Waiting ’til the cows come home
Posted on | December 22, 2006 |
Today is the day I can put the away message on my email that says “I may not write back to you until February.” The amount of joy this is giving me is hard to describe adequately. This year has felt like one never ending battle with Microsoft Word, my inbox and these two keyboards before me - one apparently more ergonomic than the other. (Secret tip: no keyboard is ergonomic when you sit at it too long, every day, without a holiday… without ever knowing what a holiday without a computer might be like). So from now on I’m following others’ example and trying to chill the hell out for a while, just to see if I can do it.
When I heard Geert’s new book was called ‘No Comments’, it made me think about the effect that having a blog has had on my life for the past two years. I have a developing paranoia that it may have affected the intensity of my relationships offline in some way - that the promise of an audience at any time of the day, the constancy of *some kind of* presence, no matter what kind, has made me feel a little bit better about not having many people around me in a physical, geographical sense, because what remains remarkably clear is that neither blogrolls nor trackbacks translate to dinner invites on a Saturday night. But when I do try to translate across personae (online/offline), I just end up feeling needy, pathetic and deranged. I wonder what I’m doing wrong.
Then the other day I was reading an article in my beloved Fin Review about (heh heh…) Web 2.0 (they’re so Web 1.0, you have to pay to access the link… or does that make them 3.0?). Anyway, I was struck by this soundbyte from one of the cool-hunters interviewed: ‘We have people everywhere in the Yahoo! world who are focused on finding the new, new thing and every day someone finds something which could potentially change the world.’
Just digest that sentence for a moment.
Then all I have to add is: imagine what that sounds like to people born even, say, 40 years ago.
Then all I have to add is: Hyperbole much?
And finally: What it made me realise is that I will be waiting forever to get the comment on my blog that will change my life. (But hey, feel free to prove me wrong.) I know this, and yet I still want to blog. Explain that to me, cool-huntin’ Yahoo cowboy.
Speaking of cows, at a time when the cows on my yoghurt tub seem to be the only ones in my life that aren’t stressed, I’m wondering what to do with what else I’ve learned this year:
-how to have your priorities wrong;
-how to sit properly with good posture;
-how to break up quasi-ethically, if perhaps too slowly and/or quickly;
-how to have your hopes deflated over and over and beg for more;
-how to stand up for what you’ve worked hard for;
-that I am not a femme, but I’m maybe a technodyke, even if I still like boys;
-how good it feels when people’s ideas about you have been wrong from the start;
-that I don’t sleep well after drinking beer or before a morning flight;
-that working collaboratively with people you respect is still awesome;
-that I let my guard down too easily;
-that the answer to everything is Time;
-how amazingly well some boys can write, about things that I find important.
I just listened to the most indulgent Smashing Pumpkins album ever released (I was going to hint and say it’s a double album, but I fear they may have had more than one) and I’m about to go out to see a local band. This makes me think I’ve just wasted the last ten years of my life and have completely reverted to my mid-90s self. But maybe that’s what being on holidays is supposed to feel like? In which case, that’s fine with me. Tell me what it feels like for you if you have some spare time, otherwise, to quote Greg: ‘Merry, Happy, and all that’.
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6 Responses to “Waiting ’til the cows come home”
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December 23rd, 2006 @ 9:00 am
“the answer to everything is Time”
I’m so, so, proud of you
dinner invite pending.
December 23rd, 2006 @ 9:17 am
Deranged? Go figure…
That posture learning is a good one. Core.
As for de-stressing cows, I don’t know from farming, but your bovine yoghurt spokesmodel may have been primed (vis http://www.calmcow.com).
Many thanks for your work.
Take flights of fancy seriously and enjoy your holiday.
December 23rd, 2006 @ 10:08 am
Hmm. A commenter on my blog asked me about an original design I had made and photographed. She was a magazine editor and that resulted in a published pattern (for real csah money!) and dialogue about future designs. So even though it’s not a new career it’s provided a new direction for some of my creativity.
December 23rd, 2006 @ 10:38 am
Well next time you see me, we should arrange to go to dinner. I love dinner (more than live bands, I regret to say).
I have been in holiday mode since the beginning of December, even though I know I shouldn’t have been. It’s something to do with the weather and the shortened opening hours of my favourite coffee shop. I’ve been warding off guilt by reading your book, which has been inspiring; as soon as I finish sleeping through Summer, I’ll be raring to go.
Merry Christmas.
December 23rd, 2006 @ 12:02 pm
Hey Mel
Well, I’ll be looking for QLD dinner company in mid-January some time and you know yr always at the top of the list if yr around :). But yeah, I have also wondered about the kind of self-exiling nature of blogging, the energy going into a diffuse electronic social. I don’t think it’s that you’re doing anything wrong, it’s the nature of the beast. Or maybe it’s the nature of Queensland, but that’s a longer discussion…
Hope you get a good rest. I’ve also been crawling toward the finish line this year and 10 days coming up out on an east cape beach with no computer and a 15 minute walk to cell phone coverage is making my hands and brain feel better already, even though I’m going to be finishing policy chapters on Christmas Day :(.
Thanks for the home cooking through the year.
December 23rd, 2006 @ 12:15 pm
your correct-posture-sitting has improved your breathing, like a yoga thing or something, because this post has a discursive timbre of a big sigh of relief. A release of tension. even though you are teh superstar, you don’t want to get too serious, no?
is it possible that the world actually gets better during this time of the year? I never really believed that it did. the refrain of the muzak christmas jingle and all that overproduced, bargain-bin-cd jazz. but the little contact i have with people i know appears as if they are getting on with living in sufficiently delightful ways. maybe it is the season? i’ve never really appreciated it before. it feels like a good time to be living.