Enjoying The Non-Creative

I'm in my head right now.

This is the first time I really started thinking about an audience when writing a journal entry. Or, at least, it hit me a different way.

But, fuck it, I'm just gonna go. Not really thinking about it. The thing that I was thinking about is what folks out there would like, but that's not what this is about. This is just about writing an entry and posting it.

Sure, there's consideration of the audience, but, that's more in the edit. The clean up. Not so much with the content (other than not writing about work stuff).

Anyway, we're off now. I'm in pretty good shape with the direction.

The other thing I'm in good shape with is the continuation of work. I spent some time yesterday working on video. That's been on my plate for a long time, but I finally did it.

Well, I'd done a little before. Where I used ffmpeg to assemble some multi-part videos and then make them black and white and add some noise suppression. That worked okay, but it wasn't great. The reason I wanted to go with ffmpeg is so that I could automate the process. But, yesterday, I decided to play with Adobe Premiere. I went through the included tutorial. It took maybe 20-30 minutes. After that, I was off to the races. I dropped the clips in, toned them, added suppression and hit export. It took barely more time than setting up ffmpeg.

Premiere loomed large in my head. It was this giant thing that I thought would have taken forever to produce videos. And, it wasn't something I could automate (I don't think, I should look into that). But, the trick goes back to the mania. The idea of having to do repetitive work manually sparked that fire of aggravation. The thing where it took so much force of will to stay on a thing that if I wasn't doing the creative part it pissed me off.

Yeah, that's a good refinement to what I've been trying to get at. I'd have this intense blast of focus on a thing. Like a rocket blast. But it was short lived. I wanted all that time to be spent doing the creative part of the work. Anytime spent doing the maintenance behind it was a waste and I abhorred the waste. It was a waste of the most precious thing I had. My time, energy, and attention.

With the meds, my focus has dispersed. I have the same amount, but instead of a rocket blast that burns for an hour, it's a cooking flame that lasts all day. Dealing with all the supporting processes behind the pure creativity is no big deal. There's even pleasure in the processes with the nice repetitive flows.

Enjoying the repetition is new. It used to piss me off, now it's relaxing.

Lithium is magic.