I’m sure the above is the punch line to one of my father’s more-sophisticated-than-Borscht-Belt jokes. Punch lines — well-worn like someone’s favorite upholstered chair — hung in the air at our house when I was growing up, just waiting to be grabbed and used (ugh, brings to mind “grab-no-go,” that awful phrase). Taste the soup, he had a little het, it won’t be long now said the rabbi (and yes, there’s no comma in there) — all more or less Yiddish-inflected, although my parents wouldn’t want me saying that.

Don’t We Have People To Do That? — whether it was one of those hanging-in-the-air phrases or not — should have been. It’s what I’m thinking after wasting — er, no, spending — an entire day messing around with WordPress, wondering if I should be using Square Space or Weebly or Wix or paying for something more flexible and friendly, wondering why on earth I’m not just writing (or “composing,” as we’re saying in many of my graduate school classes these days). After all, isn’t that what I’m here for? To write, to read, to think — not to find my way around WordPress’s stamped-out-in-a-factory-in-China “themes.”

My art director father isn’t in his grave yet, but he may just roll around in some imagined one if he ever understands what a “theme” is. I was always a word person — writer, editor — back in the day when there were those sharp divisions (which were, like most things in life, both good and bad). I wasn’t a designer, but still, this prefab, everyone-can-do-it ethos horrifies me. Partly because it denies and erases the skill and craft of those who can truly practice this art, this science, this metier. But partly because I resent the inability to create what I really want to create — if you understand, or even halfway understand, the nuances of white space, type size, font choice, font color, image, and all the rest, then having to shoehorn it all into the bento box you’re given is deeply offensive.

And while I can certainly tinker and toy and play (preferably on the job, on someone’s dime, when medical benefits are involved), what I want to do now, here, as part of this crazy midlife adventure of returning to school, is to play and build and, yes, tinker, with words. Not templates. Or as WordPress would have it, godhelpusall, “themes.”

When I crossed the river (the Potomac) from the Washington Post to go work at washingtonpost.com (no capital W, thank you very much), I remember learning to code a wee, tiny, minuscule bit in those early days (that first digital effort was a separate division, in another state, with right-to-work laws — another division that would be effaced when the two parts were reunited some years later). And in frustration one day, I turned to the Post’s heir apparent, Don Graham, when he’d come out to Virginia to our nascent newsroom, and complained about having to do all the tasks that digital journalists and everyday bloggers now take for granted (writing the headlines, sizing the photos, doing the code, etc., etc., etc.), and said: “You want us all to be pressmen!” … And he laughed, understanding that underneath my joking tone was a deep annoyance, and replied, “Yes, exactly.”

When I arrived at the Post from the New York magazine world (back when dinos perambulated the earth), I was struck by the big, burly pressmen that you would see when you went to the Post’s godawful cafeteria. There was nothing there worth eating save the Southern biscuits with Southern sausage gravy, one of the few culinary delights I’d never sampled in my palette-defying New York childhood. But there were two sights worth seeing: one was Ben Bradlee, large as life with his weathered, movie-star face and always a tweed jacket (with elbow patches? do I imagine that?), schmoozing with palpable joy (if WASPs can be said to schmooze); the other was the pressmen, most of them deaf, expressively and emphatically signing to each other. Washington was and is a center of deaf culture and population because of the presence of the renowned Gallaudet University. From Ben and the pressmen to a world with no photo editors, no editors, no writers, divisions dropping dropping dropping, lines blurring blurring blurring. Or rather, a world in which the same body houses all of the above. But no biscuits and gravy.