What is it with my short attention span?
Used to be I was (relatively) exploratory and really gungho about teaching myself new skills. Back in university I decided I'd like to be able to write a webpage, and I set about teaching myself this. I spent countless nights staying up late looking through web tutorials and browsing other people's HTML. I figured out how to do HTML and CSS by myself. That doesn't sound like much now, but back then tutorials weren't quite as ubiquitous as they are now, and
Google hadn't yet arrived to save us from floundering around in search hell.
The problem is that my skills have stagnated. Now with Dreamweaver and Frontpage making it easy for any tech-savvy 8-year-old to whomp out a webpage, my painfully-acquired HTML skills are sadly inadequate. You can copy Java applets and an assortment of scripts from any number of websites. RSS feeds and XML are standard on blogs with owners that don't even pretend to be tech-savvy. And don't even get me started on the kids who seem to imbibe technical skills with their vitamin-enriched, trace-mineral-fortified infant formula. I can't keep up with the 12-year-olds who can write their own role-playing games.
So where does this leave me? Does it matter that I can actually write a basic static webpage from scratch in a plain-text editor? That no webpage I build now will ever make someone want to put their eyes out? That my pages load fast and scale nicely?
I guess I also need to ask these questions: why have I stopped caring?
Have I stopped caring? I haven't really stopped caring, but I don't see the need to invest that much time in something that isn't that urgent or important at the moment. Other things have become more important and/or urgent. I have a long-term boyfriend whom I want to spend a lot of time with. I'm not a full-time student anymore - I need to support myself, which means working. I need time to work out, hang with friends, to spend with my family. I have pets that need caring for. So I guess what it is is that learning more web-designer-y skills simply moved down on my list of priorities. I'd still love to be able to do the latest and newest, but doing it for its own sake is becoming increasingly impossible. Instead I'll do it when it needs to be done, or learn the necessary skills on the fly. Any opportunities that may be lost as a result will just have to be written off as the price to be paid for having the other things.
It's not just about web-designer-y stuff. I keep picking up new skills and not developing them past a certain point. I get good and competent at the basic levels of something, then something else calls and I run. Is this a bad thing? Should I be disciplining myself to a few tightly-focused interests, or should I just let myself run with the wide range of interests? Why work so hard to be someone I'm not?
I still want to be able to do the neat stuff though. It stirs my competitive spirit to see someone do something better than I can. As a matter of fact, I think that's what I'll do. I'll use this energy to feed a list of things that I want to be able to do. I'll have a list of stuff to learn or develop, and see how much of the list I can check off by the end of the year.
