Sean Carton's Bad Blog

Wednesday, March 30, 2005

On Doing What You Love

I need projects. I like projects. This stunning revelation came to me this morning at 4:44 as I was putting together a bookmark list of print zines that had crossed over into Cyberspace for the upcoming "DIY Revolution" show I'm curating. I realized that the simple joy of doing something that I love to do, of sitting here and surfing the 'Net and digging into the nooks and crannies of the Web to uncover things I hadn't seen in years made me happier than I've been in a long time. It's not another book (shamless plug 1), it's not another article I'm being paid to do (shameless plug 2), but just a project, with no real commercial value, no boss looking over my shoulder, no drop-dead-deadline, and no connection whatsoever to the world of commerce. Don't get me wrong: I love my job and I love the writing I do for pay, but this is different. And it made me happy.

When I was younger and had no real prospects of ever making a real living (how many people with Master's degrees concentrating on critical theory do you know that make real livings out of college?), I used to do projects all the time. I'd grow facial hair and then shave it off in various and goofy ways and take pictures and post them to my "homepage." I once spent a year photographing myself when I got up in the morning sitting in the same position with the same lighting so that at the end of the year I could make an animated GIF of my transformation. I used to spend days on end programming useless applications in Hypercard just to see what I could do that hadn't been done before. I used to play in marginally bad punk rock bands. I used to run a hacker BBS back in the days before the Internet found its way into everyone's home. None of these things ever brought me any money or any real fame, though my "picture a day of myself" project did get shown to a roomfull of generals at the Pentagon once by a mischevious friend of mine who did government sales for Netscape back when they sold (imagine that!) browsers.

I guess I haven't had time for projects. Between juggling my full-time job with my consulting job, writing, my family, taking care of my house, and all the other little things that come up in life, those little side projects that made me so happy seem to have gone by the wayside. Besides this bad blog, I never write for the simple pleasure of writing anymore, I don't make any music, I don't put up useless Web sites, and I never seem to be able to create stuff just for the simple joy of creating it. I find myself envying and hopelessly admiring projects like this amazing site created by friends who seem to have the time and energy to create outside of all the other stuff in their lives they have to deal with, stuff which happens to be the same kinds of stuff I have to deal with. Where did I veer off?

I suppose it all has to do with priorities. And doing what you love because you want to do it and not because there's necessarily going to be anything gained from doing it. I think that finding out that I could get paid to write about stuff I liked was the first step off of the path. The second step (or, more accurately, the character flaw) was never knowing when to say "no" to another commercial opportunity. It's tough to turn down money (or the potential of money) even if you end up doing something that you regret later. But I guess this morning, as I sat here in the dark of the early morning bookmarking obscure little zines created by people just doing what they love, I realized that it's that lure of commerce that ends up turning a project into a job. And I don't need another job.

I need projects.

5:19:17 AM