WHERE HAS THE TIME GONE.
I’m leaving on a jet plane, back to the District on Thursday. I couldn’t be more excited to get back to school, start really cracking over at The Hatchet, and work my senior year to its fullest, but I do wonder what happened to the last seven weeks I spent in Minnesota.
It would have been hard to ask for a much better short-term summer break – a trip to Arizona, plenty of relaxation, cutting a few strokes off my golf handicap – but I’d be lying if I said I felt like I accomplished everything I wanted to this summer. I had hoped that my time in the midwest would be a digital retreat of sorts – where I would get up to speed and learn everything I could ever need to know about journalism and the web and social media and the like.
That didn’t happen.
In fact, when I make a list of the things I still need to catch up with, it’s a list much longer than I’d like:
- Figure out how to really use LinkedIn
- Figure what Publish2 really is and how I can use it personally and for The Hatchet
- Learn how to code in Javascript
- Write posts here much more frequently
- Complete roughly six thousand more minor tasks for The Hatchet
- Record some music
- Practice my video and still photography skills
- Write a particularly important post I’ve been saving up that is essentially the mission statement of this blog.
- Many more tasks that has wasted away into oblivion
Maybe it hasn’t been so bad. Actually, it hasn’t – it’s been great. But when you follow [read: try to learn from] so many smart people who seem light years ahead, it’s hard not to feel a little lazy.
Here’s to picking up the slack.
Emily Ingram
August 19, 2009
Don’t fret, Alex.
If you’re anything like me, you set ridiculously high goals for your summer and somehow still find it absolutely inexcusable when you fail to meet them.
We tend to be our own biggest critics.
And as far the feeling like you’re lagging behind your peers? I think that one is a universal, too. Lord knows I am familiar with it.
Lucky for us, that feeling of terror in terms of what’s on our to-do list is what provides constant fodder for our ambitions.
Just keep on keepin’ on.