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Slightly Bleah
Good show last night. Small crowd and plenty of pre-show nerves and stress, but a nice vibe permeated the evening. The audience was almost entirely close friends and family. My playing felt fine and I received the usual number of compliments any half-decent cellist is sure to always get due to the "cello factor", but I could tell that my intonation was off a bit. I feel that, even though mechanically, my playing is not what it was when I was younger, my ear and sense of phrasing has improved. I can tell when I under or over-played a passage now more readily. I remember playing feeling more effortless and easy, but perhaps that is simply because I was less perceptive. What I could pull off with ease and agility before could very likely have come from a showy or selfish place rather than a musical place. Now if only I were to practice more and let my playing skill grow to fill in my increased musicianship ;]
The past few weeks have been difficult. It's painful to be reminded that you are not entirely suited to a particular path you have decided for yourself. Computers and software are part of my identity now. An undergraduate curriculum, years of full-time work, and now most of master's degree have made their mark on my job skills, my thinking process, and my body. I've always been aware that my academic strengths lie in memorization and correlation of bodies of knowledge, learning through reading, and organizing thought in written form. Math, however, has always required a special effort for me to grasp. I have to sit in lectures. Work examples over and over again, ask questions, and consult text books. If I don't make this effort, I am unable to fully capture an idea. And even if I do make this effort, the low B's and C's in my undergraduate theory- and math-heavy classes attest to the fact that I am simply not ideally suited to this kind of thinking. Fortunately, the kinds of programming that require math as opposed to a general sense of literate architectural and aesthetic awareness are rarer thanks to the propensity for modern programming to use libraries of pre-packaged algorithms to do the really heavy numeric and data structure manipulation. Unfortunately, this means that after every single theory or math class, it's only a matter of months before my skills degenerate to uselessness. My course in fault-tolerant computer architecture served, again, as a reminder that fluency in math is just beyond me. I ended up over-preparing to solve the Markov model problems using Laplace transforms, solving systems of linear equations and using partial fractions and neglecting what I perceived as the easier-to-understand CRC encoding schemes. I just barely hung on with a grade of a 70 and ended up burning myself out for a few days.
Not all is lost. I know that, from personal experience and from reading the excellent Coders at Work, that raw analytical ability is only one part of a software project. I'll never be able to take on a whole algorithm-heavy project on my own, but I'll continue to be an effective team member on such a project and/or an effective solo programmer on small to medium-size applications.
The past few weeks have been difficult. It's painful to be reminded that you are not entirely suited to a particular path you have decided for yourself. Computers and software are part of my identity now. An undergraduate curriculum, years of full-time work, and now most of master's degree have made their mark on my job skills, my thinking process, and my body. I've always been aware that my academic strengths lie in memorization and correlation of bodies of knowledge, learning through reading, and organizing thought in written form. Math, however, has always required a special effort for me to grasp. I have to sit in lectures. Work examples over and over again, ask questions, and consult text books. If I don't make this effort, I am unable to fully capture an idea. And even if I do make this effort, the low B's and C's in my undergraduate theory- and math-heavy classes attest to the fact that I am simply not ideally suited to this kind of thinking. Fortunately, the kinds of programming that require math as opposed to a general sense of literate architectural and aesthetic awareness are rarer thanks to the propensity for modern programming to use libraries of pre-packaged algorithms to do the really heavy numeric and data structure manipulation. Unfortunately, this means that after every single theory or math class, it's only a matter of months before my skills degenerate to uselessness. My course in fault-tolerant computer architecture served, again, as a reminder that fluency in math is just beyond me. I ended up over-preparing to solve the Markov model problems using Laplace transforms, solving systems of linear equations and using partial fractions and neglecting what I perceived as the easier-to-understand CRC encoding schemes. I just barely hung on with a grade of a 70 and ended up burning myself out for a few days.
Not all is lost. I know that, from personal experience and from reading the excellent Coders at Work, that raw analytical ability is only one part of a software project. I'll never be able to take on a whole algorithm-heavy project on my own, but I'll continue to be an effective team member on such a project and/or an effective solo programmer on small to medium-size applications.
