I found myself engaged in a mildly tedious task of drawing a rudimentary floor plan of the apartment room where I live. I am supposed to note the number of outlets and then figurethe Wattage or something like that. I got out the old physics book and spent 20 minutes trying to find how Wattage related to Amperes and Voltage. Finally, I broke down and checked a table in the American Heritage Dictionary and low and behold V = W/A and that was that. It frustrates a lazy fool like myself how often the simplest questions require hours of research and are usually best found in the most general of reference books. I often think that all I really needed to make it through college was a good set of encyclopedias an internet connection and a good thesaurus and dictionary. I could have saved quite a bit of money on books.
Maybe it is my rushed sensibility towards education. I see no point in endlessly distracting and confusing a simple point through the laborious process of discovery when the answer is not something of subjective quality but a simple fact. In art this does not apply of course. I found myself shooting my ukelelle for my 8mm object assignment. I put it in the sun and shot it with mostly macro-zoom lens shots. I think it looked good but it didn’t take much deliberation or forethought the whole process probably too less than an hour to familiarize myself with the camera [reading instructions just like a textbook nothing simple there] and to set it up and shoot the footage. I wonder if this quick approach is a sign that I have no appreciation for the artistic skill and patience that I have observed fellow students to demonstrate? Is my impatience and desire to just get the assignment job causing me to produce work of low quality? I think it is but I don’t know what the difference would be a shot is a shot and if it takes me 15 minutes to shoot what I think is good footage then maybe that’s just something that I am good at. I’ve always figured that people who can accomplish a task and do it with intelligence, thoughtful consideration and produce quality work without taking a long time are “good” at that task. To me it seems that is the real goal in life to find what you can do well such that you can excel at that since the consistent thing about all of us is that we have a limited amount of time. Though there is a learning curve and there are limits in terms of talent and intelligence but if one does not test them then one cannot know how “good” he or she can be.