Mastering the cycle of inspiration

August 29, 2010


Yesterday, my inspiration level was at zero. Today, I have five blog posts to write.

Such is the process that goes on in our minds: creative momentum, fueled by the peaks, stalled by the valleys.

It isn’t enough to wait it out. Waiting out creative momentum as it’s floundering at the bottom of a hill is to do it a disservice; to assume that things will pick up again, that all you need to do is wait.

It still takes work. But it also takes patience.

As I move from project to project, I believe more in the idea that mastery of creative momentum is one of the most important things a creative-minded person can learn.

Whether you’re designing Web sites or writing novels or cooking or reading or whatever, if you can give your mind the push that gets it going back up the peak toward maximum inspiration, and if you can recognize the moment when you’re at your best and take advantage of your brain’s open channel ways, you will be both more productive and better at ease.

It’s a cycle. And while controlling the cycle is impossible, recognizing its benefits is crucial.

Tags: On..., Writing |

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The doctor’s office

August 19, 2010


ChartDoctor’s offices have a tendency to be bare, cold places.

Which is why, when you go into any health care or training facility, you’re going to find posters on the wall. Anatomy posters and “how the body works” posters; images that belong in high school biology classrooms and undergrad medical seminars – anything to add a bit of color, to “warm the place up,” grabbed haphazardly from the stacks of promotional materials doctors get on a constant basis.

Which is all well and good. Sometimes, the posters are interesting.

It’s always my fear, though, that one of these days, in the midst of an intense check-up, as we’re considering some serious condition, the doctor will stop, think for a minute, and stand up.

“Hold on. I need to check something quick.”

And he’ll walk over to one of these charts, look at it thoughtfully, and say, “Ah ha!”

“Yes. There it is!”

Smiling, he’ll return to our checkup. “No wonder I couldn’t figure it out. I was looking at the wrong muscle!”

That’s probably the point at which I’ll start sweating.

Tags: On... |

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Everything is dead

August 18, 2010


Did you hear the one about when a magazine that makes a living talking about technology and the Web told us all that the Web was dead?

The Web. It’s dead.

Let’s review.

Chivalry is dead. The Queen is dead. Microsoft Kin is dead. Duke Nukem Forever is dead. Michael Jackson is dead. Bill Cosby is dead.

Print is dead. The 30-second spot is dead. Blogs are dead. The record industry is dead (though, surprisingly, analog and vinyl are not). Sitcoms are dead.

Paul is dead.

God is dead.

And now the Web.

We’ll look beyond the argument that, while stand-alone apps and smartphones are rising in popularity, the simple fact is that most apps still depend on Web content and a not-so-small degree of Web promotion to become successful. We’ll also look past the example, which positions a tech-savvy media consumer lucky enough to own an iPad as some kind of technological standard, as if a vast majority of people are suddenly rising to the upper income brackets, running around and buying Apple products and downloading apps as if their status depended upon it.

Instead, we’ll just bask in the cheap journalistic practice of stating [SOMETHING] IS DEAD!, a surefire way to deliver easy traffic, draw considerable ire, and make baseless predictions using flawed data and a minor timeframe.

Because, in the eyes of the claimants, who are we to question?

These headlines are cheap. And so are the stories. The only solace we have is that, five years from now, we’ll be able to look back at this article and laugh at its misguided bluster. That is, if we even remember it – the hidden strength behind these boisterous obituaries is that, five years from now, no one will ever remember.

Listen, Wired may have a point.

But a point isn’t enough to lay claim to predicting a medium’s demise. (One they’ve admittedly already made, 13 years earlier.)

It is, however, enough to throw a hail mary article into the abyss of the magazine industry’s dwindling readers – of which I’m one – in a desperate attempt to regain a little relevancy.

Journalism is dead. Long live journalism.

Tags: Annoyances, Blogging, Journalism, On..., Technology |

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I’m afraid of everything

August 8, 2010


Thunderstorms. They’re loud and wet and can cause unruly weather-related harm on whatever they pass over. They are a precursor to floods and tornados and hail. They ruin picnics and kayak trips and weddings.

Who cares. It doesn’t matter. I haven’t been afraid of thunderstorms since I was three.

That is, until this past week.

Now, every rumble scares me. A severe weather forecast makes me nauseous. The mere mention of rain causes my bowels to churn, my forehead to sweat, my entire disposition to revert into panic.

We’ve spent the last ten days dealing with a too-high water table and a constant threat of leaking water. A once-in-a-lifetime weather event, one we’re fortunate enough to receive only a portion of, has left us scared. We’ve finally torn out floorboards and sheet rock. We’ve fretted over the future. We even cancelled Sierra’s 3rd birthday party.

Don’t even ask me about that one. It’s enough to bring me to tears.

But it’s not the rain we’re worried about. We’ve got that covered through a system of wet-vac hoses and split second deployment processes that would qualify us for medals and special compensation from most major U.S. military branches. And it’s not the flooding, either – we’ve got everything torn out, so we certainly won’t be ruining anything new. It’s not the repairs. It’s not the money. It’s nothing material.

It’s that we don’t know when this will end.

We go through life with a series of end dates, our plans developing natural conclusions, our dreams the only items worth putting off indefinitely. We know when things will end and we feel safe in saying, “Well, this won’t last much longer,” even though sometimes it does last a lot longer and even though sometimes things never really end. We have that date. We live by that date. We understand the date, what it is that we’re working toward, what it is that will save us from the unspeakable fate of falling into confusion and uncertainty and utter shame.

Right now, we don’t have that. We don’t know what the weather will do. We understand that a sudden inch of rain will throw us back into the frantic wet-vac switching monsters we have become over the past week.

We as humans use knowledge as a crutch, assuming we’re in full control of our situation as long as we’re totally comfortable with the facts. If we know the outcome, we can plan for the outcome, and we can learn to live with the outcome, and we can move forward, the outcome a major part of our life but still there’s an outcome to understand so we’re richer and more lively human beings because of it.

Without that knowledge, however, we melt. We become useless. We snap at our kids and break down into tears and feel so utterly helpless that nothing else matters.

I know. I’ve been working through it, living with this stupid fear of rain, of waking up knee deep in the water that’s been haunting me even in my dreams, forcing me to misinterpret our dog’s curled up torso as a water leak in the middle of the night, causing me to reach for the floor to feel if it’s dry.

I know that someday I won’t be afraid of thunderstorms. Instead, I might be afraid of the future of my industry. Or of what my kids are doing when I’m not around. Or of the march of time and its effects on my personality and health. Or of dying. Certainly, I’ll be afraid of dying.

Ultimately, it’s just the fear of the unknown. And as much as we all may try to deny it, we all suffer from it.

If anyone has any cure, let me know.

Tags: On..., Vilhauer |

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Remind remind remind

August 2, 2010


While we’ve spent the last four days vacuuming water out of our basement – 48 hours of nonstop humming from four wet-vacs, followed by a brief respite and, thanks to another storm, a reprise – our annoyance doesn’t tell the whole story.

Or, to be more honest, our annoyance tells TOO MUCH of the story.

Our basement didn’t flood. There was no standing water. There was no need to cut away feet of sheet rock or call a cleaning company. Our windows are intact; in fact, outside of some carpet we were planning on replacing someday, we lost nothing of value.

We didn’t lose heirlooms. We didn’t lose furniture. We didn’t lose electronics or hobby cars or pictures or pets. We lost sleep. We lost a little hearing from that damned constant mechanic whir. We lost all hope a few times, our minds worn down and the end nowhere in site, but we always gained it back.

It’s easy to fall back onto the willing arms of first-world bitching, its hands reaching out like some perverted game of trust. See, we vacuumed and we dumped water and we tore out carpet and we washed the smell of quickly molding foam, and – at times – we felt justified in our complaints. We always do, right? What happens to us at THIS MOMENT is the best or worst thing that’s ever happened in the history of the world.

But we didn’t lose anything we would have missed.

A lot of people did.

In Sioux Falls and Harrisburg, people lost their basements, their things, their sense of security. In New Orleans, people lost their homes and their city. In Darfur, people lose their lives.

All things are relative. We reminded ourselves that every time we felt like falling back into complaint. This was a major flood, and we came away with only a few sleepless nights and an over-reliance on Ridgid and Shop-Vac products. Others weren’t so lucky. Others have decisions much more costly and much more important to make.

And I still have to keep reminding myself. Remind myself to continue working. Remind myself to look forward. Remind myself to keep calm and carry on. Remind myself that things could be worse. Remind myself to let it go. Remind remind remind.

Tags: On... |

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On holding the Internet

July 11, 2010


Some initial thoughts on the iPad, several months after my initial thoughts could possibly be relevant.

This isn’t a gadget. This isn’t a trifle – it’s not a thing you just have, like Flip video cameras and iPod Shuffles have become. This isn’t a piece of trivia.

Most of all, this isn’t a laptop, where the Internet is simply a function of a larger machine, as equal in processing power as the calculator or word processor or camera. This is – and I’m being almost literal, here – the physical manifestation of the Internet itself. Sure, you can pull a few offline productivity type programs into the mix, but the iPad’s importance is tied directly to its ability to condense and simplify the Internet experience, offering such a direct pipeline to information and entertainment that the pipeline itself becomes transparent.

If you could actually hold the Internet – if the Internet were a physical, tangible thing – you’d probably be holding something pretty close to the iPad.

Seriously. It’s smooth. Real smooth.

All that hype? It’s real, you guys.

Tags: On..., Technology |

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Selling it all

July 8, 2010


I took my CD collection to the record store the other day.

It took a while to get through the doors.

To be honest, the box was heavy, and I was by myself, and the door wouldn’t open properly. There were physical strains accompanying the mental ones. But, yeah. I’ll admit. It was kind of hard.

For a little while, at least.

It wasn’t so much that I was selling the CDs – after all, they’d sat in our basement for a full year without so much as a peep, and before that they had been pushed to the attic where they rarely saw human contact – but that it felt so irreversible.

Over 1000 albums. Stacked, alphabetized, moved twice, organized and reorganized. A representation of two people’s musical tastes; a chronicle of over 15 years of changes and favorites and succumbing to pressure.

And then, I turned around and left. The box sat on the counter. I’d hoped for the best. They were literally out of my hands.

At some point over the past few months, a string of nostalgia snapped. The notion of holding onto a physical representation of an abstract sense became ridiculous. The music wasn’t on those CDs – it was in the air, in my ears and (oh, man, here comes the sap) IN MY HEART.

(Coincidentally, it is on our computer, too.)

When I shifted my view of music from something that you hold and collect to something you listen to and enjoy and allow to run free, I understood I had to move. To unload the discs while I still could, while someone else was still interested in buying them, before others came to the same realization: that holding on to CDs – especially if they’re already stored on a computer and an iPod or whatever it is you store your music on these days – has become as antiquated as cassette tapes and 8-tracks.

Maybe you’ve already done this. Maybe you progressed faster than I did.

Maybe. Then again, maybe you’re in the same place I was. If so, take it from me – a former CD junkie:

Your music is not tied to those discs. You can let them go.

Tags: Music, On... |

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