Strange Lands

In these first two weeks of coding, I’ve been working to track, mentally, the balance of emotions as I learn. So far, frustration is winning out, as one might have anticipated. I want to stay with this for a moment and try to do more than name the emotion, though.

I think part of the frustration I am feeling can also be attributed to disorientation. The space of the screen is not new to me, of course–I’ve been interacting to screens my entire life. But prior interactions have been primarily passive, or receptive, in nature. Creating and editing my own and remixing other peoples’ videos had given me some sense of the space of a screen. In past projects, I’ve had to account for composition, sonic elements, lighting, etc., in televisual projects that oriented me differently to the screen.

But this coding stuff is even further back behind the screen, and the space in which it is produced is unlike the more mimetic back-end spaces I’d encountered in a limited capacity producing short videos. This is a distant, strange, abstract space I am learning to navigate in. Pixels and axes and planes shape the productive space here in coding land so far. A part of me regrets tuning out the prophecy that the math I was learning in middle school would be useful in the future. I feel a bit as if I’m relearning some of those dark, buried lessons of geometry from Mr. Diehl, and that’s frustrating, mixed with a tinge of imagined I-told-you-so regret.

Back to the space of coding, though. I find myself moving between two spaces. In one space, there’s the language & textual symbols–varriables, syntax, functions, parentheses, curly brackets, left-to-right and top-to-bottom lines, etc. I move from that space to the visual space of the index file rendered in a browser: a visual space (which itself is also a textual space for me in word processing, reading, etc.). As I try to learn how these two spaces correlate, I often experience a kind of frustration that feels closer to an anxiety that’s flavored with ignorance and failure. I don’t know what I’m doing, and that not knowing often leads to failure. Bodily, I feel that anxiety in my face–upper cheeks and ears–my shoulders and gut. All tense as I grope around this new place, occasionally remembering a quick search of the intertubes can provide some illumination, but it can also add, sometimes, to the disorientation.

I’ve done some searching for classmates and blog posts to reference and link to in this post, but I think I’m a bit early in the game, and I can’t quite find everyone else’s blogs. So far, I’ve found Adina, Diana, Aden, Kelly, Sarah, and Todd. I’ve tried to set up rss on Feedly but can only get Aden, Adina, and Todd to work. What do those blogs have in common? They don’t use the folio theme.