I sat down twice yesterday with the best of intentions. I meant to write. I really did. I had ideas that I wanted to write about, and they were really great ideas. Wonderful things. Things you really wanted to know about, ideas you’d never had, insights that would have changed your life. Yeah, that blog post was going to be the one that changed everything.

Except, it didn’t, because I got sidetracked by shiny buttons in my blogging software.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. I get a great idea for a song, and sit down to record it; hours later, I have ... nothing. Well, not nothing. I have a lingering sense of frustration with being unable to get the recording software to do exactly what I want, or being unable to eliminate the distracting static from a particular instrument connection, or some other technical glitch.

I’m using a software package called Storymill for a project I’m working on. It’s a great tool for organizing a large writing project, with outlining, notes, linking, and lots of other features that are really helpful. Sometimes. But the best feature of Storymill has to be its “full screen” mode, which makes my computer look a lot like the first computer I ever wrote with. The entire interface is hidden, and you’re presented with a black screen and a flashing cursor. At this point, you write. You don’t format, or compose, or do layout. You just start writing, sending words onto the screen. It’s a poor interface for editing, and it’s horribly archaic. It’s also incredibly helpful. All the distractions are removed, and you’re left with ... words.

Recording music should be this easy. Programming should be this easy. Life should be this easy.

But life isn’t. A lot of the tools I use every day aren’t that simple. For example, I just spent nearly 5 minutes getting that small thumbnail screenshot into this post. Some of that time was spent remembering which key-sequence fires off the screen capture function on my MacBook Pro (it’s command-shift-4.) The rest of it was spent importing the screenshot into iPhoto (It’s a screenshot, not a photo, but the “media” browser in iWeb doesn’t just let me browse to a folder to find images,) and then figuring out how to put the image into this post and get text to wrap around it (you have to drop the image onto the page, “cut” it off, get into the text box in “text” mode, paste it in, and then adjust its properties using the inspector.)

The other day, I tried to describe my frustration with how my life has gone in conversation with a friend. I said finally that it wasn’t the big things that had gone horribly wrong that discouraged me, it’s the millions of little things that are way more difficult to do than they should be. When I think about that, I realize that a lot of the things that are supposed to make life easier really don’t.

For example: cell phones make it possible to reach virtually anyone virtually anywhere virtually anytime. It seems like that would be a good thing, and as a parent, I find cell phones to be essential. Except that now I have think about answering the phone all the time. Before I had a cell phone, I only had to think about answering the phone when I was home, or when I was sitting at my desk at work. It’s not that answering the phone is hard, but there’s a level of effort involved, and there’s – for want of a better term – a psychic cost involved in being interruptible anywhere anytime. People who call me don’t seem to understand this. I’m not being terse because I’m angry; I’m not being vague because I’m not interested in the conversation; I’m not being short because I don’t like you. I’m driving. Or in a meeting, or on my way to the bathroom, or about to get into an elevator, or talking to my child, or sitting down for the first time all day after running around dealing with all the things people call me on my cell phone to get me to deal with.

Cell phones are just one example. We can browse the internet on laptops, cell phones, wifi, etc. All that empowering technology is great, except when it isn’t. Do I really need to know that the thing I’m about to buy at Target is cheeper at another store 15 minutes away? Does it really matter what other people think of the restaurant I’m about to eat in? Do I need to know all the stuff that’s out there that I can know about whatever I’m doing? And what happens when this technology doesn’t work? I love having an iPhone, but I want the time back that I’ve spent trying to get it to connect to the 3g network, or calibrating its location services, or asking me whether I want to join a network it has found.

The answer to that last one, by the way, is that I want my phone to only ask me whether to join networks that I want to join, not the ones I don’t. Before I had a phone that asked me this question, I was blissfully ignorant of the topology of wifi networks around me. And I lived.

But I’m sounding like an old grumpy person at this point, so I’ll end there.