Neanderpundit

Jihad Gene leads us to remember the burial of Dear Reader Kim Jung Illin tomorrow.

Lady Gaga will be singing. Click the link to see the preview on his site.

My hands are still quite functional.

I still get the occasional twinge, but for the most part, I feel- well, I’m changed. I can use my hands again.

I am back to about full efficiency on the fingertips. I have two trigger fingers, but that’s not a related issue. I hope they do eventually go away. I expect they have something to do with how much typing i do, but at least one is a finger i never use to type.

In any event, the checkup pre surgery, the doc poked my fingers with a straightened out paperclip, and asked me to tell him if he was using one point or two. I could always tell him, so he had concerns about my actual need.

Post surgery, actually a couple months down the lone, he did the same test (You have to look away while they do it) and asked “one or two”? and I said “One is on my index finger, and the end is square cut and sort of the shape of a D, the other on my middle finger has a sharp bur and is flattened. ”

he stopped and I turned to look at him. He was looking at the end of the paperclip with some measure of incredulity. “Now I understand what you felt you were missing”. It’s good to have it back. I’m trying very hard to not take it for granted.

You can’t teach me something I’m not interested in. All through High school, I tuned out the history teacher as he droned on, and thought about just about anything else. Economics? bleagh. Social Studies? egad.

OTOH, if I wanted to learn something, nellie bar the door. When you embark on a career in Journalism, you first learn wwwwh- which stands for Who, What, When, Why, and How. hell, by the time I was 10, i bet I had asked Dad those questions a billion times.

Dad always answered to the best of his ability, but he wasn’t a well educated man himself, his wisdom lay in other areas. So he saw to it that I had a library card, and a set of Encyclopedia Brittanica. I would look up the pertinent information in Brittanica, and if it wasn’t complete enough, I would write down the references there and look them up at the local lending library. The virgins there were good at either finding my requests, or getting them transferred from the main branch, or recommending better sources.

Later, I chose experience over reading. I wanted to know about boats, so I hung around at boatyards. I wanted to know about cars, so I hung around in garages. I was eager to learn and was often given menial tasks to do, and the skills I learned were worth more to me than the free labor I provided.

I never did “full” apprenticeships but I spent a lot of time with old masters. A semi-retired old gentleman who had been a cabinetmaker for many years showed me how to keep my tools sharp, and how much better sharp tools worked than dull ones. he taught me some joinery- it seems a simple word, but it encompasses things most people could never comprehend. A miter cut full blind dovetail, forinstance, is a skill he had mastered, and there are probably five people alive today who can do that. I didn’t become a journeyman at cabinetmaking, but he said something at the time that I have heard a thousand times since: “You have a gift. If you would just stick with this, you’d be incredible”
I never became what you’d consider a “master” at very many things (Robotics systems, few people can keep up with me, there are a few other disciplines) but I got very good at a lot of things, very quickly. And if I need to I can ressurect those old skills very quickly, and do pretty much anything.

But I’ve gotten lazy. Instead of wanting to know something and going out to learn about it, I’ve started just doing internet research. Sure, that’s fine for casual knowledge, but I always preferred more detailed information, hands on wherever I could get it. This, not texting, is the issue I have with Smartphones. They have encouraged me to be lazier than I already am.