Rolling With the Punches
Yes, I have not completely abandoned this thing!
Life has been one crazy blur this past year, and all I can do is roll with the punches. So, I’ve decided to mix things up a bit – add a little flair by changing themes, and write with (possibly) proper punctuation.
So we’re just about 1/3rd into 2009 and I think my new outlook for the year has helped get through a lot of things. Pip and I had talked prior to him moving to the east coast, and one of the things that I know we’ve both been taken to doing is not saying I can’t/won’t to things that we are looking to achieve, but rather how can I. We’ve stopped subscribing to the thinking that we can’t have what we want in life. We’ve decided that you just have to figure out ways to get it. While not entirely practical at times, it does provide us both with a new attitude – a persistence that is often hard to come by is often created in mysterious ways when we contemplate ways to achieve.
I wish I could say that adopting this attitude has made life easier. On the contrary, it makes things more difficult! But also makes the ending that much sweeter.
It reminds me of one of my most difficult classes at UCI: ICS 186a – Computer Graphics. I’m was no math whiz, nor was I a particularly great programmer, so that class was a struggle from start to finish. I wasn’t really used to that. The understanding in most classes came fairly clear after a few questions and studying for a couple hours a week. This class was hard! I had never spent so much time studying, being in the library, being in the lab, and programming like mad. At the end of the class our professor, Gopi, said to us that each new assignment and test was purposely meant to be hard. He never expected any of us to be exceptional at anything, but what he wanted to do was the following: for everything he assigned us, he purposely extended the difficulty just outside of what we thought was our max. By making us strive for more each time he was able to push us to better understanding of the material and forced us to set higher standards on ourselves. At each step of the way we each achieved something we thought was beyond our reach.
This has always been an important lesson in my life, one I try to carry each day that I push myself to better myself. This month has been a particularly difficult one at work, and each day has been like that quarter in my graphics class – pushing to reach that which is just outside my reach, then coming back the next day to do it again. I think once this is all said and done I’ll look back and see what kind of strides I made in understanding my job and technology as a whole. It’s been difficult, and at times fun.
For now though, I’d like to get some sleep.
-m