Wednesday, January 30, 2013

R-E-S-P-E-C-T Yourself

What are you doing right now?

Are you on Facebook, Twitter or Pintrest? Are the birds angry, the wars raging, the football/basketball/soccer/hockey games tied? Are you making the best use of your time?

Along with respecting the time of others, the artist has to respect their own time.

That means not wasting hours playing Internet games, twitting, facebooking or pintresting. You can’t spend all day watching television, working in the garden or talking on the phone. You only have so much time and if it isn’t being spent on your art are you really respecting yourself.

Now I know how tempting friends can be, I actually still have a few and they are generous enough to respect my own personality quirks and in return I honor theirs. They know for instance that I do not like phones at all. Oh sure I have one, when the car dies or the spouse is out late of the kids in trouble the comfort of having a phone in my hot, little hand is the next best thing to a direct line to the heavens.

You know, I am so old I can remember when you had to look for a pay phone if you were out and wanted to make a call. I had a pager.

If you have yet to give up Christina, Brittany and Nikki and move on to adult music or if you still think reality television has something to do with reality then this may surprise you, but there was a time when phones were housebound. You had to find one anchored to the ground if you wanted to make a call.

Even after they became mobile they were huge, hefty thing that only a “Real” man could use. It took Hulk Hogan and Lou Ferrigno to lift one of the old Motorola handsets. I had one and with a bit of luck and on a good day the battery would last all the way through a fifteen minute call!

But even though I think mobile phones are he best safety device ever invented and now that I have one, thankfully one I can slip into  shirt pocket, I wouldn’t leave home without it, but my phone is set to make phone calls only. Yes, I know I am contributing to the slow recovery from the Republican recession, but that’s just the way it is, I make phone calls on it and few of them.

You see calling on the phone keeps me from doing anything else about my art. I love talking to you guys about your projects and finding out what everyone is doing and how creative you are and what wonders you’ve come up with that never would have occurred to me, but at the same time I have to remember that the time can’t be recovered. So I use my phone for the really important thing, talking to you. I don’t play games, download Internet files, take pictures or twit.

Okay, I am a photographic snob and wouldn’t use a phone camera if I saw a unicorn. And in fairness if you have been following this Blog you know that I can barely saw things in a page and a half and in less than 114 characters that’s not even a grocery list.

In fact all social media baffles me. I don’t get it. If I wanted to connect with my pals I would. Twittalk or Facetime doesn’t mean a thing to me so I can’t claim the moral high ground cause I’m not tempted. (As you grow older you’ll find that lack of temptation is one of the perks of aging. That’s why advertisers hate people who have grown up.)

So I don’t waste my precious time doing social media.

What about errands?

When you have to go out do you find all sorts of things you need to do and stops you need to make and you wind up spending the whole day out and not getting back to the ole rancho until there’s just enough time to whip up a batch of mastodon helper so that the knuckle dragger won’t starve when he walks through the door.

Sure I love Books By The Bay and the devil masquerading as a coffee shop where you can find exotic goodies not on my or any other diabetic meal plan and coffees and teas with meat on their bones and books, books, books, was there ever anything so wonderful as a book?

No, an E-reader is not the same. Try reading one when the battery dies or if you decide that today is a Janet Evanovich day and not a Jim Butcher day. And how can you get the same excitement when you don’t have to turn the page?

But books will steal your soul if you let them. And their little friends magazines will too. Yes, I do have about four subscriptions to magazines which take much too much time away from what I ought to be doing and that is where I get lured away by the siren of the word. So watch out for the Lorelei whatever she decides to appear as.

The problem is really simple; you must make your art the top priority.  And no it ain’t easy to do and once you’ve done it you have to keep the faith and not backslide cause there just are not any tent revivals for disciplinary sinners.

Take the pledge, make a vow and do the right thing.

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