Obsession with Perfection

Oh, I understand. You've read the title and thought "Bloody hell, not another fat bird making excuses". Honestly, it's nothing to do with weight, or the media, or society, or anything like that. This post is about artists.
Not just I-paint-and-stuff artists. ALL artists. Musicians, actors, writers, painty-artists and any other profession you would class as an art form. Being a musician/artist/writer myself, I'm exposed to the constant need to perfect a lot. Sportsmen and such practise, and train and train and train to improve, to be the best. Artists don't do that. Artists will spend hours correcting one point of their work, be it that one chord they can't get quite perfect, or that one line in their script they can't convey perfectly, or their word choices on a single paragraph because it's not perfect, and I could go on. Artists don't strive to improve, they attempt to be perfect. There is a difference.
Perfection is the want to have nothing wrong with the work. It doesn't matter if it's a cover of Wonderwall (Oasis), or a ground-breaking and incredibly controversial statue that is intricately detailed and is likely to sell for £82654783489 million, it has to be perfect. Being the best means being better, being recognisably better, which means fame. Not necessarily major fame - I'm not talking own-brand-of-perfume fame, but definitely regional-news-on-a-slow-news-day fame.
The problem with perfection is that it drives people insane. I vaguely remember sobbing for a fair amount of time because I couldn't get a chapter right. Last week, my Art teacher had to physically stop a friend of mine from throwing a piece of artwork that he'd spent the best part of an hour working on, because he'd become so convinced that his work was awful (I thought it was pretty good to be honest). I had another friend who smashed up their electric guitar because they believed they were bad at it.
You see, the problem is simple. Art forms are not something you can measure, and everything is a matter of opinion. If I were a swimmer, for example, I could aim to cut a second off a length. But there is very little I can do to monitor my progress. I could say my knack of drawing noses has become more life-like, but then again, it might have also meant my skills at drawing a range of different noses has decreased, meaning a step back. Also, this is again a matter of perspective.
This is why everything takes so long. It doesn't take long to create something, but months to correct.

I'm sorry

I did have a post on Friday, and I posted it via email.
I haven't bothered to check until now, but clearly the email didn't go through.

I am very sorry and I shall post it now.

Wales

As when I go to university most of the ones in the UK will be £9k a year, I was thinking of going abroad. More accurately, Holland. The Maastricht university is an international school, and so teaches in English. Bonus, it's only £1,500 a year right now, dependent on the euro/pound exchange rate. I mentioned this to my father, who despite being from Henley-on-Thames is one of those irritating militant Welsh, and he said to me "It's free in Wales. Remember you have a Welsh birth certificate"
Now, I'm sure Wales has been bashed with a stick until it is less than dust, but I'll give it another fair whack. What exactly is it that I would study? Agriculture? History of sheep? Here's a well-known fact for you - for every one person in Wales, there are three sheep. Wales is dull. Wales is hilly. Wales is empty. Wales is full of sheep. It also has a pretty much defunct language. And I'm not surprised. Would you particuarly want to learn a language in which vowels are f,y and g?
Welsh is an irritating thing we could live without, frankly. Welsh causes town names such as Rhosllannerchrugog. To be a teacher, politician or anything really, you have to know fluent Welsh. To know fluent Welsh, you should live among Welsh-only-speaking people and preferably your parents speak it too. This reaches out to a good, ooh, three people? If you want to live among Welsh-only-speaking people, you'd have to live in Mid Wales. Wales has two motorways, the M4 and M5. Both are in South Wales. Even Northern Ireland has more. Mid Wales is just a large expanse of... nothing. It's windy, rainy and everybody speaks Welsh, which of course nobody understands.
A friend of mine recently went to Aberystwyth, came back and told me that she went to a restuarant that had the menu available in Welsh. She asked the waitresses if any of them understood the menu. They all said no.
Don't get me wrong, I love Wales, rolling hills and... well, all the sheep. We can just do without Welsh.