OK, I'm back. I'm sure you've been asking yourself all week, "Does she like being offline?"
I hated it. But I got used to it.
Every spare moment I had, my impulse was to sit down and check my mail; to see which friends were online and chat with them; to look up some fact I was curious about. To check the weather! It took all week to lose the habit of walking into the office and bringing the computer out of sleep mode with a jiggle of the mouse.
Being offline forced me to recognise how much time I have in my life. I see now that I use the computer to procrastinate, while still being able to say I've moved forward on something by researching it. I don't do the scary, likely-to-fail parts of my projects.
So when I approached the animations for my latest film project, I balked. I simply could not do them. I wanted to find out what other animators had done; check possible color schemes; play with ideas in digital form. But I couldn't. I had some analog ideas but I didn't implement them because I'm uncertain of my analog skills. So I didn't do the animations and I hate myself for that.
The rest of the week was spent avoiding the animations. I designed a butsudan and some storage benches. I took a watch to be repaired. I walked into Otemachi to have lunch with Tod. I took other long walks to Jimbocho, Ikebukuro and Ueno. I went swimming. I ate lunch outdoors. I jotted thoughts in longhand in a notebook. I reverse engineered one of my favorite daypacks and remade it in new fabric that took me hours to find. I took everything off the rack in the office and reorganised the wires and layout of my gear. I arranged a three week trip to India (I admit that required a bit of e-mailing, but I kept it to a minimum). I cooked and cleaned and did all the usual things, too.
In the coming week I will try to remain more in the world and less online as I think it is good for me, even though I don't like ti much. But I'll keep up the weblog and the 40x365 posts. And maybe I'll poke my head into the chat world. Just for a little while.
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