Consumption v Production

I used to keep a lot of things on optical discs for storage. Old hard drive backups on DVD or backups of my audio books on CD. But I recently shelled out some cash for about half a T of external hard drive space so I'm in the process of moving all my shit from old optical discs onto the drives.

But I've noticed something with these. I see the amount of stuff I've accumulated and it surprises me how much we consume versus create. Some of this stuff, like some of the divx video and some of th emusic is stuff I haven't even bothered watching or listening to, but as I think about it, this stuff is largely made up of things I have consumed and by the sheer volume of it, if I had spent half the time consuming content as I did making it, I'd have a lot more to show for my life.

I'll admit to watching some TV daily. It's often the news or whatever is on PBS, but I do consume TV daily and I certainly don't produce much writing daily. Granted I'm not popping out Oscar caliber scripts or any shit like that, but even things like journal and blog entries I don't do daily.

There's an abundance of consumption and a dearth of production and it's disappointing. It also takes frelling forever to get the last season of Farscape from optical disc to my goddamn hard drive.

Thanksgiving Rest and old ideas resurface

Not much happened over the Thanksgiving weekend. I did listen to an interesting recording of a historian talking about the Pilgrims. You know there's a lot of that story you don't get in fourth grade when you making paper turkeys and stuff. But that's beside the point I suppose.

I do feel more rested now. Four days and the most I did for work was check the email a few times (by which I mean no more than three times daily).

But I have come across a quote I used to have on a poster or something. It's something I should remind myself of more often and appreciate more. "Time is precious and constantly slipping away from us." I don't know who said it. Google says there was some pretty close bastardization of it in a Ricky Martin song a while ago. Go figure.

But I figure it was something I should reflect on a little more. Particularly when I accomplish little of what I want to accomplish in pursuit of the day to day tasks. "Carpe Diem" is the line, "sieze the day and live your lives extraordinary." Typically my day is more focused on "carpe piscis" - "sieze the fish, cause otherwise you're not going to eat and HECO's going to turn off the power so you can't cook the damn fish."

Fine

I haven't been "good" in quite some time. I've been fine. And as much as I want to be good, sometimes you have to let that go. It's a phantom dream to aspire to but not a reality to which you can grasp. But it's not a loss. Fine is real, and sometimes reality is what we need. It's the pain in the reality that lets us know we're alive. And it's the things in 'fine; that we know can be better that give us the motivation to keep going, to preserver, to hope.

I spend a month busy and being away from writing. In that time, I've had a number of different thoughts cross my head. Hopefully I'll get a few of them down this weekend.

Skills I don't have

At some point I need to gather the skills to tell someone "shut the fuck up and go away." Because honestly, I don't want to hear it. I don't give half a shit about your life story. I don't think it's possible to care any less about whatever the fuck is bothering you. Yet I still had four different people waste 20 minutes of my cell phone minutes and an hour and a half of my time today telling me shit about themselves that I don't give a fuck about.

Not that it frustrates me, just that if I'm telling you I'm in the middle of doing something else, like say, USING A HOT FUCKING IRON don't try to keep me on the phone. End the goodamn conversation like a decent person and go the hell away. I don't care, none of what you say matters to me and no matter how comforting of a voice I may or may not have or how calming of a demeanor I may emit, you're pissing me off. A reasonable person would say "oh, I'm sorry I'm interrupting you, I see I caused you to burn you hand because you're trying to hold a cell phone between your head and your shoulder while I'm telling you shit you couldn't care about. Please excuse my gigantic fucking idiocy and selfishness and let me let you get back to doing what you were doing in the first place." But no, instead you keep prattling on about some such bullshit that matters less than the sinus infection that giant bug up your ass has.