correspondence to where you touch could make exporting contacts from a computer child's play. And it is if you own an Apple computer. But if you are one of the savages that own a PC, you have to first make sure your contacts are put in Outlook, preferably the latest version, and then you call your computer guru friend. He gives you a three page step by step summary of what you are to do, with the last 3 steps saying, "The rest should be self explanatory." Yeh, right.

So determined to continue my progress out of troglodytism, I decided to do it myself. I would not wait for my husband to get home, or call my son, who would then not call back and add depression to frustration. How hard could it be for someone who does not really even know what a byte is let alone one word of programming? I knew that what I was embarking on was the equivalent of a 4 year old doing brain surgery blindfolded with a kitchen knife underwater with his hands tied behind his back, but that did not deter me.

I did manage to find the little box labeled "export contacts", which seemed a good place to start and gave me a snootful of confidence. Then I began to operate. Windows started popping open like the Black Plague, and no sooner would I close one incomprehensible blurb, when a new even more indecipherable window would splat on my screen. I think they were all in English, but it was an English that I had not yet learned. I wove like a drunk from one window to the next, trying desperately to guess the right answer. Finally, in total exasperation, I closed everything and admitted, this was a tad beyond my pay grade.

But alas, the munchkins in the computer were hard at work, carrying out my clueless commands. I began getting ominous messages from an email address that I hadn't used in 5 years. I had awakened a beast in our PC and not only had I no idea how I had done it, I also had no idea how to kill it.

I turned off the computer and drew a picture. I was careful to not make any straight lines, because there are NO straight lines in nature....except one. There is One, I thought, with great joy and hope, one shining, glorious, victorious straight path.

Proverbs 3:6
in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.