Mental Challenges

You ever feel like an idiot? I mean, not just having-a-blond-moment kind of idiot, but a full-on what-the-hell's-the-matter-with-me kind of numnut.

I love hanging out with my home-educating girls. But every time we get to talking, and each time I read the message boards, that feeling of intellectual inadequacy comes over me. It's not that I'm unintelligent, I remind myself; it's that these women are all above-average. They really are smarter than the average American. Way smarter. And it's very humbling.

Even so, I give myself pep talks and convince myself that while I may not be brilliant like my friends and fellow home educators, I am at least somewhat intelligent.

Then comes a day like yesterday. I spent hours --hours-- on the computer, trying to figure out how to burn CDs and load videos onto Noah's mp3 player. This is something any teenager can do with speed and ease, right? So, how hard can it be? Apparently, very hard. At first, the CDs we burned (burnt?) wouldn't play on a CD player at all, just on the computer. After a while of fiddling, I discovered that Media Player had been set to "Burn Data to Disc," not audio. Big, fat DUH.

Alright, I figured that out. I had to burn a new disc, since these are not rewritable CDs, but luckily they weren't expensive. This time the stereo played the CD, but the quality was terrible. I mean, on the computer, it played just fine. But on the stereo it sounded like the tapes we used to make by holding the recorder up to the radio. Well, I figured, at least you can hear music. That's enough technology-induced stress for one day.

Not so! Then we tried to transfer video onto the mp3 player. Apparently, you can't download videos from You Tube, but we did find this handy little website (http://www.videocodezone.com/) that will convert video web pages into various downloadable formats. It only took me two hours to figure out which format would work both on our computer and on Noah's mp3 player. Noah's like, "Can't you just convert the file on Video Code Zone, then have the mp3 player software convert it into the format it needs?" Well, yeah, smart ass. That's what I'm trying to do, but it won't work.

So I spent a very demoralizing couple more hours trying to figure out why this process wasn't following the logic I thought it should (and that the Help screen said it should). It came down to trial and error. I finally got it to work, but I still don't understand why. If I only had a 16-year-old kid in my life to explain it all to me...or my Daddy, who intuitively understands all things electronic.

But the upside of the day was that Noah and I had a little bonding time. Downside is, I feel downright stupid. Time to find some rednecks to talk to; they always make me feel better about myself. You don't happen to know any, do you?