I read two articles in the old-timey newspapers this morning, one revealing that speaking another language may help delay dementia and the other suggesting that sitting for eight hours a day can shave off five years of a typical adult's lifespan.
So after spending a marathon week hunched over my laptop, bent on becoming fluent in the 3-D modelling program SketchUp, I've decided that the most I can hope for is a sharp awareness that I'm headed for an earlier grave.
This sitting stuff is tough. I know most adults are prone to prolonged periods of it, but it's also what led to the epiphany that I could possibly assume another position than that of the chicken-necked editor, staring at punctuation on a screen all day long. So I took a stand, walked away from the job and have avoided most seat-warming activity ever since. Until last week, when I could no longer run from the real need to learn how to present my sketches in SketchUp. Now I am back in chicken-neck mode, struggling in a trial-and-error approach (What? Take a course? Neveh!) of drawing a shape, wrecking the shape, deleting the shape and starting again. Repeat. For 10 hours a day. All those years of repetitive learning in needlework and music are serving me well yet my dreams are full of angles and tubes, flying through space on the green axis and the red axis. I am the Sarah or Anna (depending on what sanity-restoring YouTubed tutorials I'm following), bushwacking through the geometric jungle, looking for a space to breathe, maybe something with four perpendicular walls and a parambular roof. (If nothing else, I am learning some fancy geometric terms).
I could always outsource this part to someone who actually knows what she's doing, but that doesn't fit with a lot of us makers. We need to get in there, stick our chicken necks out, muck around and figure out how to make this system work for our conceptual purposes.
I'm proud to say I've moved from Hopeless in SketchUp to Super Shitty. My grey matter is definitely vibrating, so I can only hope it's not dementia but some neural generation. There may be light at the end of that backward, inverted, bisected tunnel cluster, but for now it's back to the e-drawing board until I can't sit it anymore.
A little sample of the kind of SketchUp fluency I will never acheive:
So after spending a marathon week hunched over my laptop, bent on becoming fluent in the 3-D modelling program SketchUp, I've decided that the most I can hope for is a sharp awareness that I'm headed for an earlier grave.
This sitting stuff is tough. I know most adults are prone to prolonged periods of it, but it's also what led to the epiphany that I could possibly assume another position than that of the chicken-necked editor, staring at punctuation on a screen all day long. So I took a stand, walked away from the job and have avoided most seat-warming activity ever since. Until last week, when I could no longer run from the real need to learn how to present my sketches in SketchUp. Now I am back in chicken-neck mode, struggling in a trial-and-error approach (What? Take a course? Neveh!) of drawing a shape, wrecking the shape, deleting the shape and starting again. Repeat. For 10 hours a day. All those years of repetitive learning in needlework and music are serving me well yet my dreams are full of angles and tubes, flying through space on the green axis and the red axis. I am the Sarah or Anna (depending on what sanity-restoring YouTubed tutorials I'm following), bushwacking through the geometric jungle, looking for a space to breathe, maybe something with four perpendicular walls and a parambular roof. (If nothing else, I am learning some fancy geometric terms).
I could always outsource this part to someone who actually knows what she's doing, but that doesn't fit with a lot of us makers. We need to get in there, stick our chicken necks out, muck around and figure out how to make this system work for our conceptual purposes.
I'm proud to say I've moved from Hopeless in SketchUp to Super Shitty. My grey matter is definitely vibrating, so I can only hope it's not dementia but some neural generation. There may be light at the end of that backward, inverted, bisected tunnel cluster, but for now it's back to the e-drawing board until I can't sit it anymore.
A little sample of the kind of SketchUp fluency I will never acheive:
