I hadn't left the house in a few days, working overtime to meet a couple deadlines. When I finally did leave the house, I noticed the yellowed leaves falling gently around my feet. A new season had arrived, all while I was confined to my work desk. First thought that came to me was that I really need to make it a daily habit to take the bike out, because biking in the winter just isn't fun, not most of the time. 

Time.

In 6 months from now I'll be 37, which is only 3 years shy of 40. And 40 is really just around the corner from 50. I realize I'm not exactly a young man anymore, but I can probably still get away with doing a handful of youngish things. I can go to nightclubs, and I can go on hikes and workout without worrying too much about getting a heart attack.

What in god's name am I doing spending my every waking moment inside the house at my desk for fuck's sake?

I've always been a bit of a workaholic, but the metabolism of my 20's could handle the abuse of the ever-stationary routine that our line of work demands. Now, however, it's becoming apparent that my mid-section is putting on some weight at unprecedented speed, and it's probably a lot easier to counteract it now at my age than say... 5-6 years from now.

Kelsey's also talking about having kids soon (the daunting fear of every immature man), and no man should ever get in the way of a woman's want to bear children. But one must acknowledge that when that happens, life is bound to change. 

So this is it.

This is the couple of years we have left to pay mad attention to our bodies, work out like crazy, go off and backpack around the world and stay in budget hotels, and do drugs and drink till we pass out on the street and go to wild fucked up sex parties where anything goes and just fucking lose our minds for a minute.

This is clearly the thinking of someone going through a mid-life crisis, but there's a reason we go through mid-life crises, and maybe heeding to what our minds and bodies are screaming out to us is exactly what needs to be done.

None of the above is problematic in my opinion. Things only get complicated however, when I think about the work.

Because there are a shit ton of projects I'd really (really) like to do, and I'm not sure I'll have the stamina for them in the future, so I also feel the need to work on them now while I still can. Just get as many projects going as humanly possible.

Thing is though, I realize I'd been turning into somewhat of a grumpy luddite in recent years, having developed a severe repulsion toward the rapid aggression of technology upon our lives, which has left me working with a handful of rather obsolete tools. I'm not talking about pen and ink and paint and paper. Those are all things I'll never completely stop working with, but what I'm talking about is the technological solutions I've been using to supplement my workflow. I mean, I've been running on Adobe CS3 for Christ's sake. My Macbook Pro dates from 2012 with a battery life that has more or less rendered it a desktop computer. The Wacom tablet I've been using is a 9 inch piece of plastic (no screen, no bluetooth capability), and I've been adamant about keeping my phone unlinked to any of my computer functions. So: No mail, no shared calendar, no twitter even, none of that. My reasoning being that it's the best way to retain full control of my attention.

But if I'm being honest, all that does is give me more reason to stay cooped up inside, because there's less I can do on the go if the only thing my phone can do is text and call (especially also with a hefty 15" laptop always in need of a charging station).

But y'know? Even if I wanted to get my phone to do all the things, it wouldn't do a particularly good job at the things, because it's a freakin' iPhone 5C with only 6 gigs of non expandable storage, and the handful of apps on it right now only leave it with about 35 megs of free space, no joke.

Ganzeer in his mid 20's would've eyed me with absolute disgust, because that kid was hip to all the latest tech and it served him well.

So I decided to gear up and embrace the goddamn future. Tossed the Macbook aside for a Microsoft Surface Book 2, which let me tell you, is the biggest leap I've seen in laptop design in a really long time (full review to come after I close a few jobs on it). Hooked myself up with Adobe's Creative Cloud, downloaded Clip Studio (previously Manga Studio), and y'know... all the other things I've previously been luddishly squeamish about? Things like... face recognition login, smart password key for all the things, and linking a virtual assistant to my calendar and Skype and to-do lists ("you can do that now?!"), everything, fully embraced.



And I won't lie, I'm already loving it.

I love being able to tell Cortana (with my voice) to put an appointment in my calendar for a Skype call on Monday, or set an alarm for an hour so I know to get off my ass and do that other thing, or to pull up my to do list and check certain things off. When my hands were hurting too much to type something, I dictated it, and the machine typed it out for me, only requiring some minor editing work from me afterwards. 

All of this to say: enough with the whole technology-is-destroying-our-lives hysteria. You pick the tools that work for you, adjust the nobs and switches to drain out the impeding stuff and activate the things that will streamline your world. But resisting everything is foolish and futile.

A Samsung Galaxy S8 is on the way, and so is a vaccuum robot.

Screw 2019. Who's ready for 2020?



Ganzeer
September 1, 2018
Denver, CO

P.S. Notice how I'm dropping Apple and its increasingly dysfunctional "ecosystem" for something of my own tailoring? This after 14 years of being a dedicated Mac user 😮