The old saw runs that a picture is worth a thousand words. Words seem pretty important to me right now, as do sounds, particularly when I must connect headphones to my central processing unit in order to hear sonic hills of the sound of music on my computer, as opposed to the windmill splendor of what I shall euphoniously term the Great Whirr.
The thing about endless still photos with text, animated with some appropriate software, is that the words as well as the pictures can tell a story. I frankly am positively from Samaria on the old saw--because I like any 1,000 words of mine better than any picture I take. I notice that in social settings, for me, words become something of a commodity.
When I am near someone with whom i am comfortable, I spend them freely. Once in a while I spend them in discomfort. Usually, when I am among people I do not know well, words that matter get hoarded in combinations more secret than a Swiss bank.
I remember a woman in junior high school who tried too hard. She proved, in the long run, to be a rather attractive women, and she was, at that early age, less duckling than swan. Yet she had that indefinable but palpable need to be liked that is so often the death of social success. I wish I could ascribe some trite "she deserved it because she was depending on others to meet her needs" moral, like in a situation comedy. But the reality is that the troupe instinct sometimes disserves people who frankly don't deserve the ostracism inherent in just wanting to be loved. I have not kept up with the young woman, by the way, who, like me, would no longer qualify for the term. My rough recollection is that she married a man women found attractive, and lived happily ever after--almost like those episodes of the cartoon Daria in which Daria meets her aunt, and we all realize that this cool Aunt is the foreshadow of Daria herself as an adult.
My own instinct is to be effusive with people I like. I vaguely worry that this can be off-putting. Then, without losing my way of learning and calibration as situations evolve, I surrender myself to the effusion. We all need a little rain sometimes. We can all be a little rain, sometimes. Even if our poor dogs must bear the indignity of being placed into psychedelic cards with cute text. My dog Beatrice loves effusion, and tennis ball throws. I am not a particularly effective person in my kindness, but in the task of learning to connect better with people, I often suspect that precise exacto knife work is less important than assiduous glue on the modeling kit.
