I forgot to write the blog last night. I was working on Father Mark’s presentation. He doesn’t care about aesthetics nearly as much as me, which is fine, it’s good even. But combine that lack of caring or awareness with an anxiety about accepting my volunteer work, and he’s taken some liberties with updating the presentation. What that means in practice is that the presentation looks pretty slick and up to date, then BAM, a big grainy image with watermarks floating on the middle of the page with an animation that comes in from an angle that nothing else has throughout the entire rest of the presentation.

In some ways it must be freeing to be unburdened by such concerns. I went through that presentation and that slide hit me like a blow. Not because I felt insulted or anything, but because it was so incongruous with the rest of the design and aesthetic. This clearly did not occur to him, or if it did, it was not aggravating enough to be worth asking me to fix. Which I’m happy to do.

Does this very high floor to his ability to be bothered by bad aesthetic lower the ceiling to his ability to enjoy good art? I doubt it. While traveling I am often quite bothered by how bad the design of various things are, from the signage of the Charlotte airport in North Carolina, to the color of shopping bags at some anonymous shop, it’s stuff I notice and am not pleased by. Does he walk through the world with unblemished peace, at least with regards to things such as that?

Jack pointed out that it is likely that he is bothered by other things of which he has a deeper awareness than I. Presumably moral argumentation, that being the spine of the presentation which he wrote and I added some skin or clothing to.

Does he walk the world, listening to people argue and confuse themselves and respond with the same sort of nauseated frustration that I do to, say, a restaurant sign done in Papyrus?

He’s a priest so I would hope that his frustration is far kinder than my own.