My husband says I should stop worrying about whether I have the right WordPress theme and just write.  I feel like he’s accusing me of procrastinating, and I don’t want him to be right about anything right now because I’m still mad at him because of a tiff we had about Adobe Lightroom, which I’m sure is a bone of contention in every family.

(Did you catch my pun in the last sentence?)

I don’t remember how our argument started but he was trying to get me to learn Lightroom by watching video tutorials.  I just wanted him to learn by trial and error or whatever, and then teach me, because that is how I learn best.  This is actually really my learning style.  I date or marry someone who is good at something I suck at, and then they teach me.  So I said that I don’t learn very well from video tutorials, which is true (although it’s also true that I refuse to watch them).  Then–you’re not going to believe what he said to me—he said, “How did you learn in college?!” in a snarky, patronizing voice.  I got really angry and I told him that maybe instead of watching videos on how to “post-process” he should watch some on how to talk to his wife.

Later I saw him watching a video in which the guy says, ever so slowly, “Sharpening is a difficult concept to wrap your head around, and it’s really tough to put it into words…” and I’m thinking, “Then shut the hell up until you figure it out” because there’s nothing worse than listening to someone ramble on and on in a video when you just want to learn the concept and move on.  This is part of why I don’t watch video tutorials.  I don’t like the way they talk and my mind wanders, because it’s a tutorial, which means it’s probably boring.  I told my husband, “You’re a guy who doesn’t have 5 minutes to sit and listen to his wife without doing something else simultaneously, but you sit there, without moving, for 30 minutes and watch a guy drone on about the sharpening tool!  In the 20 hours a week you’ve been spending on this new Lightroom hobby, you not only could have figured out if I have the right WordPress theme, but you could have created a website for me from scratch, and simultaneously made a huge deposit in our Emotional Bank Account for doing something just because it’s important to me!” I think he is still processing this.

In the meantime, even though my husband says I should get my ideas out there and not worry about my WordPress theme, he says little things like, “It’s not so easy to switch themes,” to which I’ll reply, “Yeah, that’s why I’m asking for your help to make sure it’s a good one.” Or he says, “Why do you have a picture of dead fish as your header? I think people are going to wonder what the significance of the fish is,” and I’ll respond, “Because I can’t figure out how to make any other size photo fit the header.  Think of the dead fish as a cry for help.”  He’ll then dismiss my concerns about my theme, and he’ll turn back to his video tutorial about sharpening.  Apparently it takes no time to decide on a theme or to learn WordPress, where terms like “widget” and “bloated child theme” have no inherent meaning in the English language, but it takes 30 minutes or more just to learn that in Lightroom, if you move the slide rule thingy back and forth on the line that says “Sharpening”, the picture—gasp!—gets sharper or less sharp?!

I think some of us should think twice before we criticize other people’s learning style.  Humph.