The Writer’s Corner features poetry, essays, short stories, satire, and various fiction and nonfiction from SCAD Atlanta students. To submit your own work for the Writer’s Corner, email features@scadconnector.com.
“Risks and No Reward” by Florence Kahuhu
I’m sitting in my overcrowded apartment, looking up at the glow of the TV that has had me in a trance for the last 12 hours. Friday, 31st May, the last day of the quarter and the last day you can turn in your homework. I was on a great tangent. The quarter had not been the best — who am I kidding, it was the worst one ever. Grad school has been a rocky road so far, and I occasionally miss when my plans for the future would just work themselves out, and I’d be rich and famous by my Lord’s blessing. That blissful ignorance fueled my spirit and sunny days I wasted away. Now, hard work fuels my dreams because nothing short of sacrifice and back-breaking work will get me to where I need to be.
But as I assume a shrimp-like posture, my back damn near dislocates as I edit the 15th layer of my video essay I should have submitted two weeks prior. I wonder if this is karma or just another road bump in this uphill battle. The instructions for the assignment (create a 10-minute video essay on a topic of your choice) were not the issue. But hitting the 10-minute mark for the video was certainly difficult to fully actualize. I had been stuck at 7:43 for the two weeks the project marinaded in my hard drive, but I finally got off my ass and gave myself the harsh but well-deserved pep talk I needed to get to work and cross the 10-minute finish line. But the file corrupting after I promptly passed out was not a part of my plan. The panic that ensued damn near killed me. A conflict between crying myself to oblivion until I gained strength again was damnably tempting, but the pressure of a deadline carried my jackrabbit of a heart to push all emotion aside and lock. In.
After a nap, a smoke break, and several scratches to my ankles, courtesy of my lovely cat, I began the most grueling 12 to 14 hours of my life. Because of course, I deleted everything in celebration and did not save the links to any of the source material. And anything salvageable was also in the same corrupted folder, so a three-week-long project was crunched to (maybe) 15 hours left to the deadline.
I began optimistic. I’ve done this once, I remember the steps and techniques, so it should be pretty straightforward. Right there is where the problem began. In my panic, I never thought to stop and think why exactly my laptop very randomly corrupted a file, an issue that had never happened before. The nap brought some clarity for me, and a smell promptly pierced through it. Process of elimination and several sniffs around my apartment confirmed that the familiar sharp sting of ammonia was coming from the desk. Looking accusingly at my cat passed out in an aggressive stretch, I started sniffing around. The fear settled when the HDMI corner had a stench of straight cat piss. How I did not smell this rancid mess, I do not know. But the missing pieces clicked, and I was just appalled that my own child would sabotage me.
The repair bill was a whole other trauma that leaves me lightheaded when I think about it.
So, my night was full of discovering new and creative ways to move my computer screen around so I could get to different buttons with a malfunctioning HDMI that I could not abandon the use of. Because when you’re editing a large video essay on After Effects, you need to be able to zoom in and click on those tiny little effects. At 3 a.m., the project was not of the same quality as before, but my spirit had gone through war and I chanted, As long as it’s over in my head. Then came rendering. My tired eyes couldn’t even tear up as the cruel display gave a timeline of five hours. Oh well, I’ll sleep and check on it every hour. An hour and a half later, I woke up to my 10th alarm to the battery dead. A number of deep breaths later, I held back my panic and I nudged the plug the ½ inch it had gone loose.
I bit the bullet and emailed my head of department with a heavy heart with my progress update as well as the links to the sites. I put on a 12-hour South Park Super Smash and settled to watch it red-eyed because I wasn’t sure if I could perform such a miracle again.
