Finally finished and up and off my desk. Only took a month and a half. That’s the holidays for you, though it hasn’t been the only thing I’ve been working on.
As I mentioned a while back, the last few months I was taking a painting class at the local community college. While I wasn’t in it for the grade–simply to learn from a craft perspective–I still planned to complete all the assignments, including the research paper. Now, being an intro visual art class at a community college, we’re not talking “Master’s Thesis in Composition” style points here, but it had still been a fair amount of time since I’d written anything of the sort, and it left my stymied at first. While easy enough to finish and ace once I set to it, it was interesting the way all the old feelings and bad habits came right back.
I made this to capture that sense–always overriding even the best work–of the execution of an idea falling so fall short of the mental conception you had of it.
I’m old enough to remember writing papers on a typewriter and when I found an error, rewriting an entire page and praying it didn’t go over one page so that I’d be forced to rewrite every page after that.
So I got into the practice of leaving an extra inch of space at the bottom of each page. And every page had to be double spaced, so I had to keep track of where the bottom of the page was.
When I was in college during the late 80′s, I was able to use the University printers and wrote my papers on the university computers, till I got a better computer at home with a decent dot matrix printer. (A Mac of course!)
Suddenly it became easier to write a paper and correct mistakes and not worry about rewriting a whole paper because the change on page two moved two lines to the next page.
[old fart mode]You young’ns got it easy![/old fart mode]