Finishing lines
Nov. 30th, 2007 10:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
j4Last day of November!
"I've been trying to write a blog post every day this month," I said, in the pub, earlier.
"Doesn't that mean you just end up writing a load of crap?" asked my learned colleague.
He had a point; I've published things I wouldn't have published (which was part of the point), and had a go at things which didn't really work (which was another part of the point). I've also got round to writing some things that I might not otherwise have got round to (ditto), and maybe some of them are crap too. The main result, though, is having started getting back into the habit of writing. And along the way I've had far more positive feedback than I expected, and I'm afraid I've failed to reply to a lot of comments that really did deserve a reply.
I've let other things slide, too. The photography is so far behind schedule that I don't know if I'm going to manage to do my end-of-course assessment at all. It's not helped by the fact that I have approximately one hour of daylight free in a normal working day, and when it's dark outside there's no sensible light in the house (a combination of badly-positioned lights and energy-saving bulbs means that it always feels too murky to see anything properly, let alone photograph anything properly, like I'm looking through a very thin veil). I don't think that makes the course a waste of money, if I don't hand the ECA in; I think I got what I wanted out of it. (It'll probably disqualify me from ever taking another OU degree, of course, and they'll send me hundreds of letters asking why I FAILED FAILED FAILED, but I can probably live with that.)
But I've still managed to read interesting books, and sing in one carol service and one carol concert, and sing at a colleague's leaving do, and go running twice, and play piano a couple of times, in between all this actually get some work done (though I've felt fairly unproductive lately, to be honest, and maybe that's the next thing to try to kick-start, and I have some ideas for that too).
I don't think it means anything or proves anything or achieves anything in the grand scheme of things. But sometimes it's good just to know that you can carry on putting one brick upon another, one foot in front of the other, even if it's not clear what you're building or where you're going.
"I've been trying to write a blog post every day this month," I said, in the pub, earlier.
"Doesn't that mean you just end up writing a load of crap?" asked my learned colleague.
He had a point; I've published things I wouldn't have published (which was part of the point), and had a go at things which didn't really work (which was another part of the point). I've also got round to writing some things that I might not otherwise have got round to (ditto), and maybe some of them are crap too. The main result, though, is having started getting back into the habit of writing. And along the way I've had far more positive feedback than I expected, and I'm afraid I've failed to reply to a lot of comments that really did deserve a reply.
I've let other things slide, too. The photography is so far behind schedule that I don't know if I'm going to manage to do my end-of-course assessment at all. It's not helped by the fact that I have approximately one hour of daylight free in a normal working day, and when it's dark outside there's no sensible light in the house (a combination of badly-positioned lights and energy-saving bulbs means that it always feels too murky to see anything properly, let alone photograph anything properly, like I'm looking through a very thin veil). I don't think that makes the course a waste of money, if I don't hand the ECA in; I think I got what I wanted out of it. (It'll probably disqualify me from ever taking another OU degree, of course, and they'll send me hundreds of letters asking why I FAILED FAILED FAILED, but I can probably live with that.)
But I've still managed to read interesting books, and sing in one carol service and one carol concert, and sing at a colleague's leaving do, and go running twice, and play piano a couple of times, in between all this actually get some work done (though I've felt fairly unproductive lately, to be honest, and maybe that's the next thing to try to kick-start, and I have some ideas for that too).
I don't think it means anything or proves anything or achieves anything in the grand scheme of things. But sometimes it's good just to know that you can carry on putting one brick upon another, one foot in front of the other, even if it's not clear what you're building or where you're going.
