Flawed human beings

It's been a busy couple of weeks, and in trying to keep up with everything, I've found myself frustrated and disappointed in my performance at times. I've been trying to learn a new set of skills, and found myself becoming frustrated several times when I wouldn't be able to replicate the action my instructor had just demonstrated the first time I tried (or in some cases, the second and even third time!)

I've also been desperately trying to stay on top of a work project that has mushroomed over the last few weeks. I knew it was a large project when we started, but it seems like the simplest part of it is exponentially larger than I expected.

On top of that, I finally got some feedback from some of my dissertation committee. The only problem is that I'm having trouble interpreting what some of the comments mean. There are also comments that I understand, but I don't see how they quite fit with everything else that I've been doing, so I'm not sure how to implement them.

What all this activity has done is increased my awareness of my own flawed nature to a level that I obviously don't think about most of the time. Most of the time, things go smoothly, according to plan, and I suppose I attribute that to my own intelligence, or foresight, or ability, rather than the combination of luck, serendipity and a bit of innate talent that it really consists of.

The irony is not lost on me that the topic of my dissertation - posthuman figures like cyborgs and clones - are pretty much the opposite of flawed humans. In fact, one theorist suggested that a criteria for defining the human in opposition to other artificial creatures would be that the human makes mistakes (this is also one of the warrants in the Turning test). So I suppose all this flawed-ness that I'm experiencing lately at least has the benefit of confirming that I'm human!