Conventionality

Curse my finite humanness. And bless it too. It's taken far too long for me to realize this on more than an intellectual level, and even longer to begin acting on it, but the reason I do terribly at everything is that I expect myself to do well at everything. Sure, it's probably possible for me to become great at mathematics, a wonderful programmer, a good writer, fluent in Mandarin, composing, circuits, machining, design - individually, I can learn each of those jobs, and I can learn them very well. The problem is that since I know I can do them all individually, I expect myself to be able to do them all together. The end result is that I don't make it to the end of anything at all, and I think I'm a slacker because - well, I could have done all this stuff.

It might be too late to do that for this semester. HFID's sweet and has taken much of my time, and Matsci is hot, and I do enjoy CompArch even if I've been a slacker at it; Human-powered is of course rockin', and then there's teaching which I love to death. But there's no one thing I can point at and say "yes, this was my life." There's no lab that I live in; there are many that I frequently visit. And I do get a bit jealous of my friends who have found their homes. And at the same time, I can't give up my wandering yet. It's not quite time.

The other trouble that is if you expect human things, you get human things; if you expect superhuman things, sometimes you'll crash and burn and fail - and sometimes you'll learn that "human" actually goes farther than you thought it would.

I live for the long shots, but I've got to accept the odds that come with it.