It’s true. Even the weather here has no idea what it’s doing, but it’s somehow succeeding. And I’m a big admirer of the weather, even though we miscommunicate. Sometimes my armpits get sweaty and my butt gets cold and who else is there to blame but the erratic and clueless weather? Myself? Probably not, but mostly yes. If you think that response is too uncertain and too vague, you’d be right, it is. I respond in this manner because vagueness works. Not having a clue what you’re doing is exactly how you thrive. I’m fairly sure Elon Musk just pokes at stuff noncommittally and five slightly different pokes later, stuff launches into outer space successfully. It works for Elon, it worked for Jon Snow, the weather and it works for me. I’ll tell you why and at the end of it, I should have you more or less convinced that I should be a motivational speaker at a TEDx talk, or at the very least, an anonymous motivational writer with a loser username on Tumblr, where being clueless is a respectable job qualification.
Over the last six weeks, I have tried my hand at a bunch of things that under normal circumstances, would have never let me within a 5-mile radius of them. They’re museum exhibits; I am a cranky child with yucky chocolaty fingers. They’re coffee; I am pumpkin spice. They’re 10/10s in real life; I am maybe a 3/10 on Tinder and that’s a little optimistic. In sum, no relation with each other. But I gave them a shot anyway. I had to know what it felt like to have the suave confidence and macho-ness of 3/10s on Tinder. Those guys go proper hard.
Data Visualization:
Back when Snapchat wasn’t a world-class loser, I used to put lines of code on my Story and try to get help from my past friends and future Mark Zuckerburgs. Responses I received were of the but-you-studied-humanities-why-are-you-using-code-who-told-you-that-you-could-step-out-of-that-box nature. People were concerned about my sudden change in skill set. Liberal arts was easy, coding was tough and I didn’t even have the pale, sweaty face of a true Silicon Valley zombie. However, what my concerned fans didn’t know was my five-week data class basically taught me how to fiddle with code and not write it from scratch. It’s an artful form of cheating and everyone who went to school knows how to cheat. Students cheat on exams and on each other and teachers are running the greatest scam of all (secondary education).
Still, fiddling is tricky. You could say that I’m only good at following directions, because that’s all I did. All other times I was crying. I was never good at math, and a lot of really long numbers were co-conspirators in this whole code thing.
I had no idea why all these numbers and brackets suddenly made a chart or some shit appear on my Chrome, but they did. I never knew commas could be as crucial in computer science as in English. And I did it myself! All those Snaps screaming for help were useless; I realized quickly that people on Snapchat are mostly there to put a trendy timestamp on their tipsiness. I now have added HTML, CSS, Javascript to the list of languages I cannot speak or understand, but can be relatively comfortable around without a sense of alarm and impending doom.
Photography:
Somewhere in the other hemisphere, my father and brother have grateful tears leaking out of their eyes — they have found their third musketeer and it is me. Since I’m a fantastic daughter to have anyway (the only qualification is making a good coffee and not spending money on drugs), I have raised the bar pretty high on how to impress my parents. Still, my father spontaneously combusted with joy when I said I would take a photography class this semester. He thought it would be swell to purchase a good camera for my birthday back in December. But my brother, God bless him, promptly reminded him that I knew exactly zero things about a camera and such a gift would not be economically efficient. My father, who likes economic efficiency, accepted this argument and they settled on a compromise: a Polaroid, which is great for looking like an chic urban girl with a travel journal who secretly longs to live in the 1980s and go to music festivals in the desert. I identify with only the girl part of that definition, but the little camera got me started until I got my hands on a DSLR at college.
I still don’t fully understand what’s going on inside this giant lens. I don’t have a single clue what white balance is. Do I understand aperture, ISO and shutter speed? Vaguely. But they all have something to do with holes and holes are much easier to understand. All I do with the camera is try to explain the machine to myself like I am a five-year-old child destined to hate physics later in life. And it works. I don’t know what’s happening inside the camera, but I turn the dials until I see something change. Does the sun look black? Turn. Does the sun look like a color I have never seen before? Turn again. I point, click, and it’s not the world’s ugliest picture that comes out. Divya: 1, Knowledge: 0.
Website: dmurthy.com
I know; three things is kind of a vast list. Every time I add a new skill or a new spice to noodles, I say to myself “Surely not?” and I reply to myself “But of course, dear.” I chat with other Divya from time to time just to make sure she’s still there and cheering me on. She is. She cheered me on as I made a new website for myself last weekend. Someone informed me that employers like it if you have a clean website outlining your work, experience, personality, dog preferences etc. I like the sound of employment. But I didn’t like the sound of creating a website on my own on a new platform. I was right not to like it; I spent two hours wondering why my .PNG logo file did not show up in a bigger size on the site. This happened because I don’t have a clue about Adobe Illustrator, or Adobe <insert program> really. The most capable I am with Adobe is opening PDFs. But if you spend a couple of hours clicking anything with words you know and saving a million useless files, one of those files will eventually turn out to be the right one. What’s that? I’m losing space needlessly on my laptop? Byte me.
To conclude, yesterday my economics professor suddenly chucked a bunch of alphas, betas and deltas on the board and told us they would all star in the coming exam (I stopped learning Trigonometry in the 10th grade). This was not a requirement from the syllabus so I confidently told her that that I had no idea what a derivative was, but if she wanted I’d try to learn it in the next five days. So did a bunch of other people in the class. An hour later, she sent an email omitting the calculus from the exam.
See the power of a giant bunch of stupid people? Never underestimate a collective dip in knowledge. Treat life with an “idk lol” attitude and then watch as success just happens to you. Crazy, I know. Or do I?
The Fourth PowerPuff Girl 