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Delayed Scotland / What Gets My Attention Post

…And then blip! a little light flashes on and the need to write something arises.  This is usually accompanied by dusting off the Miles Davis or Dave Brubeck records and off I go…into something.

The problem with the blip, and I’ve touched on this before, is that it is quite elusive.  And things need to be in proper places and the parts of my brain that seem to feel the need to create something need to be unencumbered by the dull, mundanity of daily life.  And this usually takes something extreme.

So I’m in the middle of extreme.  The weekend comes and I have an extra weekend day (Friday, July 4th), and I’m heading to Scotland for a quick 60 hour trip of extremes.  SLC to JFK, JFK to EDI, Edinburgh.  I skip a night’s worth of sleep in part because too little sleep isn’t much better than no sleep, also because free time is a luxury and 11 hours in airplanes to a father of 3 is paradise no matter what the destination is, and third because if Senja doesn’t sleep, neither do I.  Senja is working the Edinburgh flight so I get to watch her do her thing, which she does remarkably well, from Business Elite.  We’ll land 7 hours later (6 hours from now), and try to cram Scotland into a nice 24 hours.

But I digress.

And I will continue to because I don’t really have a theme today.

First, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the amount of data that I collect in a given day, and it’s importance.  As a general rule, what doesn’t excite us doesn’t get our attention.  But of course we are humans and life isn’t always exciting, so we have to be responsible and all that.  But outside of attending to things that may not be exciting but are necessary, where does my attention go?

I figure on any given day I have about 2 hours of this free time.  It is usually between 9 and 11pm.  I can stay up later, but sleep is important and all that.  In a given week I have about 14 hours to allocate.  But I’m married, so chop that in half.  7 hours.  But I’m married to a flight attendant, so add 50%.  10 hours.  And the marriage thing is about compromise, right?  And sometimes marriage is about talking about things that may not interest you, or watching that Hugh Grant movie that doesn’t interest you, but hey, marriage is about partnerships.  So let’s go with 10 hours.

Well, immediately I throw television out the window.  Because with 10 hours to divvy out to my personal interests, who has time for television?  I can pretty much group what gets my “tertiary attention” this way:

1.  Books
2.  RSS Feeds
3.  Podcasts
4.  My Websites
5.  Films (a version of tv I suppose)
6.  Twitter (jk)

So for me, when I’m left with an empty slot in my iCal, I grab a book.  I’m currently reading 8 books.  This is not something I brag about, it’s merely a fact.  Another way to state this would be to say “I’ve bought 7 books that had my attention for about 30 pages, but I know this book I picked up today (#8) is bound to be a winner.”  It’s definitely not something to brag about.  It’s July 4th and this year I have actually COMPLETED 3 books.  Often times I read books like I eat.  I get a plate of food that I pick at, rearrange, and generally bite off a piece of almost everything before I focus on that one item and finish it off.  But most of the time I nibble.  Fiction, business, technology, my plate holds a wide variety of items.  Or not.

But this isn’t to say I don’t read, because I do.  But 90% of what I read isn’t literature in the strictest sense.  I work on the internet, I socialize on the internet (sadly), and I get most of my news and information from the internet.  An easy way for me to do this and not waste a large amount of time is through RSS feeds.  So I can visit my favorite sites without actually visiting those sites.  I bring those sites to me in all their textual glory through NetNewsWire, my latest and most favorite RSS aggregator.  My reading list is relatively large, at 124 different websites.  I can sort and filter and select what I want to read, but everything comes from these sites.  I add sites and drop sites frequently (weekly).  Music, Technology, Apple, Literature, Film, Blogs, Comedy, and a few other miscellanea are my RSS focus.  It’s enjoyable, easy, and informative.  Try it out if you haven’t.  I can typically go through about a hundred articles or posts in about 20 minutes.  And I can easily ignore what doesn’t interest me.

I’ve recently started paying attention to podcasts.  And iTunes makes this really easy.  It kind of started with Merlin Mann and his “You Look Nice Today” podcast.  YLNT has it’s genesis in Twitter, where I also came to find it.  It’s freaking hilarious, I kid you not.  @hotdogsladies, @scottsimpson, and @lonelysandwich make up this dynamic and crazy trio that has brought tears of joy to my eyes on several occasions.  Subsequent to that I discovered Jesse Thorn’s “Jordan, Jesse Go!”, and Ira Glass’s “This American Life”.  I now have about two dozen podcast feeds that go to my iPod and has completely erased the need for XM, or any other radio.

I’ll admit that these 3 sources make up about 75% of my information sources.  I usually watch a movie a week, maybe two if Senja is in town for the whole week.  Today I watched my 2nd movie in the last month, I watched X-Men for the first time on the SLC-JFK leg.  Nice.

So that’s a breakdown of my main sources, probably more for my benefit than yours, but there you go.  I’ll attach a list of my RSS sites and Podcasts below.

Also noteworthy this month is my acquisition of my 4th iPod.  I added the 160GB Classic to my collection and it’s been great.  I can now free up about 75GB on my laptop, which gives me the video editing space I need, and carry all my media with me in one neat little silver package.  Of course all the usual iPod suspects, 10K songs, over 100 videos, all my podcasts and all that.  But an equally great thing is that now I can view all my photographs, at least from 2000 until now, on this neat little thing.  That’s well over 10k photos as well.  So I have virtually all my media on my Classic and I still have over 40GB left for new discoveries such as the hip-hop mix of almost a GB of music my friends from UWS put together for me.

Unrelated:

This week I was browsing through the iTunes Store, and as luck would have it I ran across my old pal Thom Yorke.  I pretty much ignored his latest release, “In Rainbows” except for the ubiquitous news articles about his ingenius distribution of the album.  But I never checked it out.  I’ll be honest with you, “Kid A” freaked me out.  “The Bends” happened and WOW, then “OK Computer” happened and HOLY FREAK, then something just…happened.  Anyway, long story short, the closest I’ve gotten to Radiohead in the last 5 years was relistening to his duet with Bjork for the “Dancer In The Dark” soundtrack which came out about a million years ago.

Anyway, I bought it, watched a portion of it with Luke and finished it off by my lonesomeness, and WOW again.  If you have the inclination, pursue it, buy it off iTunes or whatever and get reacquainted.  But then again, I may be the only one who hasn’t been around The ‘Head for the last 5 years.  You all may have beaten me to the punch.  And I promise to never reference Radiohead by using “The ‘Head” ever again.  That was quite lame.

Also unrelated:Did I tell you that I haven’t been out of the US in exactly one year?  The last time was Cabo, right before I temporarily moved to California.  It was July of ‘07 and I was atop a huge rock cliff at the edge of a swimming pool [image of that pool here], and talking to my future boss.  “I accept” was my phrasing, and down the cliff and onto the jet ski again for a complete feeling of freedom and success.  Much has changed since then.  Will I reenter the country tomorrow with a feeling of freshness and renewal?  I doubt it.  But I’ll have many other things that aren’t quantifiable, but still appreciable all the same.

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