Of One Whose Driving Skills Are Poor

When I was driving home the other day, I was behind a man in a nice SUV. The man in the nice SUV came to a stop sign before I did, as people who are driving in front of me are wont to do. Even though the road we were traveling ended there, and the man in the nice SUV must clearly turn either to the right hand or to the left, his turn signal was left untouched.

I always find it slightly annoying when people don't use their turn signals - especially when they haven't forgotten about it but have decided that it's unnecessary. The point of using your blinker is to show the drivers around you what you intend, and if you don't see any cars around you that's no excuse: it's the cars that you don't see that need to know what you're going to the most. Besides, it's just a flick of the wrist! If you think it's too tiresome, just pretend it's a Bop-it game, and whenever you're going to turn or change lanes, your car suddenly says, "Bop-it down!" or "Bop-it up!" That makes it fun. And besides, not using your blinker reveals a vacant mind. I rest my case, which has been logically and unanswerably presented.

Where were we? Ah yes, the man in the nice SUV had not used his turn signal. Well, I wasn't really worried about this gross lack of courtesy. I have seen too many drivers behaving similarly to think this instance remarkable. Anyway, the man in the nice SUV had driven to the far left side of the lane, leaving more than a car's width of pavement to his right. Clearly, he intended to turn left. I was going right, so I pulled alongside him and began to check for traffic... when the man in the nice SUV turned right.

"Silly driver," I said, rather loudly. But of course he pretended not to hear.

A Tearjerker

I have been painting for work these days - painting my dad's new office space so he can move his business into a place with pretty beige walls instead of bare sheetrock. It's no use denying that I sometimes get tired of painting. No, seriously, I will not deny it! I do! The constant up and down motion, the constant bending over to get more paint, and either the constant vigilance or the constant cleaning of spills and spots - it just isn't something I think I'll want to do in heaven. And when you have over a thousand square feet of wall space that is frequently interrupted by wooden trim boards that have to be painted with a brush, the job can be very tiresome indeed. There's nothing like a full week of repetitive work to make you appreciate the Sabbath.

Painting does have several notable advantages for me, though; it's not all a trial and a bore. For one thing, it's something I know I can do well. Sheetrocking, which I was doing last week, is not.

If I have any sheetrocking skills at all, they're pretty thickly buried under a couple strata of inexperience. I started last week with a couple pieces that had to be scribed to fit a rather irregular wall that included a ledge, a sill, an electrical track, and a beam. I measured wrong somehow and ended up with a nice one-inch gap between the board and the wall for about six inches at the top. The next piece I cut was almost just right, but was just big enough that I had to keep trimming down tiny slices off the end to make it fit. At least it was snug when I finally got it into place. By that time I was quite tired (just as, incidentally, I am now!), and I almost quit for the day. Not really feeling like I had accomplished much, however, I decided to try for one more board, this one a simpler specimen. All it called for was a simple rectangular window cutout. I measured once, measured again, and set to work cutting.

Suddenly, I stopped myself. I had just been about to cut on the wrong side of the board! I sighed with relief as I settled down to doing it right. The cuts were clean and beautiful, exactly following the lines I had carefully delineated with a pen and a square. I was sure that in a few minutes I would have earned my rest for the day. As I picked up my opus (it wasn't really magnum; just an opus), I was confronted with the awful truth: I had been right the first time.

There I stood, grasping the mirror image of the piece of sheetrock I wanted and having no way to rewind the time so I could cut it right. It fit perfectly into the space for it if I held it against the wall backward, but that wasn't much comfort. I just left it there and departed for a long weekend. When I got back on Tuesday, the sheetrocking was almost done, and boy was I glad! I've been painting ever since.

The Tales of the Tired Mind

If you look at the timestamp on this post, you will note that it is rather late. I was actually working on another post - a longer, more detailed one - until about ten minutes ago, at which time something happened that showed me I should probably go to bed.

I was writing about some of the work I have been doing lately, work that involved sheetrocking. And I was really tired. Slowly, involuntarily, my eyelids began to droop as I typed away, recounting how the other day I had been tired but had decided to put up just one last sheet of drywall before heading to supper.

Suddenly, I realized I had been drifting into that misty semi-unconsciousness in which one is neither alert nor slumbering. I hadn't quite fallen asleep, but I had begun to dream at least a little. I shook myself, unable to recall where my thoughts had just been wandering, and looked at the clock. It was past one.

"Maybe I should finish this later," I thought, and when I looked at the computer screen I decided that was a good plan.

"By this time I was very tired," I had written, "but I decided that I would lend my land to the farmer boys..."

The Other Side of the Coin

You know how the squeaky wheel gets the grease? Well, sometimes the whining mosquito gets the slap.

Debunking a Myth

We have all heard it said that a picture is worth a thousand words, and in some cases this statement bears a degree of accuracy. It is, for example, difficult to reproduce in words a facial expression portraying absolute shock, or joy, or anguish. The words we use, if used well, may evoke mental images that accurately represent what language is attempting to convey, but it is still pictures that do the trick. Show someone a picture of the beautiful view you enjoyed from a mountaintop and a thousand words of description are immediately rendered unnecessary. Show someone a picture of an adorable baby, and information that words simply cannot express is successfully shared.

Words, on the other hand, wield a kind of power that pictures would only dream of, had they the ability. A good book is far more likely to make me want to cry than the saddest of pictures – though I must concede that both pictures and words can make me laugh without great difficulty. Language can conjure thoughts, feelings, and emotions that photography cannot touch. If I let it, a good novel can toss my heart around like a hacky-sack. An encouraging personal note, though it be only ten words long, can mean more to me than all the pictures in China. Words can do things to me that pictures never could. That is why Microsoft Word is more used than Adobe Photoshop. That is why the library has so many books that are largely devoid of illustration. And that is why Edgar Allen Poe wrote “The Raven” instead of sketching a big black bird sitting on a statue.

So the question I want answered is this: to what words and pictures was the proverbist referring when he made his precise comparison of their value? Sometimes words are priceless, and sometimes pictures are; sometimes one is absolutely useless where the other is quite invaluable. It is all relative. There are instances where a picture truly is worth a thousand words, and there are other instances where a thousand pictures will not suffice for a simple word fitly spoken.

I am of the opinion that photography and writing cannot be fairly compared. They are apples and oranges, two different forms of expression that were created for different purposes. I take pictures because I like to capture visual beauty and to explore different perspectives. I write because I like to use verbal beauty to positively affect my audience, whether through humor, insight, or intellect. Both an essay and a poster have some degree of worth, but that worth is pretty subjective. Is this 500-word article worth half a picture? I think not.

A lot depends on the quality of the sample in question, by the way. A picture may be worth a million LOL’s, but no number of photographs will ever be worth a Dickens.