Like it?

There’s nothing like completely overhauling your website to smack you right into the fundamental questions of life. Why am I on earth? Does it have anything to do with getting my website to look perfect on all 3,819 browsers in the cosmos, as well as being understandable, simple and yet elegant on PDAs, text-to-speech simulators, and an Etch-a-Sketch? If not, should redesigning this site take precedence over video games, sleep, eating, and neck pain? If I’m going to waste my time, can’t I do it in a more pleasant fashion?

Like most experiences that smack you into the fundamental questions, however, it offers few answers. So I continue to trudge on through the ideas I mentioned earlier about site design. The new theme? Simplify, simplify.

Unfortunately, simplifying can be absurdly complex. I’m beginning to realize that I can’t, in the space of a single human lifetime, learn to be a master writer and a master web designer and a master woodworker and artist and builder and farmer and musician and potter and linguist. You can’t gorge the arts. A master has many hobbies, but one craft.

As soon as I type that, I disagree, and the truth is probably somewhere between that and the “You can do anything” mantra that leads to half a life spent in grad school. I don’t mean to disparage hobbies; Chesterton has a great passage in Outline of Sanity (I hope) where he laments that a man in a factory is only permitted to use his “best” skill, so he never gets a chance to be a fairly good tenor, a so-so checker player, or a barely decent bowler. My problem is the maniacal illusion that if I just find the right website, I can be a professional tenor, checker player, bowler, and web designer, all in less than two hours.

So forgive the stylistic burps that I know echo through this “beta” site. Dangit, Jim, I’m a writer, not a design guru…and even some of their sites get shredded by text browsers (I checked). I have officially relegated my design aspirations to “hobby”, and I hope henceforward to enjoy them.