Try not, do or do not.
Today was my final in Information Security here in Dresden. I've been
taking this class, along with others, not sure if I'd take the final in
any of them. Seeing as how Professor Fritzsch was awesome to both John
and myself, I opted to take his final, even though I knew it would most
likely be a lesson in futitily. I was right.
There is an important lesson to be learned in failure. Just because a
person fails at a thing does not make that person a failure. This idea is
seemingly obvious, I know, but at the same time, before coming here, I
would have never really believed it.
I studied reasonably hard for this test, especially as far as studying for
me goes. I gave it a solid night of highlighting and translating, in the
vain hope of making something resembling coherent answers when the time came.
Sadly, even with all of the studying, the test did more than just beat me
up... It was more like putting Gary Coleman in the ring with Tyson...
yeah, you get the idea.
Still, there was something profound to be said for getting my ass handed to
me so badly. It feels like a liberation of sorts, like the culmination of my
German experience. I mean, the whole thing really has just been a tightly
clustered string of beating after beating, and I've gotten to the point where
getting back up isn't all that hard anymore. I guess the real thing to be said
here is that even if I haven't really learned anything in the academic sense
here in Germany, I've learned much more than I ever could have had I spent
another seemingly mundane year at NAU. With that, I will return to the bottle
of $1.50 good German wine that I bought, and continue to remind myself that
it's 5 o'clock somewhere. Prost.
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