This has always confused me.

Ever seen a non-technical user move the mouse with the same dexterity as you or I? I haven’t. The mouse always roams around for a month of Sundays before it eventually arrives in the right place.

It took me a week or two to master the mouse. I haven’t gotten significantly better at it since I started using a mouse in 1994 or so. It’s not hard. So it always makes me wonder what the hell is going on when someone (not old, not disabled, just non-technical) who has been using a computer for 20+ years has difficultly being at all accurate with a mouse.

I guess I just cannot understand why people don’t get better at tasks like this, even in areas that involve basic dexterity only, when it has to do with a computer. It’s like if I attempted to play the piano for 20 years but couldn’t even muddle through “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” at the end of all that time.

I can’t explain it. I don’t even know how to think about it, which bothers me.

My tolerance for existing in crowded urban spaces has decreased markedly as I’ve gotten older. After only about 15 minutes in downtown Asheville a few months ago, I was just done. I couldn’t take any more. I wasn’t nervous, anxious, etc. Just imagine “annoyed” except if you turned up annoyed to the level of irked you’d be if a million bees kept flying at top speed into your face one after another — not stinging you, but dive-bombing you over and over again.

I was always more at home in the country, near a quiet river, and my predisposition to that environment only increases every year. Urban spaces are certainly better for the planet and probably just fine for most people (as a friend points out) but for me, they are hell — a particularly annoying type of hell that is in some ways worse than just being anxious or in pain.

Urban spaces, no matter how pleasant, just aren’t for me. Give me emptiness and solitude.