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...