Spring is here, it is April, and it's already hot. The temperatures are right for summer, but we still have the vibrant Spring colors everywhere. I'm not a photographer, never have been, but I'm enjoying using Instagram to take pictures.
Instagram is a good piece if software, and I can see why people like it (I like it very much myself). But it has a negative effect that is common to modern-day software that is intended to be used to create art. It makes it so quick and easy to create a finished product, that it tempts a lot of people like me (who have no eye for photography) to create lots and lots of finished products that have no substance. Instead of examining the substance of the photograph and admiring the photographer's peculiar genius in selecting the particular subject matter, lighting, and exposure, we revel in the ease of pulling out a high megapixel smartphone, snapping a picture of just about anything, applying a filter, and having the image shared with the whole world in under to minutes.
The same problems apply in other media software: DAW software, video editing software; heck, even word processing software to a certain extent. I admit, there are some benefits to all of this. We capture images we wouldn't otherwise capture, we hear songs that would never have been recorded, we see films that would never have been produced. But the ubiquitous and never ending stream of digital content produced by nearly everyone has made me appreciate more than ever the experience of seeing a good idea, fully developed and beautifully executed, presented by an artist who has taken the time to perfect it at every level, whether or not the artist chose to use modern tools to create it.
Not to digress, but this is why I have always been angered by George Lucas' refurbished Star Wars films released in the 90's. Lucas apparently didn't realize that his biggest fans not only loved the movies because they presented a masterfully crafted, soul-touching story, but because of what Lucas was able to achieve technically and visually with the tools that were available in the late 70's and early 80's. With the new versions, he has erased the simple beauty of what he achieved in the original versions.
Now back to the topic. Does the ease of the digital age make us artistically lazy? I think it does. Probably intellectually lazy too. I suppose the question is how do we make full use of the amazing tools available for creating art withou betraying the works that we create with them~
Saturday, April 21, 2012
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Who You Are
I went to a wedding last Saturday with my wife and her friends. One of them was talking about people who get married young, and she said something like, “Can you imagine getting married before 25? I didn’t even figure out who I was until I was 25.”
That statement struck me, and I’ve been thinking about it over the past week. I think I knew who I was well before 25. At 16 I knew exactly who I was. Since that time, however, and especially over the last 12 years, I’ve been forgetting who I am. It’s not supposed to work like that. You’re supposed to learn more about yourself, figure yourself out, and eventually come to some ultimate conclusions about who you are. You aren’t supposed to figure it all out and then go backwards.
So here I am, at age 33, trying to figure out who I am again. Since I (along with the rest of humanity) don’t know how to do that, I’m going to have to take some stabs in the dark. Well, that’s actually not quite true. I know how I figured it out the first time, but I can’t do it that way again. I’m going to leave that statement there without explaining it any more.
This is me. I’ve been through my daily routine before on this blog, but here it is again. I’m still trying to find the meaning in it. I feel like there’s got to be something more to it than what’s on the surface of the words.
My alarm goes off in the morning at 5:50 a.m. I usually hit the snooze button once or twice and get out of bed between 6:10 and 6:15. I shower and shave. I only recently started shaving regularly. Before that, I shaved as little as possible, because I kind of liked the way I looked with stubble. But my wife doesn’t go for stubble, and I’m trying to accommodate her.
All of my clothes are in the same place in my closet. I used to have some in the closet and some in the dresser (which is out in the middle of the bedroom), but I eventually realized that I was wasting time going back and forth from the closet to the dresser to get dressed. Plus it’s quieter to get dressed entirely in the closet, since we have a walk-in closet. My wife and kids are still asleep while I’m getting dressed, so getting dressed in the closet reduces the chance that I will wake them up.
It’s springtime now. It’s chilly in the mornings, but gets warmer in the afternoons. So I wear jeans, button up shirts, and a blazer style jacket that my wife gave me for Christmas about 6 years ago, the Christmas after we got married. We had seen it in the JC Penney, and I had really liked it. She knew I wanted it, so she got it for me and surprised me. She’s very good with gifts. I don’t think she’s ever given me something that I just didn’t like.
I walk to the bus stop and take the bus to work most mornings, so I take some things with me to do on the bus. I have an iPod Nano and AT noise-cancelling headphones that I use during the walk to the bus stop. I used to listen to music. Then I switched to podcasts. I would listen to “Tech News Today” and the BBC World Service. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been listening to the Old Testament podcast, which is a podcast of a gentleman with a British accent reading the King James version of the Old Testament. I’ve learned by listening to this that people have always been the same. We may have different customs, different normative behaviors, different languages, etc. but deep down we’re all the same. We all live for the same things. We all worry about the same things. There’s something about that sameness that’s comforting to me. It makes me feel like I can relate to people.
Once I get on the bus, I read the Book of Mormon on the way to work. I have the LDS Gospel Library app on my iPad, which lets me annotate as I read. I’ve never been one to mark my scriptures with colored pencils, as many like to do, but I don’t mind writing notes in the Gospel Library app. It’s a good way to create a journal of the thoughts and experiences I have as I read the scriptures. And there’s a lot more room to write in the app than there is in the margins of leather-bound scriptures.
I get off the bus near the Provo bakery. I walk by on the way to my office and take a deep breath. Smelling the fresh bread and doughnuts as I walk by is, in all honesty, nearly as good as eating the fresh bread and doughnuts, and you don’t have to spend any money to breathe. I think that few seconds when I catch the smell of the bakery might be my favorite part of the work day.
I then get to my office at the historic Utah County Courthouse. I may have described it before. It is a magnificent old building. My office is nice, with high ceilings, thick moldings everywhere, and solid wood doors. I’ve decorated my office with things from my musical past: amps, keyboards, guitars, mixers, speakers, music books, band posters, etc. Things that I used to love, but don’t use anymore since I’ve given up music.
I work at my job all day. It’s terribly interesting to tell the truth, but I can’t talk about that part of my life. I’m obligated not to by the laws of the land, by ethical rules, and by plain old common good manners. So I won’t go into that here.
When work is over, I ride home on the bus. On the way home I read novels. Right now, I’m reading Anna Karenina. I’m intrigued most of all by Levin. He’s got such an interesting conflict within himself, leading a life of position and productivity (he’s a wealthy farm owner) but longing for a life of simple good labor such as he sees the peasants around him leading. It’s a conflict similar to the one I often feel within myself. Tolstoy is quite good at getting to the meaningful bits inside of peoples’ personalities. I’ve been enjoying this book very much.
If smelling the bakery is not my favorite part of the work day, the walk home from the bus stop is. The weather has been very good this spring, and it’s a simple pleasure to walk home in it, carrying my little satchel and listening to the Old Testament, watching the people in my neighborhood as I make my way to my house. I want to get to know them better. I need to get to that soon.
When I get home, we have family dinner. After that, I’m in charge of putting the kids to bed. It’s a delightful job, even though I often lose my temper with the kids, whose attention span is so short it has to be written in scientific notation. But I love my kids, and my favorite part of the day as a whole is when I tuck them in and turn off the lights. It’s comforting to me to see the trust and the carefree looks on their faces. I sometimes wish I could have that look again, the look that the kids have just before they drop off to sleep, the look that tells me that they know nothing of the world and its troubles, that they care nothing for careers and finances, of disasters and calamities, that they trust that all will be well until the morning. I envy them that.
After the kids are in bed, I have a few minutes to do whatever I can to keep my affairs in order before I go to bed. I usually iron a shirt for the next day, make sure all my clothes are in order, and then write a few lines in my journal or on this blog.
That is my day. My wife and I recently had a conversation about who is interesting among the people we know. We also wondered whether others think that we are interesting. We decided that they probably don’t, because we probably aren’t very interesting. I certainly don’t feel interesting. My life, as I’ve just described it, goes about the same way every day. There’s nothing of interest in it to anyone else. Even to me, the only interesting parts are the feelings I have about things, the worries I have, the curiosities, the wondering about things I know nothing about. That’s what makes me up. I’ve traveled, I’ve lived, I’ve loved, I’ve experienced, there are lots of things that make up the fabric of my past, but what composes me now are not those bits of history, but the things of the present that I feel and want to know.
But I don’t know. Sometimes life feels so full, but other times so empty. I sometimes feel like I don’t know anymore. Like I’m just an unmanned ship adrift at sea. I sometimes wonder, as Vger did, “Is this all that I am, is there nothing more?” I find myself wondering about the meaning of things, the purposes. I suppose that’s the way everyone feels. We all want to know who we are~
That statement struck me, and I’ve been thinking about it over the past week. I think I knew who I was well before 25. At 16 I knew exactly who I was. Since that time, however, and especially over the last 12 years, I’ve been forgetting who I am. It’s not supposed to work like that. You’re supposed to learn more about yourself, figure yourself out, and eventually come to some ultimate conclusions about who you are. You aren’t supposed to figure it all out and then go backwards.
So here I am, at age 33, trying to figure out who I am again. Since I (along with the rest of humanity) don’t know how to do that, I’m going to have to take some stabs in the dark. Well, that’s actually not quite true. I know how I figured it out the first time, but I can’t do it that way again. I’m going to leave that statement there without explaining it any more.
This is me. I’ve been through my daily routine before on this blog, but here it is again. I’m still trying to find the meaning in it. I feel like there’s got to be something more to it than what’s on the surface of the words.
My alarm goes off in the morning at 5:50 a.m. I usually hit the snooze button once or twice and get out of bed between 6:10 and 6:15. I shower and shave. I only recently started shaving regularly. Before that, I shaved as little as possible, because I kind of liked the way I looked with stubble. But my wife doesn’t go for stubble, and I’m trying to accommodate her.
All of my clothes are in the same place in my closet. I used to have some in the closet and some in the dresser (which is out in the middle of the bedroom), but I eventually realized that I was wasting time going back and forth from the closet to the dresser to get dressed. Plus it’s quieter to get dressed entirely in the closet, since we have a walk-in closet. My wife and kids are still asleep while I’m getting dressed, so getting dressed in the closet reduces the chance that I will wake them up.
It’s springtime now. It’s chilly in the mornings, but gets warmer in the afternoons. So I wear jeans, button up shirts, and a blazer style jacket that my wife gave me for Christmas about 6 years ago, the Christmas after we got married. We had seen it in the JC Penney, and I had really liked it. She knew I wanted it, so she got it for me and surprised me. She’s very good with gifts. I don’t think she’s ever given me something that I just didn’t like.
I walk to the bus stop and take the bus to work most mornings, so I take some things with me to do on the bus. I have an iPod Nano and AT noise-cancelling headphones that I use during the walk to the bus stop. I used to listen to music. Then I switched to podcasts. I would listen to “Tech News Today” and the BBC World Service. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been listening to the Old Testament podcast, which is a podcast of a gentleman with a British accent reading the King James version of the Old Testament. I’ve learned by listening to this that people have always been the same. We may have different customs, different normative behaviors, different languages, etc. but deep down we’re all the same. We all live for the same things. We all worry about the same things. There’s something about that sameness that’s comforting to me. It makes me feel like I can relate to people.
Once I get on the bus, I read the Book of Mormon on the way to work. I have the LDS Gospel Library app on my iPad, which lets me annotate as I read. I’ve never been one to mark my scriptures with colored pencils, as many like to do, but I don’t mind writing notes in the Gospel Library app. It’s a good way to create a journal of the thoughts and experiences I have as I read the scriptures. And there’s a lot more room to write in the app than there is in the margins of leather-bound scriptures.
I get off the bus near the Provo bakery. I walk by on the way to my office and take a deep breath. Smelling the fresh bread and doughnuts as I walk by is, in all honesty, nearly as good as eating the fresh bread and doughnuts, and you don’t have to spend any money to breathe. I think that few seconds when I catch the smell of the bakery might be my favorite part of the work day.
I then get to my office at the historic Utah County Courthouse. I may have described it before. It is a magnificent old building. My office is nice, with high ceilings, thick moldings everywhere, and solid wood doors. I’ve decorated my office with things from my musical past: amps, keyboards, guitars, mixers, speakers, music books, band posters, etc. Things that I used to love, but don’t use anymore since I’ve given up music.
I work at my job all day. It’s terribly interesting to tell the truth, but I can’t talk about that part of my life. I’m obligated not to by the laws of the land, by ethical rules, and by plain old common good manners. So I won’t go into that here.
When work is over, I ride home on the bus. On the way home I read novels. Right now, I’m reading Anna Karenina. I’m intrigued most of all by Levin. He’s got such an interesting conflict within himself, leading a life of position and productivity (he’s a wealthy farm owner) but longing for a life of simple good labor such as he sees the peasants around him leading. It’s a conflict similar to the one I often feel within myself. Tolstoy is quite good at getting to the meaningful bits inside of peoples’ personalities. I’ve been enjoying this book very much.
If smelling the bakery is not my favorite part of the work day, the walk home from the bus stop is. The weather has been very good this spring, and it’s a simple pleasure to walk home in it, carrying my little satchel and listening to the Old Testament, watching the people in my neighborhood as I make my way to my house. I want to get to know them better. I need to get to that soon.
When I get home, we have family dinner. After that, I’m in charge of putting the kids to bed. It’s a delightful job, even though I often lose my temper with the kids, whose attention span is so short it has to be written in scientific notation. But I love my kids, and my favorite part of the day as a whole is when I tuck them in and turn off the lights. It’s comforting to me to see the trust and the carefree looks on their faces. I sometimes wish I could have that look again, the look that the kids have just before they drop off to sleep, the look that tells me that they know nothing of the world and its troubles, that they care nothing for careers and finances, of disasters and calamities, that they trust that all will be well until the morning. I envy them that.
After the kids are in bed, I have a few minutes to do whatever I can to keep my affairs in order before I go to bed. I usually iron a shirt for the next day, make sure all my clothes are in order, and then write a few lines in my journal or on this blog.
That is my day. My wife and I recently had a conversation about who is interesting among the people we know. We also wondered whether others think that we are interesting. We decided that they probably don’t, because we probably aren’t very interesting. I certainly don’t feel interesting. My life, as I’ve just described it, goes about the same way every day. There’s nothing of interest in it to anyone else. Even to me, the only interesting parts are the feelings I have about things, the worries I have, the curiosities, the wondering about things I know nothing about. That’s what makes me up. I’ve traveled, I’ve lived, I’ve loved, I’ve experienced, there are lots of things that make up the fabric of my past, but what composes me now are not those bits of history, but the things of the present that I feel and want to know.
But I don’t know. Sometimes life feels so full, but other times so empty. I sometimes feel like I don’t know anymore. Like I’m just an unmanned ship adrift at sea. I sometimes wonder, as Vger did, “Is this all that I am, is there nothing more?” I find myself wondering about the meaning of things, the purposes. I suppose that’s the way everyone feels. We all want to know who we are~
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