Career Composting

It has been uncharacteristically sunny this weekend. But instead of basking in bright light and the warm 40 degree weather, I spent all of my daylight hours in the basement of the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Prior to Saturday morning I had no idea what a Cascading Style Sheet was. Frankly, I was a little nervous about getting through the class with my rather weak computing skills. This sense of doom was exacerbated because I didn't sleep a wink the night before (inexplicable insomnia).

Somewhere in the middle of eight hours devoted to the foreign language of computer programming code I started to feel encouraged.

As the instructor reviewed HTML coding for the rest of the class and introduced it to me, I instantly drew parallels between the code and traditions of manuscript styling.

The bracketed instructions in manuscript share almost the same syntax as HTML and CSS. There is a marker to show where pages, paragraphs, and headings begin and end. Text styling such as boldface, italicizing, and underlining is called inline editing just as it is in print publishing. If I hadn't worked in publishing, the concepts would have been entirely foreign and, in the context of my accelerated academic schedule, probably overwhelming.

I felt relief that something from my former profession could be salvaged and used to bolster my effort to resist erasure. Perhaps I'm not headed to obsolescence after all.