It’s hard to go from moving at one hundred miles per hour to a dead stop but that’s exactly what has happened. The semester is, officially, done for me. I will probably keep my odd schedule for an extra week just to make sure that I can hit anything that I need to, but for the next month or so my life is going to be rather quiet. Even then, I am only taking one class this summer so it should be an interesting break.
Of course, there’s still work. It’s odd living between two worlds. On the one side I find myself thinking about graduate schools and planning the next steps of a new career path while on the other I look back on what brought me here. I believe in the power of technology. I believe it has the capacity to bring people together and to generate not just that connection but culture. For most of my career, I never saw my job as a numbers game. It was all about communication. It still is. Companies and businesses come and go, I build and manage networks of people and computers because I believe in the power of communication regardless of whose name is on the door.
So now I write. I may publish a book. I may just take what I am doing and create some new media experiment. I am discovering that the possibilities are truly endless. What I know is that I must see this through and I must create. It isn’t so much a wish anymore. It is a need. I look around at the debris of failed attempts at organization and structure and I am emboldened by what still may come. If there is anything I have learned this year, it is that movement matters and self direction is key. The New Media class was an eye-opener in this regard. I watched and I learned that you can not make people create and, what’s more, that there are a thousand people with a thousand good ideas and only a handful of people willing to implement those ideas. I have to be one of those who implements. I worked my ass off this year. I wrote hundreds of pages of text, I risked submitting my work, I gave presentations, helped plan websites, and did it all while trying to work a full-time job. I loved every minute of it. Yeah, it sucks. Yeah, it hurts some days and some days I just wanted to break down. I still made it through, though. Another year, ticked away.
For now, I have work and my summer projects. I have the Abigail line to tighten up. I need to get more images and plan for the inclusion of a few more storylines. Really, I just want to make something and then I’ll see where it ends up. I need to work at connecting and reconnecting as well. I’m not silly enough to think that I have done this all on my own. My journey is only thanks to friends, family, colleagues, professors, and an infinitely supportive wife. Without them, well…most of this would just be vapor.
So, that’s my school wrap-up. Theres a lot of cool things coming our way. New technologies, new stories, new ways of interacting and a hell of a lot of new adventures. I don’t know about you but I can’t wait!
