Create/Consume 75/25

This year I had the idea that I was going to make Christmas ornaments and give them out as presents. Ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Not so much. I now realize that this is something that should only be attempted by those 10 and under or by people who actually regularly do crafts. I found a couple of what seemed like pretty straightforward and inexpensive (plus environmentally friendly) projects on Pinterest. There was a project for cinnamon dough ornaments: https://www.homemade-gifts-made-easy.com/cinnamon-dough-ornaments.html and this project for papercraft ornaments: https://www.homemade-gifts-made-easy.com/paper-christmas-decorations.html. Both seemed within my rather narrow range of crafting expertise. At least I found a use for my "Dokdo: A Beautiful Island of Korea" calendar from Dongguk University as seen on the tree-shaped ornament. Also - in this picture Dokdo reminds me of AhCh-To from "The Last Jedi".  Reader: I tried them,...

If I hadn't begun the 75/25 Create/Consume Project* I'd probably be watching a lot of  Christmas movies and TV shows this time of the year. As with many people, certain holiday movies and TV shows have become part of my Christmas tradition. For me they had perhaps taken on even more importance because my nuclear family of origin has sort of dissolved** and because for many years I was living in Korea where Christmas was not a big-deal holiday, but more of a eat an ice cream cake and go on a date kind of affair. These movies and TV shows provided a measure of comfort and home, a through-line, connecting me to Christmas past. In past years I've felt an almost primitive urge to watch these movies and shows, but this year I've found that shifting. So, last weekend, when I was very bad and veered off-project***, Lee asked me to watch "It's a Wonderful Life" with him because he had to return it to the library. I did. Now, "It's a Wonderful Life" ...

So, last week I was saving up minutes of creative time in order to spend them on consuming "The Last Jedi" in theaters. In the process I realized that I was not only going to need to budget for the running time of "The Last Jedi" (a healthy 152 minutes), I was also going to have to budget about 20 minutes for previews and the occasional advertisement. And that's when I realized something really obvious - movie trailers are advertisements. Movie trailers are designed to get you to go out and pay money for a product - a movie. This is very obvious, right? But I have always loved movies so much, that this capitalist aspect of the movie trailer has been invisible to me. It has felt like a privilege to watch movie trailers, or at least it was something which I took for granted as part of a proper movie-going experience. Trailers became even more special to me when I lived in Korea, because there, instead of 20 minutes of trailers, and maybe a few ads, you would ...

"The greatest teacher, failure is." - Yoda, "The Last Jedi" This week brought about my first real failure on my 75/25 Create/Consume project.* I spent Thursday night through Sunday night off the project engaged in a veritable orgy of novel-reading and tumblr-scrolling. It started with a fairly reasonable excuse but turned into a full-on binge. I'm determined, however, to get back on track and use my failure as a lesson. What happened It started Thursday night. I'd been exhausted and in pain all day, and I was running a fever. When I got home I had no energy for anything, so I started reading "Americanah" again, which had been my source of distraction between phone calls at work. Intermittently I was also checking in with Dr. Google trying to figure out whether I had some sort of life-threatening illness like meningitis, the first ailment to pop up when I typed in my symptoms. Anxiety over my health combined with the fever kept me awake unt...

Something I've noticed since starting this project - the majority of the small talk I participate in is related to consuming culture or news. I don't think I'm alone in this. Except for the portion of Americans whose small talk runs more towards sports (something I've never been interested in), I think this is fairly common. Give a listen to a room of coworkers or any group of acquaintances and you'll hear a lot of "Did you read...?" "Did you see...?" "Did you watch...?" "Have you listened to...?" Until recently, this was so normal as to be invisible.  Now I find it somewhat unsettling. The banality of this conversational gambit now suggests to me a pattern of consuming too much entertainment and information, at least among the sorts of people I find myself hanging out with. So now that I've noticed this, I've been thinking about the possible functions this kind of small talk might serve. It identifies us. Certa...

Today I discovered how much I love reading again. It's interesting to say this in this blog* for two reasons, 1. because the whole point of the blog is about reading and watching less and writing or creating more 2. because you would think that a person who deliberately has to create a project around reading less must really really really love reading if they consider it an addiction. However, when reading or watching is an addiction, it is no longer pleasurable. It is merely the thing you are doing to make the bad feelings go away. And now that I am only reading mindfully in limited quantities, the reading has taken on its proper character again. I am reading for pleasure. My Current Reading Roster.  Before I describe to you the great enjoyment I am once again receiving from reading, though, I want to describe some of the ways I was reading up until a week and a half ago and what was bad about it: 1. I was reading to avoid feeling depressed, sad or anxious. Rather than ...

The last few days I've been visited by my old friend*, clinical depression. It isn't the worst bout I've ever had if I think about it and put it in perspective. I've had bouts of depression where I couldn't even read a book (I'd just keep reading the same paragraph and losing my concentration), and a movie wouldn't be distracting enough (the sadness would still seep through.) This is not one of those bouts. I could easily keep this depression at bay by reading novels all weekend or watching 6 familiar romantic comedies, or continuing my "Game of Thrones" rewatch. If I escaped into those other worlds and forgot my own brain chemistry/personal stressors/hyperawareness of the global situation for a few hours, I'd probably fix myself up, at least temporarily. It almost feels a bit masochistic then to carry on with this project of creating 3x as much as I consume with depression in the picture. However, however... I'm not sure whether in the...

So it's a week into my Create/Consume 75/25 Project as of tomorrow morning, and a good time to update how things are going. How it Works As I've mentioned in other entries, the project parameters are to create/consume at a ratio of 75/25. Which means I need to make 3 times the art or content as I consume. So far I've been keeping track of this by starting the stopwatch on my cellphone every time I start creating something and then dividing the minutes I spent creating by .33 to obtain a rough estimate of the minutes I can consume. I record all this in a red composition notebook and set the timer when I want to consume a book or Facebook, etc. So far the only problem I've run into with this system is that I often forget to start the timer when I start creating. Mostly I just write that off as lost minutes, but sometimes I'll try to reverse estimate the time. What I've Created I haven't done anything stunning as of yet. I've made these blog posts....

So, as often happens when I start a new self-improvement project, almost immediately a surprising and challenging wrench gets thrown into it. In this case with my 75/25 Create/Consume project, my goal is to create art 75% of the time and consume art and information only 25% of the time. The wrench is that I'm not feeling well, and when I'm not feeling well my tendency is to read or watch TV. I certainly don't want to draw or paint or collage or even write. I just want to rest and be passive and try to distract myself from feeling like crap. At first it wasn't an issue. Yesterday I came home from work and had a bath and took some medicine. In the bath I don't really read anymore. I've actually found that I prefer to just zone out. To "hit the mmong" as they'd say in Korea.* But after the bath I lay in bed, and I wasn't quite sleepy enough to sleep, but I also wasn't quite feeling up to making art. So immediately I used up all my remainin...

When I was about 3 years old, my Uncles Jon and David wanted to teach me math. I'm sure it was a well-meaning effort to turn me into some kind of child genius.* I strongly resisted learning math, though. I wanted to play and sing and dance and color with my crayons. Probably I wanted to look at books, too. But, math? No. I didn't see the point. When I got really tired of them bothering me about math I told them to go away with the declaration: "I know enough to be a kid." I thought about that today. It was genius, really. I didn't need to know math when I was three years old, at least not anything beyond the basic counting of apples. It was my time to play and imagine and explore and have fun. It didn't serve a purpose, and it didn't help me create. Then I thought about who I am now and how easily I get drawn into learning some new bit of information. Before these last few days, I have been constantly consuming information, and with the internet I wa...

This is Day 3 of my 75/25 Create/Consume project*, and up until now I haven't made any art today.** I woke up late after a rough night's sleep plagued by nightmares which I hope are not related to this project. After eating breakfast I decided I wanted to meditate. Then after meditating I decided I wanted to meditate some more, and then once again. The feeling of the world being noisy had persisted from yesterday, so I guess I was craving some deep quiet. The only other thing I did before work was to use a new recipe for vegan sloppy joes. They were awesome, for the record, and unlike usual I did not make them while "The Office" or "The Great British Baking Show" droned on in the background. Instead I listened to a Prince album and almost cut myself when I felt compelled to clap along to "Raspberry Beret" while cutting onions. I put the knife down though and no animals (including me) were harmed in the making of lunch. After lunch we drove to wo...

My second day of the project and my brain feels, oddly, too full. I have barely used any of the minutes to consume that I have earned, and I haven't used any of them to watch a TV show or movie or read a book. I've checked social media a couple times for under 5 minutes each time. But my brain feels fuller than usual anyway. One explanation could be that Lee and I went to the indoor farmer's market at the Monona Terrace, followed by a brief stop at the Fair Trade farmer's market going on in the next room, followed by the Willy St. Co-op on a Saturday afternoon. All three places were crowded and noisy. It could also be that the art form I mostly engaged in today, collage, involves me leafing through piles of cut-outs from magazines, discarded books and other ephemera that I've collected in two big plastic bins. Collaging, the way I do it, is like consuming a lot of images and seeing what comes out when you vomit them back up. In any case my brain feels very ful...

Today was the first day of my project 75/25 Create/Consume. From the moment I woke up, things were different. Generally I wake up to my phone alarm and immediately get on Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr to see " what's going on in the world", as if the mishmash of information and fluff on these three sites would be any indication thereof. To be fair, most of my friends post a lot of news articles to Facebook, so I do get an indication of what's going on in the realm of politics, etc., but the fractured way that information is dispersed on social media is no way to view the world or choose what goes into your head. Quite often I start the day in a blind panic over climate change and health care, and that's before I've even had my coffee. I know it's a bad way to start the day. But I do it anyway. Today, however, instead of diving into the internet, I wrote morning pages - a practice of stream-of-consciousness writing from Julia Cameron's The Artist...

Recently I came to a realization that wasn't exactly new - I consume too much entertainment, art and information, and I create far too little. As in, lately, I've been creating almost nothing. As a child and teenager I wrote, drew, collaged, sang, danced, spent hours making mixtapes, painted, and even produced odd skits on the playground. In college I continued writing, collaging and occasionally dabbled in other arts. In my 20s I wrote and edited zines and began acting. In my 30's, living in South Korea I became a director and producer of plays and acted in plays as well. I wrote and performed at spoken word nights. But by the end of my time in Korea my creative time had started to erode. Part of it was increasing responsibilities at my university job, but part of it was also how I began dealing with the stress from those responsibilities. Instead of taking my worries to the page or stage or even the noraebang (singing room) I increasingly started numbing myself out with...