I think it's safe to say that if things like 'work ethic' and 'dedication' were measurable, mine would tend towards negative infinity. It has literally been months since my last post. Now I'm not one for making excuses (psh), but there are three reasons for my lack of commitment recently. The first and, if I'm honest, most prominent reason is that the past few months have been my 'gap year', of sorts. It was a gap year on a rather tight budget, which means that while many of my peers went sailing across Bermuda, or running through Zimbabwe, or cage-fighting in Northern Europe, I stayed home watching Friends reruns and looking for a job which would let me keep at least some of my dignity. I also developed asthma, which was not so nice. As you can probably imagine, after seeing "The one with Mac and C.H.E.E.S.E" about six times my brain gave up, switched the 'autopilot' on and went for a Martini by the beach. While this must have been lovely for my brain, it left me in a state of complete uselessness: anything more complex than aimlessly clicking a mouse or holding a toothbrush caused a system overload resulting in an intense headache and an urgent desire to lie down and die.
This lasted for about a month, and then my brain decided to come back to me. I must say it wasn't in perfect condition, but I did enjoy being able to once again operate a door without fear of personal injury. However, this brings me on to the second reason for my disappearance from the blogoshpere. Once my brain let me access my higher functions again, I created a Youtube account. This was the second worst thing to happen to my productivity in 18 years. I got a strange sensation in those first few moments after creating my account: between Youtube's many pleas for me to upload a video and my somewhat exaggerated estimation of my abilities with a camera, I realised that I needed to grace the world with a film*. After about half an hour of excited, ambitious and ultimately pointless planning I started work on what would become Just another Lego Star Wars type movie. At that point I (naively) reckoned it would take me about a week to do. After a week, having finished about 27 seconds of what I wanted to be a 10 minute movie, I re-evaluated my first estimation. A strange thing happened thereafter: I became fixated on this clip I was making. My entire life, as lonely and sad as it was, was put on hold. Days (and I'm not kidding here, days) went by when I didn't eat or sleep at all, because that would have meant giving up precious and valuable time - time which could be used to work on the film. A few weeks later and I was quite impressed with the finished product, which I had been able to get into something resembling an HD format (you must understand I had - and still have - no understanding of video compression whatsoever and was rather shocked when, uncompressed, the movie took up 49GB of space). I was slightly less impressed when something went wrong while uploading it to Youtube. Somehow this professional and industry-leading video sharing site managed to stuff up my beautifully colourful and smooth HD blockbuster, turning it into a low resolution, blurry and fluctuant mess.
*This is a rather abridged version of the thought processes which led me to start making it. The full story is available in the AWoD Special Edition DVD, which is scheduled for release in Spring 2087.
"But," you scream at your computer screen or Blackberry or iPhone or iPad or internet TV or whatever other gadget you might be reading this on, mistakenly thinking that I can hear you, "but, your video was uploaded nearly two weeks ago! Why haven't you posted something in that meanwhile?" Well, this is because of my third reason: I'm going to university soon. In itself, this is not a very good excuse: most students-to-be spend every last moment, right up until they cross the threshold of their college, utterly intoxicated. Since inebriation is no excuse for writer's block, if my case had been similar then I would have no excuse. However, for me this is not the case. You see, the university I'm going to seems to have gotten it into its head that I'm quite smart. This might have once been true, but after 8 months of stumbleupon.com's humour section and BBC's mind-numbing daytime telly, I am probably not on top form. So for the past two weeks I've been attempting to refresh my memory of all the things that I learned in high school, in particular calculus and its affiliates. Unfortunately this hasn't been as effective as I'd hoped it would be; in general I'll get through half a question before saying 'grr' in frustration and dramatically giving up. But, every cloud has a silver lining...
Whether I struggle to keep up with the rest or outshine them all (fat chance...), university will at the very least give me something to write about. The reason for this is that the university I'm attending isn't exactly... conventional. The New York University of Abu Dhabi promises a rather unique experience for me and my 150-odd fellow classmates. I'll be travelling frequently, meeting lots of interesting people and apparently discovering the true meaning of soul-crushingly large amounts of work (less-vague information about NYUAD can be found here). So, for the next four years this blog and its Youtube equivalent will be a travelogue, a diary, a place to share my experiences and a place for me to bitch about difficult tests and unreasonable assignments...
Oh, yes. I leave on Friday!!!!!! ^_^
Oh, yes. I leave on Friday!!!!!! ^_^
