I spent hours — 6? 8? more? — trying to get the Suckerfish dropdown menus work at the new Linn County Dems website. The sucker just refused, no matter what I did. I was frantic, just could not believe I was the only person incapable of making the damn things work.

As it turns out, I'm not. I got them to work (yay me) as soon as I read the javascript code carefully and realied the "slight" modification I'd made in my css hosed the script. As soon as I typed in 2 (2!) missing letters, the dropdowns worked perfectly.

It's not just that I did not pay attention to a detail that was within my grasp of comprehending. Worse, I assumed I would not be able to understand the script, so I ignored it. I cut it, I pasted it, and then I hoped I'd get everything else right. Once I read the script, I saw the problem. Or the symptom. The problem was my self-perception. Even at 50, I'm still fixing parts of myself broken when I was a little kid. Sheesh.

And it was just supposed to be a simple dropdown menu, not an exercise in self-revelation.