Why I'm Not a Programmer
The wordpress codex has a little tagline at the bottom of every page that reads, "Code is Poetry." Apparently, I am not a poet. I know I said a couple months ago that I was repenting. I changed my mind. The reason is fairly straightforward: programming makes me feel stupid. Now there are a lot of ways to feel stupid, some of which I have of necessity embraced and even come to appreciate in my life. There's the kind of feeling stupid that comes because you did something oafish, but usually that also comes with making someone laugh, so I'm okay with that. There's the kind of feeling stupid that comes because you don't know something you should know, but there are few better motivators for finding out, so I'm okay with that too. There's the kind of feeling stupid that comes because after a long, stubborn fight, you find out you really are wrong, and that kind of feeling stupid is very, very good for me.
The kind of stupid I've felt in my characteristically enthusiastic foray into the world of basic progrmaming is entirely different. It's like the entire programming community has closed ranks and decided that anyone who missed the CSS bus when it pulled through town 5 years ago doesn't deserve to be on board anyway. I've found thorough step-by-step tutorials on template tags and divs and customizing CSS, [granted, full of language I only vaguely understand] but none of them do me any good if no one will tell me where to find the templates on my blog! I don't know what to search for, I don't know where to search, and after spending hours of time I really don't have feeling more and more stupid, I'm starting to wonder why I'd bother searching.
I've come to the conclusion that the remedial training that would be necessary for me to understand and use the "help" materials currently available, let alone the actual tools, would take me at least a month of concerted effort. And, since I don't regret the way I have spent any of the months of my life since the development of XHTML, this kind of feeling stupid just makes me kinda mad.
