"The Gap"

This is actually a few years old, but it's been making the rounds amongst the photography blogs I follow. And I love it. I transcribed it and tucked the words away, and whenever I would pull it back up and read it, it's inspired me to keep on, particularly as it relates to how I think of doing photography:

"You gotta know it's totally normal. 

The most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, every month, you know that you're going to finish one story. 

It's only by actually going through a volume of work that you're actually going to catch up and close that gap, and the work you're making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while. It's going to take you a while, it's normal to take a while, and you just have to fight your way through that."

And yeah, I know that this is basically Gladwell minus the pop science. But I do believe that practice is the best way to improvement and "success" (in quotations, because it depends on how you define it). It's about practice. (No really, practice, Allen Iverson!)

Sharon says I'm too hard on myself. In many ways she's right, because I am, about many aspects of my life. But she also says that about the way I judge my photography output. Perhaps I'm harsh; but I know what I like, and I know when I've reviewed photos that I took and realized that none of them are quite to my liking or have fallen short, as Ira says in the video.

But this is a reminder not to defeat myself just because I haven't reached a point where I'm "satisfied" or certain that my work matches my ambitions (and it hasn't; not by a long shot). I really appreciate when people tell me they think a photo I took is great. But I also know I'm working towards something. I don't have so many hours a day to devote to this, but it's something I've identified to myself as a passion, and it's something for which I have ambitions for myself. I'm just working my way through The Gap, as Ira calls it.

Come join me in The Gap?

"Accidental Racist" and the Impotence of Good Intentions

I hadn't originally given it a thought for posting here, and I have other posts on many topics in the dry dock here, but TNC's entrance to the discussion on this Brad Paisley-LL Cool J collaboration has provoked me. (Plus I'm tired of only getting around to writing on things long after they're out of the immediate national or social attention. Just this once, I'm jumping in while it's still in the air.)

There's a lot to unpack in this whole situation, and others have gone through the song in ways I'm not willing to do here, so I'll key in on this train of thought: some commenters in his Tuesday post complained that TNC was too harsh on Paisley and LL Cool J, that they were well-intentioned in their efforts to reconcile and have "a conversation", they said. I can understand this defense; I think Paisley and LL thought they were helping.

Curation

Last week, Engadget founder Ryan Block published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled "Why I'm Quitting Instagram," wherein he explained that the recent flap over the social media giant's Terms of Service inspired him to jump ship. When news broke of the Terms of Service, Nilay Patel, a founding editor of The Verge and former patent attorney, posted this piece explaining that the updated Terms of Service was on its face no worse than any similar terms for many other social media or Web multimedia sites and that the real lesson over the uproar over Instagram's action was just that people ultimately don't trust Facebook¹.

I count myself among their ranks.

Waxing philosophical about wonder

I'm taking a few minutes to return from this unplanned extended hiatus to recommend strongly this piece in the Times by Ta-Nehisi Coates on the subject of school and the manner in which students are made to process their subjects. I cannot find strong enough language to express how much I enjoy and appreciate Ta-Nehisi's writing, and this guest spot continues his excellent writing on the topic of child-rearing, race, and education. And while he steers the direction of the article on towards matters of race (as is his charge over at The Atlantic), there is truth overflowing from his thoughts on the purpose (versus the execution) of education. This part made me want to stand and cheer:

I can tell you everything that was wrong with my education — how cold pedagogy reduced the poetry of Macbeth to a wan hunt for hamartia*, how the beautiful French language broke under rote vocabulary. But more than that, I can tell you what happens when education is decoupled from curiosity, and becomes little more than an insurance policy.

"An insurance policy". As he goes on he explains how this rote education is can serve ultimately as a safety net or protection for poorer and/or urban children if they indeed make it through to that very-important high school diploma; and while he allows that it is something worth celebrating given the higher rates of success for those who attain their diploma, he reminds that another goal of education is to instill in the students with an ability and drive to learn more. While it's great to equip students, especially those like himself when he was in school, it would be even better if they exited with a productive curiosity to accompany that diploma.

This piece resonated deeply with me since my upbringing strongly stressed the importance of "education" or rather an incomplete appreciation of it. My "education" was my ticket to university, and my performance at education would pave my way to further education and opportunities (Ivy League, of course), where I could continue to learn and magically emerge a successful member of society. And my "education" did just that for me (well, minus the Ivies)- it was a "smart" insurance policy through which I collected a good "education". But lost somewhere in the midst of all of this was the development of curiosity, a drive to delve into the subjects at hand (and tangential- I spent most of college tossing aside non-engineering classes with disdain as if they were holding me back from a goal of ... doing something with engineering... that hadn't materialized in the first place). Somehow, I managed to travel through secondary "education" and nearly all of my "higher education" before my sense of wonder was kindled - and by this point it was too late to spend all of my idyllic college years on exploration. All's not lost, of course. But it's a deficit of time and opportunity to discover more of the world and myself that I really regret: one that I have been spending a lot of my time lately trying to make up for.



*[From Dictionary.com: hamartia — n, literature: the flaw in character which leads to the downfall of the protagonist in a tragedy. Would've been an incredible word to have known back then for paper-writing uses.]

Perfectionism

You know what my problem is? Or one of them?

Sharon has gotten me a journal (actually, a handful of them) for me to keep a record of my thoughts. I think it's a fantastic idea. We've talked so much and work through so many ideas, struggles, issues - and I think about so many things throughout the day that a notebook for journal-ing would be a great way to really work through some things by myself.

All of the journals are still blank.

And here's why- I keep wanting to start them off with a bang. And I just can't think of anything worthy of the, uh, grandeur of the very first ink to hit the page. In a journal. A private journal. I keep wanting to make a big production out of it, but this would all work a lot better if I would just freaking write.

Which also explains the lack of activity in this space here.

Sweet Home

It's really odd when you have to define exactly why something is offensive. Sometimes it's just flabbergastingly hard to get out. Maybe to you it makes perfect sense that Christians in a majority-Christian nation making tasteless jokes about Muslims is, well, tasteless. I guess if I had to explain why this man's "joke" was not only unfunny but also mean-spirited and offensive, I would say that Muslims get a bad rap from extremists and that such "harmless" jokes only serve to further a perception of untrustworthiness, danger, and implied inferiority that our [American] (let alone Alabamian) Muslim neighbors have neither earned nor deserved. I would say that I'd like to see how the same people who say it's "just harmless fun" react to more overtly racial remarks about other minorities, however, I'm pretty confident I already know how that'll go.

I submit that perhaps you would never have to vigorously defend your "well-intended, innocent fun" if it was, in fact, that. Unless you're a moron.

Related reading:
Patrol Mag: More of Christians reasoning badly
NPR: The shoe on the other foot. Sure, point out the violence of the Muslims [but be sure to ignore the political malfeasance and skullduggery behind it]. But, minus the overt violence, it would seem that Christians do their fair share of persecution here in God's country, too.

Regrets, I've had some

I don't like it when people say things like, "Live with no regrets." That just sounds ridiculous when you stop to think about it. I don't think that anyone ought to wallow in past regrets- I think we've all encountered situations with people stuck in the past; I do, however, consider it not only okay but also somewhat healthy to re-evaluate past decisions or actions. Someone who steadfastly claims to live without any regrets whatsoever is either the world's most repressed individual steeped in denial, a liar, or they're just not thinking hard enough. 

So do I have any regrets? Certainly. For example: 

• I wish I had been a better student in college. 
• I wish I'd learned when to keep my big mouth shut. 
• I wish I'd taken a photography class in college. 

And the list goes on. I don't think there's a problem that there exists such a list for my life (not that I actively keep one... that might be a bit much).

I think this is the key: that your "regrets" don't become deadweights but rather an impetus for a highly personalized list of goals for self-improvement. And here one cliche collides head-on with another: when life gives you regrets, make productive use of them. Now that's a philosophy for living.