A+ for Ideas!

Let's celebrate the positive first. At this point in my career I've ceased to believe in A+'s - and in a field as old as mine I certainly didn't think there were any A+ ideas left to have. Nevertheless, my professor, the most notorious ass-kicker in the department, said I wrote a great paper that could be developed into a publication.

Unfortunately, he also said that the paper was a B+ in execution (so, rounding out the paper overall to an A-), because there were too many careless errors.

It's amazing that he called me out on it, finally. Carelessness was a problem I was pretty much born with, but no one (except my mom) has called me out since the second grade. Seriously. I had become rather good at hiding it, or disguising it as flakiness, which is different. That is, this time I had actually put a lot of effort into it. I guess it's time to bust out those old second-grade training wheels that my dad used to make me do, that used to drive me crazy, like writing down everything I have to do and have done, finishing tasks early, double-checking and triple-checking stuff, assigning special spaces for things I'm likely to lose, having a regular bedtime, etc.

Just to give you an example of how embarrassing my carelessness has become: I accidently started talking about "metis" as if it were "menis" in my paper. This is more or less unforgiveable because "menis" is the programmatic first word of the Iliad. You can imagine my horror when I realized what I had done. I'd say I was LESS embarrassed when my mom started broadcasting old home videos this weekend of me at age 4, bumbling around and singing and cartwheeling and picking fights and generally making an ass of myself.