all things me

I dread social situations, more precisely official situations: presentations, calling on the phone on official matters, handling things at a counter or office somewhere. When I realise I have to do something like that, my heart rate jumps a lot of notches and my face feels like it’s turning red. I have to think how I’m going to start and rehearse a few times.

Still, the situations don’t cause me to blunder; I don’t stutter, get mixed up with my words, or mumble unintelligently. In fact, I’m very normal and seem at ease. Why, then, can’t I remember it when the pre-socialising symptoms start disturbing my calm and collectedness; I won’t make (too bad) a fool out of myself however much I fear it.

I just made a call to customer service to change my parents’ magazine subscription to a discount. I tried to think of a way to state my business, thought I’d figured out a good way to start but still managed to say something quite ungrammatical (it is very easy in Finnish with the 15+ noun cases we have). Nevertheless, I was understood. Don’t get me wrong, I was flushing and well on my way to arrhythmia. But I sailed through it.

Very frustrating.

For a long while I’ve been wanting to re-do my site — the blog, more specifically. I try and sketch, find colour schemes, and start coming up with the basic structure. The problem is, I have no graphic design talent.

Finding nice colours is quite easy, there are lots of tools to make it even easier, too. I have collected hundreds of fonts through the years and there are the selected few that I really like. But after those are taken care of, I should start making my site pretty. That’s when I hit the wall.

I can’t draw (seriously), I possibly can doodle but doodling doesn’t make pretty. Of course, I could make my site with only coloured boxes, but that’s quite dull.

I took a look at my past designs and I may just resort to using one of the old ones (coded better, of course). However, I’d really really like to create something new. Maybe I’ll finally continue with the design which was in the “final polishings” stage two years ago(!!!) — if I can find the files, that is.

How do you do it? Are you one of the lucky ones who have an artistic bone in their body? Do you use some sort of resources to help with the design?

[Edit May 18] And where do you get an idea for the design?! I’ve only managed to think of the main colour so far. Argh! [/Edit]