I was just uploading a YouTube video. In fact, I was about halfway through an upload. And then, I shifted my laptop a little and this set off a series of events. My laptop's keyboard is old and gunky, so I use a USB keyboard that sits atop the normal keyboard. And every once in a while it presses against the screenshot key. Thus my laptop takes screenshots. Many of them. So many that it floods out all other processes and I have to open a command line and manually kill the processes. In this case, it used up all my memory and the browser crashed in the middle of the upload. And then when I restart...there it is at 51%. Not moving upwards. Is it a zombie upload? Should I kill the past hour and start again? It is 1 AM.

Do you know what they say about Linux? That it makes hard things easy, and easy things impossible. There is probably some intricate reason why someone would want to take 100 screenshots in 500 milliseconds. There are many non-intricate reason why a normal user would not want that to happen. But I have chosen this particular operating system, and I don't get upset when Linux decides to Linux.

But I have to admit, even though I am 41 years old, that when dealing with people, I sometimes think: "Can we please not do this in the most difficult, stupid, joy-destroying way possible?" Given two options, one of which is an easy, fun and productive way to do something, and the other which is difficult, miserable and doomed to failure, maybe once in a while we should look for the first? At the risk of bringing up indelicate subjects, once I had a girlfriend who suggested we needed a conversational safeword to use when we were walking on dangerous emotional territory, an easy way to say that this is not a time to start picking at scabs. Every once in a while, a bolt of insight comes down that maybe this isn't the day to see if we can find it for a little bit cheaper across town, or try to repair a sparking washing machine while holding a flashlight in our teeth or to convince people that they need recommendations on how our favorite self-help author can change their life. Maybe every once in a while we can decide to do things the easy way.