Day 4: She Makes Art for No Money
[Returning after a week of no posts – life got in the way]
Today’s screw-the-routine was targetted at my down times. Specifically, I was thinking of a sentiment expressed by a Dutch designer whose talk I attended. “I’m a creator,” he exclaimed. “I’m not just a consumer. Even when I’m not working I think of ways to create.”
Well since you put it that way!
But before I continue, I’d like to say that even though I’m a designer as well (although certainly not of the same calibre as Mr Never-Consume) I’m also a major consumer of content. In fact I consume so much content that at times it becomes a problem and a crutch. When I go into my Sad Spirals, I usually binge-read and binge-watch Youtube. (For that reason I will never get a Netflix subscription. At least Youtube vids usually end in 10 minutes or so.) (But then, of course, I can watch many-many-many 10-minute clips.) (But-but. Is that still better than watching many-many-many-many 1-hour shows?)
There are usually two times of the day in which I #consumecontent, both of which occur during my down times. In this case, down time = I’ve got nothing else pressing to do during this time. Down time #1 is the home-work-home commute. If I take the train, which I’m aiming to do more often, that’s 2.5 hours each day of what-else-can-I-do. If I’m on Uber or taxi, that’s 50mins. Still an ok amount of time to get an activity accomplished.
Down time #2 is the I’m-home-and-exhausted-and-wanna-veg-out time, that starts after I get home, feed and cuddle the Cat Monsters, shed all clothing and collapse into a sweaty heap in my Veg-Out Corner. This is essentially a tiny corner of the room I’ve kitted out with a pile of old towels that I can crumple up into as I would have lost the will to take a shower by this time. (This post is also tagged “decay”, “decrepitude”, “degeneration”.) This one’s the more insidious of my two Down Times, because it has been known to spiral into uncontrollable bouts of Youtubing and/or reading. This routine triggers massive bingeing, especially when I’m already feeling a bit sad and am in need of numbing or distractions.
So for today, I decided to try disrupting the usual Down Time Consumption with Down Time Creation. Flex the creative muscles and actually produce something. This was quite an exciting thought. I’ve been lucky to have had clients who were pretty cool with me taking varied design directions, but seldom have I gotten a blank canvas to do whatevs.
Down Time #1 today would be all on trains, so I had around 2 hours or so to play around with something. (It turned out to be much less than that, because the crazy crowd meant that I couldn’t raise my arms for much of the time. Anyhoodle, for this pocket of time I decided to zhng my cat photos to get a snazzy new Whatsapp profile pic.
That’s my plump little Popster, failing to jump over the moon. The background is landscape shot from a hike I took a couple of months back which I hipster-filtered into oblivion. Whatsapp profile pics are circular, so the original intent was for Poppy to leap over the moon but I couldn’t quite get it all together by the time the train rolled into my station. It took a looong time for me to get the lasso tool working just right on my small phone screen.
It’s not terrible.
(Yep that’s a shortened Terry Pratchett quote about cats.)
Down Time #2 spawned from one of the craft videos I’d binged a week or so ago. Comb knitting! I had one of those wide-toothed combs that I’ve never used and #winteriscoming (no it’s not, I live on a tropical island) so it would be a perfect project. Plus it would take up long, lovely oodles of time AND I can still sort of indulge in my content-consuming habits – am not much for cold-turkey – by listening to podcasts or audiobooks while I knit.
(Yes… it was past 8pm and I was drinking. Erpp. Intermittent fasting fail.)
To get some synergy with the endeavour at hand, today’s was a podcast that I’d been very eager to listen to for some time: The Hilarious World of Depression!
The intro bit contains these lines:
Depression is a vicious cycle of solitude and stigma that leaves people miserable and sometimes dead. Frankly, we’re not going to put up with that anymore.
Yeah tell it them, brother!
And really, how could anyone resist episode descriptors such as these:
“Patti Harrison Figures Out Who She Is and She’s a Woman Who Likes Gross Jokes” (Nov 6, 2017)
“Jenny Lawson is Very Fond of Creepy Smiling Dead Animals and Worries Quite a Bit” (Dec 11, 2017)
“Rhett Miller Really Hates That Brass Cat” (Jan 2, 2018)
AND SO MUCH MORE. I giggled so much I stabbed myself a few times with my stitch picker while knitting. Oh yeah – the comb knitting – yes that was fun too, and relatively easy to do if you kinda like small, repetitive actions and a neck ache that you can feel smug and productive about.
Today’s Daylio record: another smiley! (Small note about the shorthand: “Movies” is my category for podcasts cos I don’t have a Daylio category for podcasts yet. “Art & Rug” is my category for art-making or rug-weaving, which I got into last year to use up old T-shirts and to make worshipful mats for my kitties.)
Depression Rules 