I’M NEVER BORED
Web 2.0
I’m almost never bored anymore. My days are always packed with something. But I’ve realized that boredom is where so many of my best ideas used to come from. So, note to self: schedule some time to be bored. Turns out it might be my most productive creative tool.
That I would say is my happy place: making something just because it’s fun, not because it’s due. (lol)
When I have nothing imminent on my schedule, I tend to wander around my studio until I find myself a “lil project” that suddenly becomes my entire personality for OMFFFGGG who even knows how many days/weeks.
Which brings me to… this website. And this blog. And the three containers of old hard drives that ambushed me like a corrupted RAID array of doom. I cracked those containers open to find a museum exhibit of discontinued ports from the last 20+ years. My brain immediately initiated a panic protocol: At any moment, one of these could spin its last spin and yeet my entire digital life into oblivion.
So naturally, instead of waiting for the FireWire 400, 800, Thunderbolt, USB 2.0, SATA, and a hoard of adapters to arrive, I decided that the only logical choice was to spend three straight days rebuilding my entire website and relaunching a blog. Nostalgia is apparently my new project manager.
This was supposed to be a cute little weekend task… but it has spiraled into a full-on emotional roller coaster.
As I started going through everything, I came across so much! Friends I haven’t spoken to in years, old romantic relationships that stayed offline, and the most emotional part: videos of my mom, who passed away a few years back. ♡
Back then I was vlogging pretty much every part of my life. Like… everything!
This was before I figured out I didn’t actually need to film my entire existence. This really cut down on the hard drives I’d need and I’d save so much time editing out the pointless things. I tried to keep my parents out of the videos so they wouldn’t be as online as I was… but of course they still ended up in some shots. Hearing my mom’s voice again completely wrecked me. One minute I’m backing up files, and the next I’m crying over my MacBook keyboard.
That sent me on a mission to find an old camcorder that I knew had some family videos on it. Once I found it, I realized I had no power cable or battery — so that turned into another hunt for replacements that took a few days to come in. I’m not sure how I will ever be able to stay on task to get this completed..
Spoiler, that camcorder actually has no internal memory and it wasn’t the one I was even looking for. BACK TO IT!
There is some good news in all of this! At some point in the last 10 years I actually did back up a bunch of these old drives onto one bigger one. So that gave me a tiny head start before I spiraled into this new blog side quest — All because I found a few screenshots and photos from my old one! I wrote about everything from my day, my travels, to exciting updates in Web 2.0, to tiny little one-liners that today would just be tweets… or Threads… or whatever app we’re all using this week.
It hit me that so much of my early content existed simply because I had room to play. I made things just to make them. There were no subscribers, briefs, no approvals, no timelines, no pressure. Somewhere along the way, that shifted. Creating turned into a full-on career, and while I wouldn’t trade it, the kind of aimless boredom that used to fuel my ideas got replaced with real life responsibilities, embargoes, jiu jitsu, jiu jitsu camps, training for jiu jitsu, thinking about jiu jitsu, recovering from an injury from jiu jitsu and whatever new hobby I’m currently rotating through in my downtime.
And now… here we are. Back to text. Back to where it really started for me. Maybe 30 years ago? Those early websites are gone, but I did find some journals from college (circa 2002!) and they were so chaotic and real that they made me want to reboot all of this. They reminded me how fun it was to write just to capture some thoughts for no reason.
So that’s what this is. A little nostalgia. A little chaos. A lot of cables. And maybe a return to being just bored enough to create something fun again. ꩜