Day 2

I made some mistakes that I’d like to tell you about because they’re embarrassing.

I wrote:

Console.log(IsInteger

Instead of:

Console.log(isInteger

That took me like 5 minutes to figure out yesterday as to what was going wrong.

The other mistake was writing:

Console.log(Math.ciel

Instead of:

Console.log(Math.ceil

I… before E… except after C. Apparently whilst coding, I’ve forgotten elementary school grammar…

So, why am I telling the world this?

A) I can’t be the only person who made these kinds of mistakes. I’m hoping that someone out there is going to take comfort in knowing they’re not alone in their making these kinds of blunders. I’m hoping that they’ll see I persisted despite my not being the fastest learner and that it gives them some measure of hope.

B) As an actor, I learned a great deal about interpreting text and about creativity. Nowadays at least anyone who does Western theater is expected to be able to know their lines. There’s talk about being “letter perfect” when memorizing. 99% of theater fails at that. The director, the stage manager, the other actors, the playwright… they always tolerate *some* deviation from this platonic ideal.

I found living up to even the non-platonic-ideal to be excruciatingly difficult. I found that I had a highly active imagination prone to sabotaging me. It would convince my tongue that I had spoken words that my scene partners were waiting for me to say when in fact I had not spoken them aloud. It’s like being a cab driver who’s SURE he or she’s gotten you to your destination while you’re still on the way there. I would (without meaning to) re-order words within a line. Sometimes, even with the playwright in the room, I would substitute his or her words for my own, again, without meaning to… *it was murderously difficult for me to get to “letter perfect.”*

However, I did sometimes. And my education as an actor taught me that I was at my most creative, that the audience was at its height of enjoying my work when I did the absolutely soul-crushing, gut-wrenching slog of word-by-word, and sometimes even, letter-by-letter pursuit of perfection and once in a great while I would actually get it. Those performances were qualitatively different. There was a marked difference in being passably or even very close to perfect and actually being letter perfect. There is an emergent property from being letter perfect. It is extraordinary how much freer one is when that peak is summited.

All that is to say that I developed a certain level of pride in my ability to pay attention to words and here I am screwing them up all over again. It is humbling to again be a novitiate and excellent reminder that the work never really ends when it comes to training one’s self to be mindful, orderly, and as excellent as one can in that pursuit in which they’re engaged.

There is a level of tenderness and a quantum of self-forgiveness one requires to make the work bearable. Self-laceration has to be mitigated. That itself is a skill that requires practice I’m sure to get…