All you have is now

I think I'm definitely depressed. Or at least something is wrong with me. I'm hanging in there. I just don't really feel like doing anything and to be honest, I'm not even sure I want to write this. All the things people think I like to do, I just tell them I still like doing because it's just easier. When people say, "Hey you're a comedian. It must be great doing what you love," and I would say "Yep! It's great!" But I'm going to be honest with you. If there was a show tonight, I'd have to drag myself to it.

I just don't want to do anything right now. That's no way to live a life. I know that. And I know it's a privileged thought and I feel guilty even thinking about it. I would definitely never say it to anyone. What would be the point? I am glad I have this blog that nobody reads. If you're reading this, don't reach out to me. I'd just be embarassed and brush it off as nothing. But it's something. Thanks for reading. I'm not in pain. I'm okay. I just need to write. This is not going to be the most coherent blog entry.

I know what I'd like to do. Let's list out what I've done with my time in the past 2 years.

I learnt to livestream. Kinda. I was a slow learner and never got good at it but it taught me how to use video and audio equipment and now, I'm using that knowledge to make Youtube and Tik Tok videos. I'm grateful for that but I wish I made the transition from livestreams to making videos earlier. But in a way, I kind of needed to hang on to livestreaming, because it gave me a sense of purpose and security. It was a false sense because looking back, as I was definitely not doing it well, but it was what I needed at the time. I miss it tremendously, but I also know the party is over and it's time to move on. 

I learnt to play the guitar. Kinda. At first, I could only practice for 1 minute each time before my fingers hurt but for the first six months or so, I really got into it. I practiced several times a day until I couldn't take the pain anymore. I even soldered my own guitar cables. I've since gotten lazy and forgotten some of the song parts and I shall have to relearn them. I have no dreams of ever performing, but it was and still is a fun personal development project that I can hang on to for a small sense of achievement.

I learnt to edit videos. Kinda. I'm pretty bad at it and to be honest, I don't see myself ever getting good at it. There's just too much to learn and I can't see myself devoting a chunk of my life to it. But I can cut and splice a video together and sync the audio and understand the color graphs and do some basic color correction (as long as I know what camera and color profile was used, otherwise, I'm almost guaranteed to ruin the video).

I learnt how to carve wooden miniatures. Kinda. I still have to watch and re-watch Youtube videos and follow the instructions carefully, but I'm going to go ahead and say that if I you held a gun to my head and made me carve a figurine on the spot, I can probably do an ugly one.

This next two are kind of minor and I started doing them before the pandemic, but for my sanity I'm going to mention them here because I really have no other place to write about them. I started travel vlogging and podcasting. I've since given up podcasting, at least until I have a better podcast idea, and I'm obviously only travel vlogging when I am travelling, which obviously is something I cannot do constantly. But I know how to do these things now. They're super easy - you just hold a mic or camera up and talk into it. But they're also super hard, because your brains keeps saying only an idiot would talk into a mic or a camera.

These are all small things, but I never knew how to do any of them before the pandemic and now I know how to do all of them. I'm making progress.

Despite that, I constantly wish I had done more with my time. There's a part of me that wishes I had spent the time to grow on social media instead of livestreaming, but you don't always see all the paths until you look back. And to be honest, I needed the livestreams for the human interaction and if nothing else, I needed to practice having conversations and literally moving my mouth because I had this fear of forgetting how to speak.  I know that sounds crazy, but talking doesn't come naturally to me. I sometimes stammer and trip over my own words, and speaking fluently is obviously important to me, so it's a real fear that I have.

Anyway, I always look back and wish I had done things differently. It's the midlife crisis talking. I can still remember being in my early forties and still feeling like I still had my whole life ahead of me, and then somewhere along the way, I can't remember when, I started panicking and thinking, "Oh My God! What if I'm past my prime?" and from then on, I just always felt there wasn't enough time for anything. It's the same sickening feeling you get when you have a big test tomorrow and you haven't studied for it. I always knew that I was aging physically. I wasn't in denial about that. But what hit me hard was the realization that I was aging mentally as well. My memory is not what it used to be. Part of that is age and part of that is the heavy reliance on the smartphone. Ari Shaffir lives without a smartphone apparently. I might try that some day. 

I wish I could just learn to accept the fact that I might not achieve anything else with my life. If I could see things that way, anything I achieve would be a bonus. But it is hard to trick yourself.

Okay, I'm not going to lie. Writing this helped. I'm glad I did it. For the past few days, I would just sit in front of my computer and play Age of Empires 2. I would sit in front of my computer because that's where the "work" has been getting done the past 2 years - the livestreams, the writing, the video editing. But I also did not feel like working. I feel overwhelmed. I could edit videos or write jokes, but there's always this voice in my head that's kind of poo-pooing the idea that any of that is actual work. That, along with my laziness, I always feel like I don't really have the energy to actually look at my jokes folder or the videos I want to edit. I always think, "Not right now". So I'd play AOE2 and I'd win and then feel empty because AOE2 isn't real. And the next day, I would repeat the cycle. To be honest, there isn't any urgent work that needs getting done. There's some office stuff that's occupying my headspace but the actual work for that is just reading and doesn't require me to sit here. There's videos to edit. We recently went to Mexico for a long vacation and I took a fuck-ton of footage there on the GoPro and now I'm trying to decide how to edit them. I think the best time to edit videos is either during the vacation or right after it. I couldn't really edit properly during the vacation because my notebook computer isn't that powerful and I would have had to make do with Filmora, but I really wanted to use Da Vinci Resolve to do it properly. Also, I was lazy. I remember thinking, "Wow! I have so much footage! I can't wait to get home and edit all this!" And then I got home and it's, "Ugh! I have so much footage! How am I ever going to edit all this?"

It's amazing how your thinking changes when your location changes.

The other thing I've been spending all my time with is watching Youtube videos about prosumer cameras. I can tell you off the top of my head that the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4Kcan shoot in BRAW internally but only onto a tiny MFT sensor, the Sony A7SIII can shoot in 4K 120fps but costs about 3 kidneys more than it should, the Nikon Z9 is the best camera in every way except it weighs the same as a large bowling ball and the Sigma FP is the smallest, lightest, cheapest full frame camera there is, but its color profiles are not recognised by any editing software made on Earth. I'm at the point where, as far as cameras are concerned, I've caught up to Youtube! Any video made by Gerald Undone, Camera Conspiracies, Philip Bloom, Potato Jet, Make Art Now, Caleb Pike, DP Review, iJustine, Matti Haapoja, Peter McKinnon, Peter Lindgren, Sara Dietschy, Lizzie and Chris, Becky and Chris or Tom Buck in the past year, I can confidently say I have watched it. This makes me sad because, firstly, it means I have run out of my main source of entertainment, and secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I HAVE CAUGHT UP TO YOUTUBE! Do you know how ridiculous that statement is? I win! I have no life. I'm a loser!

I don't know why camera info is my source of entertainment. I guess I just enjoy the feeling that I'm learning something that might be useful to me down the road. I could also watch some random trivia videos like Thoughty2 or science videos like Veritasium and but those aren't really doing it for me at the moment. It's the midlife crisis. I don't have time for random. I only have time for specifically useful or vaguely applicable. It's really the opposite of what I preach to young people. I'm always telling them they have a lot of time, don't worry, just do something, anything, as long as they're doing something, they'll pick up random skills that will be at least tangentially useful when they do figure out what they want to do. But they always tell me they don't have time to waste. Maybe they're right. Maybe I'm feeling the way I do because I wasted my youth.

There's nothing I can do about yesterday. All I have is now. 

I shall get started on the Mexico videos. If they're really as big a pain in the ass as I'm making them out to be in my head, I'll do something else. Baby steps.