I have a confession to make: I’m not a consistent writer. As anyone with even a passing interest of this blog will notice, there will be periods of heavy activity followed by doldrums of inactivity that are only occasionally punctuated with some semi-routine content. It’s not like the inspiration stops and I’m just a random collection of gelatinous brain cells that can’t string two words together, but sometimes it feels that way.
During my nightly allotment of reading time, which is approximately half an hour, I was reading about the environmental damage that meat farming causes compared to smart and sustainable vegetable and fruit farming. This started a period of reflection which included such topics as humanity’s entire ecological role, our biologically “natural” diet, and whether there’s any hope for the long-term survival of our species. If I were in a writing mode, I would compose a few key paragraphs while showering and emerge, soaking wet, and ready to finish a post before I short-circuit my keyboard.
Other times, I’ll just spend some time and spit out something insanely weird and humorous that I’ll read six months later and crack up myself. I really enjoy writing and creating these, but don’t always follow them through to completion.
But that doesn’t happen all the time. I may have ran out of time before I needed to go to bed, or perhaps I wanted to play a video game, watch a movie, or otherwise consume content. This got me thinking about a typical weekday evening for me, which is often when I write these sorts of things. This “typical” weekday occurs about 3 times a week, but it’s when I feel I have the most block-time that I can re-arrange.
5:00pm: Leave work around this time on a typical day.
5:10pm: Stop by Trader Joe’s for sustenance replenishment.
5:20pm: Arrive at my apartment and promptly play Fallout 3 for approximately one hour.
6:30pm: Take an hour-long nap.
7:30pm: Wake up and begin watching whatever critically acclaimed or obscure film arrived from Netflix.
8:45pm: Begin making some sort of meal to watch while finishing the aforementioned film.
9:30pm: Take a shower and read the book mentioned earlier.
10:15pm: Get back on my desktop computer and dink around for a while before going to bed.
One of my resolutions for this year was to start catching up on movies that I had missed out on so far in life and to explore independent and artsy films. I’m really enjoying this project and get to see a lot of really awesome films. Part of making this work is that I’ve allotted this time to view these movies.
“Why not, Nikky, you cut out the nap, gaming, or perhaps the occasional film?,” you may ask. And it’s an entirely valid question. Fallout 3 has kind of taken over my free time for the past month, and I’m going to drastically scale back my gaming activities. I’ve found the less I play games seriously, the happier and more active I am. Instead of booting to Windows when I get home to play games, I’ll start out in Fedora and re-visit this whole “content creation” idea.
Nikky's Notes 