Serendipity

If you are over thirty, you may be able to relate to this. My usual approach to mastering something has been utterly linear. Whether it meant reading an owner's manual from cover to cover (yes, really) or prepping a new text by going though chapter by chapter, my idea of learning or gaining mastery meant not skipping any steps. And this approach has served me well in very instances. But recently, I have been letting go of some of these habits. For instance, I started playing around with Twitter. As the site explains, "Twitter means you can step in and out of the flow of information as it suits you and it never queues up." It also means you can't master it or maintain a linear correspondence.

OK, so I have been dabbling with Twitter. Well, last Friday I got the idea of setting up a colorful Twitter page design. Since I am a complete doofus with graphics, I looked for help online and found a template for Keynote, an application I owned but with which I had no experience. So I learned just enough about Keynote to discover that I could import a jpeg background for the page. I remembered recently reading that millions of digital photos were available on Flickr. This is probably not news to you, but it was quite a revelation to me. I opened an account, chose a couple of candidates for my Twitter design, digressed and selected some Third Man picts for my Film Class, chose the "Blue Sky 2" picture for Blogger, and contacted all the photographers concerned. By Sunday all had replied with permissions and I was able to show my finished Twitter page to the chap who had supplied me with the "Apple White Bricks" picture that gave uniqueness to my page. I learned a lot, but not by any sort of predetermined step-by-step.