Today has been a rainy windy Tuesday (not as much fun as those Sundays). It started at Midnight with a rerun of Cheers on FOX, it was part one of the two-parter where Sam’s brother comes to town and Sam feels inadequate. Class was fine but I’ve just had this lingering anxiety about midterms. They aren’t too bad but I fear that whole stupid mistake aspect has followed me from the Undergraduate years. I circled the wrong answer to an easy 50:50 type question about light on my Cinema 1 midterm. Just like my brain didn’t understand that it was wrong like telling someone with absolute certainty that something is right when it is left. I do this from time to time and it truly upsets me because I do look things over and I do scrutinize but these thing get past me enough to make me uncertain and discouraged. The great flaw with being human isn’t that we make mistakes, that is inevitable. Rather it is that we (and by this I mean me) make the same mistakes. We are limited by our own biases and flaws and ineptitude. Obviously some more than others or maybe that is just luck of the draw? Still when I think about how successful people often have a haphazard story about how they achieved their ‘fortune and glory” I find it very difficult to attempt to go about living a thoughtful life since intention and expectation is usually the best way to maximize disappointment. I have not reconciled an appropriate method for negotiating this chaotic aspect of life and I doubt I ever will but that doesn’t change much and I suppose that I will continue along the same path no matter how many stupid mistakes I seem determined to make.
another wicked killer post, professor chaos.
This part was especially good, I thought:
“The great flaw with being human isn’t that we make mistakes, that is inevitable. Rather it is that we (and by this I mean me) make the same mistakes. We are limited by our own biases and flaws and ineptitude.”
Perhaps, though, your analysis of the situation (“intention and expectation is usually the best way to maximize disappointment”, “mistakes I seem determined to make”) is itself the bias that causes mistakes.