Whenever I have really taken the time to look closely at the nature of the relationship that I have with my husband, I believe that if we've proven anything in the years we've been married it is that I? Am not an engineer.

For example, if I had to identify one of the most outstanding characteristics of my personality, it would unfortunately have to be my Stunning Inability To Locate Myself In Time And Space. I get lost all the time, so often in fact that there now exists a Greatest Hits Collection of my best "getting lost" stories:

-like the time I got lost leading a group of friends who were helping us move into our new house, despite the fact that I had just driven myself to said house only the day before,

-or the time I was driving down the highway, headed to the same place I'd gone every single Monday night for an entire year, missed my exit, got off the highway, turned around, and headed back in the opposite direction (because, HELLO, that's supposed to work!), somehow ended up on an entirely different Interstate and had to call my husband to guide me home so I didn't accidentally end up in Alabama.

-or the time in graduate school when I got lost on The Loop that encircled my city, called my husband (then boyfriend) who was also in graduate school, but in an entirely different city to announce that, "It's pitch black and I have no idea where I am, and I'm completely out of gas and am running on fumes. So even if you wanted to come and rescue me you couldn't, because there's no way you could find me. Tell my parents I love them."

I am truly someone who needs to wear a special ID bracelet at all times. But instead of having a medical alert mine should say, "While extremely proficient in exploring the realms of the mind, wearer is completely incapable of navigating herself around the physical world."

My husband, the engineer, does not have this problem at all. As a matter of fact, he is so good at orienting himself in the physical realms of time and space that he would routinely call me up when we were in graduate school to tell me about the trips he was taking with the outdoor club where they would drop everyone off in the North Georgia wilderness, blindfolded, armed only with a topographical map of the area, a compass, and a knife, and tell them, "OK, now y'all meet us back here tomorrow at this big pile a rocks when ya see the shadow of a bird on this here patch a grass." And he would.

It's fortunate for him that he had this kind of training early on, because he was just recently required put it to use in a "real world" situation just a few months ago when he was on a business trip to El Paso, attending a meeting over the border in Juarez.

He hadn't brought much travel information with him, because he just planned to buy a map of Juarez in El Paso and then find his way around from there. Unfortunately there was not one single map of Juarez to be had anywhere in El Paso.

But at the moment when many others would've given up ("Hi, boss. You know that business you sent me down here to conduct for you? Well, unfortunately I'm not gonna be able to do it. Yeah, um, Mexico's closed."), he remained undaunted.

"Well, I couldn't find a map," he said. "But I had already been tracking the location of the plant on Google Earth (Um, WHAT?!) so I knew where it was. So I just went back to my hotel, downloaded the satellite images, used them to draw myself a paper map, counted up the number of streets and landmarks, and then traced my way back from the plant to the border."

Now see, NEVER IN LIFE would it have occurred to me to do something like that. Because I? Am not an engineer. I am a language-major, liberal-arts-studying, artsy-farsty, humor-seeking creative writer.

So not surprisingly this issue also comes up whenever my husband tries to teach me how to do something new on the computer.

In his logical, rational engineer mind, all of those conversations sound something like this:

-open up this program on your computer

-click here

-type this

-save your work

-refresh your webpage

But since I am not an engineer, every computer conversation the two of has sounds more like this to me:

"OK, first you need to click on the 'MYSQLVBC+DOSRAMSAPLINUXBYTEREMPDQASAP'. Then it will take you to the 'I find it quite interesting, a noun's a person, place or thing'. So then you will need to 'whoo-ooo-whoo-ooo-beep-beep-creak-crash!' and then it will always 'we-are-the-borg-you-will-be-assimilated-resistance-is-futile'."

"Hey! Are you writing this down?"

"No!" (whimpering)

Clearly, I am not. Because clearly, all of my available mental faculties are focused on planning my escape back to my home planet.

Not surprisingly I usually tend to leave everything technological and electronic up to my husband. And generally speaking, that tends to be in the best interests of everyone involved. Because he is an engineer, and I am not.

But sometimes I do find something technological I care about, so much so that I decide to try and figure it out for myself, rather than waiting until my husband gets home. For example, one day I wanted to figure out how to add those little "subscribe to my blog feed" buttons to my blog template, and of course this meant entering The Frightening World Of Computer Code.

Now, I've never actually hurt anything on any computer (that I know of), but somehow I have made up this horrible story about myself. In my own mind I see my touching anything having to do with the actual coding of the actual programs as the equivalent of Godzilla thoughtlessly decimating an entire Japanese village. The poor, unwary villager lines of code would just be innocently going about their business, and then here I would come, squishing the "0's" and "1's" with my gargantuan Godzilla paws, and smashing into the carefully constructed HTML commands with the uncontrollable flailing of my giant Godzilla tail.

I think this might be because I'm so used to dealing with people rather than with machines. I "get" people. I know how to interact with them. I pick up lots of information about them intuitively, and I can figure out whatever I need to do in any given situation.

But when I'm faced with a computer, I get nothing. It just sits there, all shiny and enticing, mocking me. "Oh foolish mortal, who thinks she can penetrate my innermost secret...ha, ha Ha, Ha, HA, HA!"

So I am VERY happy to report that somehow, this liberal arts, language major, people person managed to figure out how to include the code for 4 subscription buttons to the sidebar of her blog, and nothing was wrecked! And lo, the villagers rejoiced.