Some Kind of Help is the Kind of Help We All Can Do Without*

Last year someone said to me, rather heatedly, "Your problem is that you can't ask for help. You need to learn to let people help you!" Paradoxically it was during a conversation where I was trying to pare down the number of people who had agreed to help me with a particular challenge to a manageable level because so many people had offered their services. I suspect her problem was that I never ask her for help but that's really another issue all together.

The thing about asking for help is that it is hard. Probably that's a good thing. Help is good and necessary but a little self-reliance won't go amiss either. I like to feel really comfortable with someone before asking for their help, though that's not a requirement. I also find that it's important to allow for the possibility for a refusal in your request. That makes the process easier on everyone and often gets more positive responses or better solutions to the problem you're putting in the mill.**

Now what I'm working on is asking again. I'm pretty comfortable with the short form:

1. Encounter problem
2. Find skills and resources lacking
3. Ask for help
4. Get refusal (or agreement with no follow through)
5. Abandon problem and have a piece of cake

In the long program you have to make a whole if/then chart out of that 5th step. Do you ask the same person for help with different parameters? Is it just a question of reminding them of the agreement? Do you go looking for someone else to help? Do you ask for a different kind of help? Is John Stewart available? He seems like a helpful guy.

So many variables for my New England/Capricorn sensibilities. It makes me shudder. I have a number of things stuck in step 5 limbo at any given time. Maybe we all do. In the best of all possible worlds a workable answer just descends from the skies above and all is well.*** 99 times out of 100, though, the skies help those who help themselves.

I want to change my blog. (Specifics to follow.)

I have a friend who is learning how to do such things as a way to make wads of cash to support his artistic habits.

I saw a possibility for him to polish some skills and me to get 117 Hudson prettified so I asked if he might help me. He said, "I will if you get a Wordpress blog, all the jobs I see are about Wordpress."

I'm not yet a huge fan of Wordpress. I don't think it's any better or worse than the other platforms out there but I don't see it as so beautiful and functional and divine that I must move right now and have to learn a whole new platform and have a UFC level fight with graphics every time I want to post a picture.

So here I am at Step 5 and I'm trying really hard not to order the cake.

Do any of you know how I could inexpensively or barterly get some sprucing up done around here? These are the thoughts I'm having about the place but all are negotiable:

• Customized banner, preferably with one or more of my own pics
• Maybe my own url
• Blogroll
• Links section
• An "e-mail me" button
• A tag line (yeah I'll have to come up with that on my own, not sure what it's going to be)
• Can I be taught to update my own blogroll/banner/tag line/etc?
• Can I be taught how to "strike through" text? (Mrs. G, I meant to ask you this on your "Ask Me Questions" post but I thought of it too late.)
• I'd like the title of each post to link to the page of that post
• I want to be able to navigate to Next Post and Previous Post from an individual post's page
• I like the fact that Blogger has a "search this blog" button so I want to keep that functionality
  

So I don't think what I'm asking for is super crazy difficult (for someone who's done this before, I do think it's super crazy difficult for me) and I think there are other things I'd like to do that I haven't listed here but they will come to me.

Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions? Funny anecdotes? Anything I can help you with?

Feel free to say no. You won't hurt my feelings. But I might go eat some cake.



*From Free To Be You & Me, which you need to have if you have kids and you really ought to have even if you don't.

**That's a little nugget of wisdom I got from PB and it has served me well.

***In the best of all possible worlds it descends with cake.