Epic Flail

Have you ever watched a drowning scene in movie or tv show where the actor is swatting at the surface of the water and gasping for air? Only their head is above water more than it's under, so they're not in any real danger (yet) and you feel like yelling at the screen "If you'd just calm down, take a deep breath and keep your fingers together, you'd be FINE!"  It's that flailing around that is so desperate and so very unproductive.  And yet, when you're in that moment, when you feel so helpless and scared and the panic sets in and takes over, it's the only thing your confused body can muster.

Sometimes all you really have to do it put your feet down and stand up to find that you were never really in danger in the first place.

I don't know what this has to do with scrapbooking or blogging, except this round-about "this is where I am" post.  I am not prepared to say that I am a perfectionist, because I am far too lazy for that.  But I'm not fond of failure and I'm even less fond of half-assing it.  And while I'm not a perfectionist, I do have a little "thing" about my grades.  I was never like this the first time around.  I worked kinda hard(ish) but maintaining a good work/life balance was more important than my grades.  And sometimes my definition of "life" was a little way off base.  Note to the 20 year-old version of me: Wheel of Fortune reruns do NOT count as "life."  Anyway, my grades: frankly, it's not the grade that concerns me.  If that were the case I'd cheat.  It's not the grade that concerns me so much as the level of understanding and ability it represents. Someone who earns a B simply doesn't have the same grasp of the material as the person who earns the A.  Theoretically, at least.  Because the person who earned the A could turn around and forget it all by the time their lunch is digested and ultimately know less than the B person, if that B person were diligent about learning from his or her mistakes and keeping the information active within their memory banks.

Theoretically.

There it is. The 83% on my Calc II exam.  That leaves me with an overall  89%.  The good news is, I kept the dumb mistakes to a minimum - maybe 3 points were because I just transcribed something wrong or made a sign error.  That's good.  The bad news is, the other mistakes were because I had genuinely forgotten, or didn't have a good enough grasp of the concept.  Now that is where I feel like the bad actor slapping the water and gasping for breath.  Because I do know this stuff.  And now, because I didn't have it on the day of the test, hopefully I've kicked into my brain in such a manner than I'll do better next time the question comes up.

Oy.  This going back to school as a bona fide adult isn't for wimps.  You develop that work ethic and standards and you raise the bar a little higher and suddenly really decent just isn't good enough.

Remember when this was a scrapbooking blog? Yeah. Me too.  I miss it.



You should take a minute to watch that. Especially if you have kids.  Because it's fun.
And also, so you can walk around singing "Potato, potato, potato. Potato, potato, potatooo. Potato, potato, potato" in your head, like me.

I'll be back in a day or two with an honest to goodness scrapbook post.
Thanks for stopping by.

And hey! Did you know that St. Hubert is the patron saint of mathematics?  He's also the patron saint of hunters, which means he has a pocket protector AND a cross bow.  How cool is that?