I'm a reasonably intelligent person. There are some things I can understand on a conceptual level that I cannot make work on the concrete level, and vise verse. My coordination is great, unless I'm thinking about it. The day I put my lawn mower together was a magnificent day. As far as I was concerned, I'd climbed Mount Olympus and won a wrestling match with Hercules all in one fell swoop. My vocabulary is pretty good, but there are days when polysyllabic explanations leave me muddled and frustrated; being frustrated muddles me even more. Then, when I find out that there is a perfectly good, simple explanation for the concept, I stomp. I get pissed when I'm outsmarted by words. It drives me nuts.
I'm working on two, related, projects right now. In one, I'm learning how to use XSL to play with XML documents. When I see the solutions, I can see, exactly, how it works, but I can't get there on my own. My second project involves DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) and there are three types of conversations about DITA that all revolve around how to do something with the structure of DITA. Some of the conversation is easy, authoring issues - some of the conversations are technical, dealing with XSL or the rendering engines - some are just beyond me and I have no idea what they're talking about. My three buckets. One I can follow, and often get ideas from, one that I can peer vaguely into and get the gist of, one I am left wondering just what the writer is saying and what they're saying it about.
I would sigh, in fact I did, but that is not something that really works in this medium.
If the medium is the message, I'm wondering what I'm missing. The whole idea of simplicity, in this case I'm exchanging my reader-facing simplicity for my creator-facing simplicity. I'm balancing a huge technical weight hoping that I will be delivering, to my reader, a clear, focused result. Something that will make their experience simpler.
I just wish it didn't leave me feeling like I've just jumped off a bridge because someone else told me it would be a good idea.