December 11, 2004

...

i want to apologize publicly to anyone i might have let down, offended or been a jerk to this semester. i have spent the semester reeling from health issues that literally consumed my life from march until august of this year. i have spent the semester trying to catch up, recover and reevaluate all at once.

i have tried my hardest not to use my health (or mental state as a result of my complications) as an excuse in school. i worry that it is a cop-out, that using it only slows my recovery back to where i need to be.

but the truth is that i spent a good deal of semester overwhelmed and depressed. it might sound overdramatic, but realizing i truly almost died while in the hospital impacted my ability to concentrate on a lot of things for many weeks this semester.

in the past several weeks, i have spoken to a lot of people. and this past 8 months has not just been shitty for me. i have to use at least 2 hands to count all the people, just within the department, who have suffered personal loss or familial crisises.

we are not a large department and yet at least a quarter of us have been forced to deal with some really serious things in our personal lives recently.

i am not trying to speak for others.

but i believe many of us have been on edge at some point this semester. and sadly, i believe these outside tensions have been reflected invisibly in the way we have treated each other and our work.

i want to apologize to all of you who have had to put up with me in a less than pleasant way.
i want to send out sympathy to those of you who have (and are still) dealing with personal complications.
and i want to hope that we may all return to school in january, refreshed and renewed; our problems overcome.

i hope that we can all communicate more openly next semester - the successful completition of our thesis projects depends on an open and constructive environment for all those involved.

(i worry that these tensions impacted the department negatively this semester and i believe it is a trend, if we are all to succeed, that cannot continue. i think that this is only possible with more open communication involving everyone [fac and student alike] in the department and with more support and less anger and competition creatively. we are all going to slip somehow, sometime. i hope that we can carry each other through rather than condemn when this happens. i need all of you; i count on all of you, just as i hope you all need and can count on me.)

again, i hope everyone gets the relaxation and peace of mind they need and i look forward to working with all of you in the coming year.

(i will continue to post progress on the blog over the break, but i expect updates to come more slowly, both because i will be on dialup and because the majority of my work will be movies too big to easily upload.)

Posted by tripp at December 11, 2004 01:49 PM



Comments

hmm...it is interesting to see your post just blow up here at the same time that I have been trying to deal with my depression. A shitty few months it has been and not just for me. Sometimes it is a consolation to think that life is cyclical and that what goes down must come up. But in truth, we all have fears and loneliness. When you lose someone and you confront their lifeless body, you realize how unimportant certain things in life are, that we fret over bullshit and that there has to be a reason to make do in an honorable way and leave your mark.

And yet we continue to be involved in our banal daily moments, rolling all over in our routine, like pigs in the mud.

If you have felt unsupported from the group I testify to that as guilty and as a victim myself of the apathy. I would like to at least state that I am always available to people as an ear if you have to vent.

Unfortunately for most of us, we create great art out of our misery. We fear parting with our pain as if it will take away with it everything that we know. After a few years worth of being slapped with misery and hardship, you realize that life will keep confronting you and there is nothing you can do but play ball with it. Sometimes you win. When you are faced with your own mortality, the only thing to think about is to understand whether you are afraid of the unknown or the known? Is it where you are going or what you are leaving behind?

Not to sound corny but if you have loved and been loved in life, your life will not perish. You will continue to face your own mortality and that of others until your end. Some will hurt more than others. Some you will never forget. It will never stop. It is not that I am fatalistic. I am bitter and my father's survivalist teachings echo in my ear every day and night.

As intellectual beings, we continue to seek more from life and try to leave our mark anyway we can. I see that in you, you are resisting what is so obvious to the rest of us, yet we have to let you find your own path, as good 'parents' should.

Sometimes, we forget what is really important or we try to impose alternate meanings to what is screaming out to us. Don't let that be you.

Posted by: marientina [TypeKey Profile Page] at December 12, 2004 03:02 PM

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