Following my clever-yet-failed attempt to jury-rig a scanner out of common materials found in any college kid's bedroom, I slouched on over to the local library to try my hand at using their machines.
If there was a book out there that taught people how to be a failure in regards to approaching basic scanning, I would now find that book to be obsolete. After all, I already learned all one hundred and seventeen techniques described in that book through a tedious trial and error process of my own.
First, the book into which I'd inked my drawings was too big, meaning it kept getting caught in the lid of the scanner next to me. Then, when I tried to figure out the dimensions of the paper, the machine couldn't decide if it wanted to torment me by cutting off large portions of my drawings, or by shrinking them down altogether. Finally, when I determined the dimensions, I learned I needed to keep the paper perfectly straight, or I would risk cutting off an important line of dialogue or two. Such setbacks only meant I needed to rescan the entire twenty-five pages all over again, as I was using the scanner to email me a completed PDF.
All jargon aside, as the veins popped out in my forehead and my agitation rose, I thought about how this experience could be an allegory for life.
There are so many times we try something, and we fail. We try the same thing over and over again, occasionally yielding different results, more often yielding the same failures, until we attack the problem from a new angle. Each attempt teaches us something new, each success or lack thereof tells us what is right and what is not, and in the end, we come off better because of it.
I guess God does give us trials for a reason.
Either way, tomorrow's the day for my pitch! I'll let you know all about it next week.
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