Not a full post...though one of those will be coming soon-ish. Yes, I am back up in Alaska. And yes, I am working towards the Summer and Fall semesters and all that that entails. But for today, just a little reflecting, much of which came to mind between ~ 0030hrs and 0430hrs this morning.
As one who has a history of significant insomnia, I tend to not be surprised by awakening multiple times in a night and being unable to return to sleep for some length of time after each of those wakings. In the past I have often found myself turning to that grand series of tubes which we all tend to frequent, the internet. I would find a documentary on Youtube on a subject that interested me - a US Navy training film on the subject of mechanical computation devices (ie: fire control computers that use shafts, cams, gears, etc to perform their various calculatory functions) for example - and let it play while I laid back down and attempted to fall back asleep. Or I would just stay up and put on one of my process playlists, again from Youtube, and see if I could get any design work done.
The thing is, for mostly financial reasons, my apartment here does not have internet. And I don't see myself adding such access in any sort of near term. So it is definitely a change to certain established patterns.
How do I manage to do email and all and sundry (such as this blog)? Well, I use my student access to the university backbone, and various public wifi hotspots such as are found at coffeehouses, etc. I have a rather handy 7 inch tablet running Android, which lets me do a surprising amount during my coffeehouse visits. And, in addition to what I refer to as my good laptop (which lives on my desk along with my little Bamboo graphics tablet and my printer/scanner combo) I also have what I call my shop laptop, an Acer that is running Windows XP and that was - true story - listed by the company that made it as "beyond its service lifetime" the day I unboxed it and attempted to register its warranty. But it still runs, and there are some older programs on it that are quite handy and that won't load on my Windows 7 machine. So I lug the shop laptop with me about 80% of the time, in case I need to do something that my tablet can't. Of course, when I am at the university I can often get access to one of the terminal units in the 23 hour lab at the Rasmuson Library as well. Which is where I am right now, working on these ramblings, as well as doing some process work for my hoped for Winter Shorts production of Antigone and for my portfolio, and some grad school research as well.
Multitasking.
I seem to have rambled....herrmn.
As I was saying: limitations on net access and their potential effect(s) on how I live my life and do my art.
Some while back, during my Collaborative Process class, one of my professors used a phrase that I find myself harking back to now and again and that I believe applies here. The phrase? Enabling constraints. That is to say those things that are initially seen as potential limitations but can be turned into methods to enable new ways of looking at a situation. And that is what I see happening with my not having 24/7 access to the online world. I must make a deliberate choice to go somewhere beyond my apartment (AKA my studio) to check email, etc as opposed to simply having a tab open in Chrome or Firefox and my leaving it running in the background. And since my transportation methods include 1) city buses 2) my bicycle 3) my feet or 4) some combination of the prior methods, this deliberate action becomes all the more focused by the realization of time constraints imposed by distance and - in the case of the buses - what day of the week it is.
So to have a playlist on while I do things at my apartment, I have to have made the choice previously to download various documentaries, music, etc and have them loaded on a USB drive for later access. And if, as I did today, I grab the wrong USB drive and there is significantly less space on it than I had thought, I need to be more selective in my downloads. I can't just post it to the cloud, or add things as attachments to self-addressed emails. If I want to do production research, or post to this blog or to one of my Tumblrs, or check email I need to make a choice to do that/those thing(s). And recognize going in that if I am using the university backbone and get distracted and miss the final bus run of the night from campus that I will either A) need to make it an all-niter or B) start the walk home.
It's only been a month so far. But it is interesting. I am not saying it is a better version of how to handle such things. Just really, really different.
Herrmn yet again. I seem to have rambled more than mused. I suspect that the insomnia from last night might be partly to blame. That being said, I shall continue to reflect on this and will - probably - end up posting on the subject yet again.
More later.
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