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I'll get back to theme days once I find a groove of posting regularly. In the meantime, most of my posts are about some variation of books, bikes, buses, or Broadway. Plus bits about writing, nonprofits, and grief from time to time.

This blog is mostly lighthearted and pretty silly. It's not about the terrible things happening in the world, but please know that I'm not ignoring those things. I just generally don't write about them here.

04 April 2013

D is for Dumb

Dumb. That's how I feel about 98% of the time in my grad classes.

Yeah.
This semester is at least marginally better than last semester, when all of my classmates were PhD students who'd been at it for a while, and I was the lone MA student and a newbie to boot. There are at least a couple of other MA students in my classes this semester. But still, I have moments of thinking, "I know what all those words mean, but not in that order."

I've been assured that other people feel dumb, too, and it's not just me. In that case, my classmates are tremendous actors.

The good news is, I've seen some of their writing. They may use words I know in ways I thought were impossible, but I can at least hold my own when it comes to putting those words down and turning them in. So that's something.

Does anything in your life make you feel dumb?

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just about everything, actually.

Trisha said...

I prefer not to compare myself to anyone I may be studying with (thankfully I'm not studying at the moment, and haven't been since 2006), 'cause you can get easily intimidated. Sort of how I don't like to compare my fiction writing to anyone else's in case they make me feel horribly inferior. :)

baygirl32 said...

right now, its that stupid candy crush game - I can't stop playing, but feel so dumb when I can't pass a level after 50 tries

A to Z Ninja Minion
http://baygirl32.blogspot.com

Tim said...

All the time. It's why I'm not allowed to play with electricity or plumbing anymore.

STILLMAGNOLIA said...

I remember when I felt as if D was for Dumb in my own Graduate school class. it was not a wonderful feeling.

J E Fritz said...

Um, does life itself count? Sometimes it sure feels that way.

Bradley Charbonneau said...

Pretty regularly. But I try to then "qualify" where I am or who I'm with. I wrote "A Writer Walks into a Bookstore" with the idea that you can see a situation in two ways: hey, I can do that too, or wow, how did they do that?

I didn't feel dumb in math class because I liked it and I thought it was easy. But I also didn't "care" so much about it, it was just something that came easily to me.

The worst is when you'd like to be good at something but feel you're not ... and double bonus round: then go hang out with people who are better at it than you are.

I think the trick is to find what you're good at, what you like, cross your fingers that those two things align somewhere, and go with it.

Thanks for posting!

Bradley Charbonneau's Pass the Sour Cream A-Z Challenge.