A Little Secret

I'll let you in on a little secret-for a day or two I REALLY hated that last group of updates. I mean a seething, irrational, why-am-I-doing-this, what's-the-point, God-everything-sucks hatred for a completely harmless group of 8 very average (at best) clips.

I'd spent quite a bit of time Thurs-Sat trimming down clips and that motley group was the result. There are a couple of quality clips that need minor finishing touches, but those were the "easy" ones.  After an orgy of editing, I often just upload the result as a group. The clips are still fresh in my mind and I don't have to go through the self-imposed agony of "picking a good mix."  So then on Sunday, I uploaded them, went on a bike ride and  pulled a muscle in my neck/shoulder (I know, an upper body injury from riding a bicycle, welcome to your 50's).   The injury was on my "mouse" side and it was pretty painful to do the clicky-draggy work needed to finish an update.

A sane person would just put it aside and come back to it after the pain had subsided.  What I did was stare at my computer screen and wallow in loathing and self-doubt. I know from bitter experience that in my 20's I would have blown everything up and started over. And I don't mean just that set of updates. I was crazy and self-destructive and my wake is littered with projects I've nuked over minor, trivial and mostly imaginary disappointments or set-backs. My "crime" was uploading a group of clips that I felt was sub-standard. Blowing up a year's worth of work seemed like a fitting punishment.

So now that I'm a grown-up I've learned to avoid rash actions. This minor self-awareness almost makes up for my aging body's betrayal. And now that I've written this down, it seems silly and self-indulgent. Public catharsis is an odd beast. I feel better now that I've written about it, but I would feel cheated if I trashed this. If I had an editor, this flagon of whine would never see the light of day. But blogging  makes it too easy to just hit that orange "Publish" button. 

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Last minute addendum-just to clarify why some crappy movies with minor bootage get trimmed down while great movies with massive bootage hover in the wings. Most of the trimming I do is motivated by my desire to  free up disk space.  I cleared over 60GB (probably about 40 movies) over the weekend. A movie with no bootage gets processed in under 5 minutes. If it has one good scene it doesn't take much longer. If it's chock full of bootie goodness it can take 10 times longer to do the job properly. It's a frustrating nod to expediency that I trim down Convoy and leave my HD copies of Van Helsing or Empire of the Ants untrimmed.