Pulling it all together

I think I should just address something obvious and get it over with: My ethos value as far as pulling it all together is probably pretty low, considering I never really pulled myself together. There were a lot of assignments that I didn't do as well as I can because of various parts of the situation with my back. At base, I think I have to acknowledge that I didn't have the most realistic view of what I could maintain. I've never run into issues with my back this bad, but last semester the issues created for my one evening class were worse than those in both of my daytime classes. It's less important the specifics of the adjustment I'm making than the basic lesson, which is be realistic about what you can handle. The annoying part about all this is the recognition that my reflective nature seems to end when I pull my nose out of a book, if you will. I think this semester was the first that it really hit me that soldiering on until you bleed out isn't all that brave when you could have ducked in the first place.

Even in academics, I learned I'm still learning to pay attention. My seminar paper was a good example. I had to be rescued from an awful topic by Dr. Cadle because I just wasn't paying attention to either how broad it was or how it applied in my own life. Then she points out the changes going on, the same kind of changes I believe I ranted in this blog multiple times about, and, well, if this were World of Warcraft or a similar venue, my reaction would have been typed as /facepalm. I'm not sure if it was panic from the general tenor of my semester or I just slipped and did something stupid, but I missed a really obvious personal application on a comfortably narrow topic and it might as well have been poking at my eyes with a sharp stick, given how many times I've groused this year about not being able to understand the announcers for Dallas Stars hockey because I was watching it on the online feed and THERE WAS NO CAPTIONING.

Maybe this will make it clearer, but I knew a man in college who was the son of a snake wrangler, the guy who handles snakes for movies and such. He said the guys who get bitten most often were the ones who'd been at it long enough to have forgotten they work with dangerous critters and not long enough to have been reminded by one.

I also think I'm going to start paying slightly more attention to what I accept, both in technology and elsewhere, as a given. I've been watching video clips on the Internet since a tiny, grainy, 5-second-long .avi was the state of the art. I could watch whatever I wanted, as long as I didn't need to understand what was said. Big blind spot because I didn't stop to think that just because there had never been captioning didn't mean there couldn't be, or that it was just peachy that there wasn't. I think I'm trying to say that now I've learned to give consideration to what's possible and not just make do with what is.

One final thing this semester showed me was that composing is composing, really. Now, that's not to say writing is video editing is audio mixing. The tools are different and you're going to perform differently using different tools. But the same process, the same way of looking at putting the piece together, can be relied on to carry you through, I think.