Life: Summer Boredom

@ Home on the Lake

Sigh.

Once the sun goes down, the last 2 weeks, I’ve been bored. I get home, clean house, do chores and cook a good meal. I’ll read the news of the day and sort of unwind after a long day of work. Damnit, it’s 8PM 2 more hours to go before I’ll be ready for sleep. I’m not tired, I’m not occupied. I’m bored.

I really don’t know what changed? I’m writing this blog to hopefully figure that out.

I know there are two big things bothering me right now…maybe 3? First, my carpal tunnel is getting worse. It keeps me from writing after I’ve spent all day writing at work. I’m only writing this because it’s 9PM and sleep is not in sight yet. The second issue is my movie library. I’ve finally reached a point where I have nothing to watch. Thousands of films and TV shows. I could finally start Californication or re-watch Star Trek TNG in its entirety for the first time since I was a kid or get past season 2 of Boardwalk Empire. There are some quality shows I need to watch. Movies, I’ve seen them all once and some 10+ times. I have lost the excitement to seek out obscure films and honestly, watching movies right now is hard. the house is hot from Summer air, the light shines through ruining the viewing angle of the TV and my basement doesn’t yet have the setup to support the projector and screen and surround sound it’s wired for. We need a guy to finish the sheetrock, dropped ceiling and flooring before that can happen. Every time someone talks in a movie, a Harley blows by and I have to rewind to hear the dialogue. Living on a lake has a lot of downsides if you’re not a boat-owner.

The third issue really comes down to sort of an angsty or unsettling feeling that I honestly can’t point out. There are things outside of the house I’d rather be doing. I don’t have the resources or time to go do them. My motorcycle needs a lot of repairs I can’t afford to get it into reliable shape to go off-roading again…probably $2K in modifications. My car needs $800 worth of tires so I can go drag racing and finally test the Turbo Blanket I need to install since I have to measure before & after temps as a part of my free deal with the sponsor. I need a longer telephoto lens and a better zoom lens for an upcoming wedding (I’ll rent both to get by). I also desperately need new pans. I don’t have any slacks or jeans that fit me since I lost weight and 3 pairs of shorts, 2 if you could one has a hole in the bottom that no one has realized exists yet.

This unsettling feeling is probably the most troubling. I need time, money and will power to go and get these things done. I’ve been tinkering all week with a mower that is having issues. We got it for free but it needed some love. I lost a part magically yesterday and it sort of sent me into this glum mood. I’m fully at fault but it doesn’t mean I’m not frustrated at the fact that at my billable rate, I could have just bought a new lawnmower by now. I really like those Honda Mowers. They look great and will last for decades if properly loved. Unfortunately, I have to start saving for a snow-blower since Winter is longer than Summer here.

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You know things are unsettled and off-balance if I’m blogging. The pain in my wrist is extreme. This is all very painful. I keep putting out YouTube videos. I’m up to $85 a month earned for the last 30 days of ad revenue. I’ll make a grand off YouTube this year, enough to afford to pay for this web-server plus a new GoPro or put that money toward a Canon lens. Finally getting sponsors is a great sign of doing something right. 

I’m pretty out of touch with technological trends and while that’s a statement that may horrify my employer, I don’t want my opinion to be misunderstood. I’m at the cutting edge of technology for what I do at work. I still feel like I have a lot to offer. I compute evenly across 5 different platforms and am always connected, always trying new things but lately, man it’s getting very difficult to keep up from an overall computing usage perspective. Everyone streams their media now and computers are almost 100% used in the consumer space for social networking. How social do you guys have to be? The amount of people using a maxed out iMac to its fullest potential and listening to local iTunes libraries and using SLRs is completely in the past. I mean, it’s truly something that’s fringe at this point. The odd thing is, I get comments from people who acknowledge that my workflows and usage of computers and devices is best. My photos are great, videos are insanely high quality (from a hardware perspective) and I fully utilize all of the computing power in my devices but they themselves just want to chat with their friends on Facebook and send crappy selfies and this is the opinion of everyone. I feel more and more fringe-group every day and i fight for what I believe is the best way to compute but I feel like such an outlier!

Over the weekend, my GF explained to me that SnapChats last a few seconds. I said “can you pull up the archive?” No, you can’t. They go away after like 3 seconds…forever! Unless you take a screen grab but what about motion pictures, you can’t screen grab those and this means millions of people are running around with screen grabs all in their iCloud libraries? WTF? So I had to confirm this one thing which is if you send something to SnapChat, you are the owner of that copyright material, You captured it, you keep it and send it to your friends who all will see it for just a minute or two and no, I’m wrong! In fact, when you capture a photo / movie, it’s not saved locally. It’s also gone forever. You upload it to a server it gets distributed to friends and then poof, gone. 

And believe it or not, at this wedding we were attending, people like everyone was using the SnapChat interface to capture really special moments like first dance of the new couple. Holy shit. this is the rest of their lives. There’s no professional videographer and a hundred people are capturing this moment in a medium that throws away that moment after a few seconds.

Simply writing this out loud makes my brain want to explode. I’m speechless. It’s the norm now to not only unplug yourself from reality to video-tape a moment you spent time and money to attend but now you’re video-taping it on film that catches on fire 3 seconds later. 

I truly feel like I have no place in the next generation of social media. 

Here I am snapping photos on a 5D SLR w/ two memory cards for data redundancy saving those photos to Lightroom on a NAS also with data redundancy and daily backups to Backblaze and you guys are snapping temporary videos that go poof a minute later.

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I don’t know what it’ll take to get out of this boredom I’m in. I could work more but that will not lead to an emotional gratification I need. There are no additional movies to watch, no projects to complete because I’m broke now paying off a lot of the house projects that are done and need to be paid and buying things like patio furniture and grill sets. No Summer travel planned. Everything is great except it’s a Summer of broke boredom. I wish there was something computer related I could sink my teeth into  but my carpal tunnel is truly affecting my ability to moonlight a new fascination. Heck, I have rated a hundred beers that should go on my beer blog but I just can’t muster the effort to do that much less, maintain the long-form writing this blog deserves. 

It is getting late. I thank you all for listening to my rambling. Luckily, the very warm May month has turned into a cool end of June. We’ve had 40F temps at night and 75 during the day. Very San Francisco like. 

I wonder what it’d be like to live in San Francisco again. Once, my angel city the place I knew I’d belong. I ran away from there 7 years ago. What would it be like to go back? To do more of my best work and once again, envision what it’d be like to actually change the world? Food for thought.

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