An apology and some self-recrimination

Self recrimination of a sort, anyway.

First, the apology. A couple of kind fellow bloggers have sent me links to their writing over the past two days, and a few have sent address changes. I apologize if I have not yet gotten to reading/linking what you sent or to fixing your address in my blogroll. The first is because I have been sort of overwhelmed with some “real life” happenings as well as my own blog-move. The second is because I still haven’t figured out how to do the blogroll thing (or the trackback thing) on WP, and it’s no use writing to tell me about how to do it because I am, yes, THAT STUPID and cannot for the life of me figure out what you folks (who are being very kind and generous to try to teach me) are saying. People write to me and say, “to do trackback just do (something) with the URI, (what?) and then add (something) and (something) and that’s all there is to it,” and I just read it – over and over again – and feel like I’m back in Sr. Leocadia’s math class going…”whaaa???? I don’t get it! Help!”

Repeat after me: The Anchoress is dyslexic and has severe math anxiety, and even though a computer is not math, it all FEELS like math to her!

Please be patient. Eventually I will find be able to get in touch with one of my son’s friends and I will make him a sandwich and he will sit down with me and show me, over and over again, what to do, and then I will screw it up for a few weeks until – suddenly, like magic – I get it…or, truthfully, I still won’t “get” it, but I’ll be a well-trained enough monkey to fool people into thinking I know what I’m doing. :-)

As to the self-recrimination: Am I a bad person because I cannot happily converse about cottage cheese with fruit, and where one might best buy it, for 15 minutes?

I had to go shopping today, which is something I hate, but we’re going on vacation (for the first time in three years! Yea!) in two weeks, and I had no choice. I’m mulling over some clothes and waiting to purchase my items, and the women in the store are talking. Incessantly. While I am shopping, and the entire time I am checking out, they are having the same conversation…when a third employee returns from lunch, she joins into the conversartion, which is basically…seriously…cottage cheese, fruit, yogart, BJ’s cottage cheese, fruit, yogurt, grocery store, cottage cheese, yogurt, fruit, Costco, cottage cheese, yogurt, I-never-liked-cottage-cheese-before-20-years-ago-you-couldn’t-pay-me-to-eat-cottage-cheese-but-now-I-like-it-oh-I-just-had-yogurt-with-my-lunch….

15 minutes of this. I’m not exaggerating. As I was paying, one woman turned to me and smiled sweetly and asked me if I had ever tried the new cottage cheese “in the cute little cups…”

I stood there dumbfounded. I knew the woman was trying to be nice, and inclusive, but I stood there with my mouth open, trying to figure out if I had recently eaten cottage cheese in a cute little cup, and if I really liked it or gave a damn either way. I was afraid to say, “I don’t know,” because that might encourage them to explain it all to me – what the cup looked like, where I could buy it, etc…but I also didn’t want to say yes or no, because…that would be lying.

I took my bag, smiled nicely and said, “thank you, I’ve got to run,” and dashed out, wondering if I have been too long in solitude, and have simply lost the ability to talk about cottage cheese/ yogurt, or if I simply had never been so gifted to begin with. I felt stuck-up, like I thought myself TOO GOOD to know about cottage cheese, too superior to condescend to yak about yogurt.

But I don’t really think it’s that I’m stuck up, or that I think I’m too good for it. I think I’m just as socially inept as I have ever been…observing human conversation and wondering…why can’t I do that?

This is why I am shy. But I need to work on it and get better about it. We’re going on vacation with three other families, all people I like very much. I have no problem talking to them about parenting or politics, religion, music, art…but I have to LEARN how to talk about cottage cheese. It might come up!

Pray for me.