By Julia Sneden 

Routing of neural signals from the two eyes to the brain, Gray's Anatomy, Wikimedia Commons

If you have never checked out The Quotations Page, may I suggest that you give it a glance, and possibly bookmark it so that you can check its popular "Quotes of the Day?" I've been an addict of this site for a long time, both when I want to look up a particular quote, and when I'm just in the mood for some random wisdom. You can find just about anything to affirm your position on almost any subject. Trouble is, you can also find just about anything to refute whatever it is you think you know.

The other day, I found a quote from Alvin Toffler, the futurist academic, editor and author of Future Shock.  According to Dr. Toffler:

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."

Boy oh boy, am I in trouble! As anyone who has updated a couple of computers and/or cell phones knows, mastering the ins and outs of each new device is always tricky, and after the first two or three, becomes downright impossible unless you are holding the manual in your hands … only computers and cell phones no longer come with good manuals. Oh, you can always go to a bookstore and pick up a book promising to teach you how to learn the new system, even if you're an idiot. My experiences with those books indicate that the idiot is whoever put them together and found an idiotic publisher, because those volumes are (a) fond of words you don’t know and they don't define, and (b) badly indexed, and (c) even more badly illustrated.

Or, you can go to a designated website and download nearly a ream's worth of instructions which you will then need to keep in a desk drawer, if you have a desk drawer that's sufficiently empty to receive the bulk. Then, when you need to find an answer, you can root through the badly-indexed, loose sheets of 8xll printout paper to try to locate the proper section. I have finally learned to take down my very own, short "cheat sheet" that lists all the usual problems for which I need answers. Trouble is, I seem unable ever to anticipate potential problems for situations that I didn’t know might arise in the first place.

I tell myself that the problem is that, having learned and then dealt with so many new systems and configurations, I know too much. One system leaches over into another somewhere down in the quagmire that is my brain, and sorting out which procedure works or worked with which system is something akin to untangling the mess in my scrap fabric drawer after a grandchild has played with everything in it and added all the loose spools of thread from the drawer above.

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