I came to realization today that I am simply not keeping up at school.

It was obvious once the idea had formed. It just took a long time to form because my mind rejected the idea out of hand.

What, me not keeping up with the class? That’s unpossible! I’m Michael Bertrand, the guy who was always light years ahead of the class even in UPEI. I’m the guy who got super bored in class because he absorbed the information instantly and others needed repetition in different modes.

Surely I could not ever be someone who struggles to keep up. Not me. ^[1]

But the evidence was there all along. It’s why I found it so hard to speak up in workshopping classes, a fact I even noted weeks before making this realization. I simply can’t keep up with the conversation and all the ideas and raw creativity flying around and come up with things to say at the same time. It’s one or the other most of the time.

I mean, it’s not like I don’t contribute in class. I do, despite the fact that often my ideas bounce off people’s heads like a poorly aimed Skee-Ball, and in my saner moments I admit that it’s not that I don’t contribute enough.

But it’s all pretty hard work. I feel like I am jogging to keep up with people who are walking. There’s just too much going on in my head these days from evenry single new item for me to spare the CPU cycles for anything else.

Obviously, age is the primary factor. When I was the same age as the other students, I was bristling with mental energy and nothing in the world of the mind happened fast enough for me. Even normal conversation with intelligent people was too slow. I would have found workshopping to be amazing fun and not a drag at all.

And don’t get me wrong, I still love doing it. But it takes so much more energy because every item added drags with it the heavy weight of all the associations and connects that have to me made in order to integrate it into my existing worldview.

Makes me tired just thinking about it, really.

I guess that his how raw intelligence turns into crystallized intelligence over time. The brain fills up and the sheer maintenance on your enormous database takes up more and more of your mind’s processor.

So we slow down in many ways as we get older. I wonder how it would feel if we had the option to delete all the boring times from our memories. Times with little or no information content, in other words, not worth remembering.

Basically, a lossless compression of the contents of our minds. Hmmm. That would make an interesting episode of Black Mirror.

I am sure it would be enormously invigorating and possibly even therapeutic. I can see it helping for people with brain damage of various sorts by giving their broken systems less to have to deal with. It would probably help mental illness too, for the same reason.

But what would the long term effects be? Maybe people’s sense of time and context would completely break down. Memories no longer in sequence, people would no longer be able to remember whether something happened 20 years ago or yesterday.

I can relate.

Anyhow, back to the subject. I am either too slow for some classes or damn near too slow. I should be grateful that I am going to school when I am, because a couple of years from now I might not be able to keep up at all.

This makes be worry about the TV writer’s room, though, I hope I can keep up there. If it’s just at conversational speed, there should be no problem. I can riff and be silly and so on with the best of them. And I know damn well that I come up with loads and loads of really good ideas, and they always need those. But if I have to deliver cogent analysis on the fly, it might not work so well.

I might have to jettison tact and sensitivity to do it, and that’s not going to make for a pleasant work environment. Nobody wants to be exposed to my brutal honestly, especially given both my muscular powers of analysis and my talent for expressing the results of said analysis in precise, clinical tones with deadly accuracy.

I’m a sniper. That’s not good for human relations.

But it might be good if I want script analysis work, like writing treatments, or being a first reader for scripts, or doing punch-ups of a lackluster script, or such.

And that is definitely the kind of work you can do anywhere. So there’s that. Apparently it can be quite lucrative, especially if you are quick and reliable.

And I have no problems there. Need that script analysis ASAP? Send me the script, I will have it for you in two hours.

Only If suitably compensated, of course. . Honestly, I would love the challenge. There’s lot of mileage in me yet, it’s just that my top speed ain’t what it used to be.

Then again, what is?

So I dunno. I am glad I have other options should the world of TV writing be completely unwilling to hire a 43 year old. It’s a distinct possibility. They may assume I could not keep up. And they may be right.

I really want to be in that writer’s room, but if I end up just doing the script stuff with maybe a screenplay to try to sell, I would be content.

The main thing is that I can paid for using my talents. I want that so bad. Getting paid for what I do is a goal that shines for my like a new Jerusalem.

And I think I can do it.

Wish me luck.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.