lightbulbs
Ideas have ruined me. They have taken more out of me than seems humanly possible, made me less human, made me less whole. I love ideas. Ideas are my opiate. Ask me about my life and I'd sooner give you a rough chart of what ideas I was having at any given point in time. I can't remember the names of most of my friends (did I even have friends? They seem like a fiction now) or teachers -- hell, I can't even remember the faces of my few enemies.
When I was sixteen I wanted to become a graphic designer. I had it all figured out in my head, right down to the way I'd introduce myself to people when I was said Graphic Designer. "Ooh," they would say, "you're that Graphic Designer."
I'm nearly 21 and now I'm a lousy Graphic Designer.
When I was seventeen I wanted to be a novelist. I was going to be the best damn novelist in history. I had it all figured out in my head, down to the dedication on each and every novel, how the covers would look, where the ISBN would be placed. They were great ideas.
I have yet to finish a manuscript, let alone publish a novel.
When I was twelve I really wanted to own a restaurant. A big restaurant. I didn't know what kind of food we served, but I wanted a big restaurant.
Then I wanted a small restaurant. This was for a few days.
Then I wanted the big restaurant again. I had it all figured out in my head, right down to the way the menu looked and what all the staff would wear, how the people would react to eating the self-designed food and how I'd sit in the corner grinning with my mother, co-owner.
I can cook a grand total of five things including tea. I always over-salt. My mother is dead.
Sometimes my memories seem to be less firm than the fantasies and ideas that swirled around them. I barely remember the trip to Mangalore when I was nine. I do remember in exact detail the point-and-click adventure game I planned to make when I got back home. I had it all figured out in my head, right down to the tagline on the box. What? No, I don't remember the tagline, but I do remember that I had the idea figured out. Memory's shot to hell.
Bah, who needs memories? I have ideas.
I have so many ideas. I have two notepads full of ideas. I have a three page long list of titles of ideas that I haven't written down yet; movies and novels and TV shows. I have them all figured out in my head. I could narrate most of them to you verbatim. I don't remember anything they taught me in school. I don't.
When I try to gather up my memories I feel like a young man. When I gather up my ideas, all of them, all the stages and the reworkings and reimaginings of older ones, I feel old.
Old.
Oh, but the ideas are just great; they're your future, you never get the same idea twice, and if you lose it it's gone forever. That idea can make your life...
...I can barely remember a life beyond my ideas, beyond the holding and nurturing of them, beyond the power fantasies of a time when those ideas would come to be.
Someday.
You know when Someday is? It's the day right after you die. Your ideas die with you. This, believe me, is a good thing. I don't want my ideas hanging around after I'm gone. They're perfectly good ideas, mind you, but they're ideas. They're like cancers. Perfectly efficient, marvellous things when you look at them on their own, but put them in a body and you know what happens. I have Idea Cancer. Hey, that's a great idea for a...
idiot. stop.
Ideas, they say, are Free. The fuckers couldn't be more right. Ideas are so free they should be given away.
Here's an idea: A man walks into a diner and sneezes onto the classic jukebox. The jukebox, coated with his germs and transdimensional energies develops intelligence, then sets out on a world-wide quest to find the defunct manufacturers who created it. Somewhere along the way it realises that it is, in fact, not seeking it's manufacturer, but in reality is searching for the family of the man whose snot it was that triggered its ascent to life, his memories and thoughts being transferred to it. The man is now dead. His family is still there, the children -- The Children! -- need a father, the wife needs a husband. The jukebox moves in. He plays tunes for a living by the side of the road.
A lonely jukebox that plays in the middle of a highway just to feed its human family.
...pretty good Idea, huh? It's yours. Take it. Do what you want with it, make some money off it; I don't care, I have a million more ideas where that came from, and each one is potentially as good.
When you suffer, as I do, from Idea Cancer, there are only two options.
Option 1:
You get a Job. A job lets you live a life, make some money and still have your Idea Cancer; you can have as many ideas as you can fit into your testicles, and you can shape them in as elaborate a fashion as you see fit, because you have a job and you hate your boss and if only -- If Only! -- you could quit your job then all your great ideas would be unleashed upon the world.
Someday.
Option 2:
Don't get a job. Don't settle for the easy way out with the security of getting up every day and going someplace where someone else tells you exactly what to do and how to do it. Don't settle for the fact that you can marry the slightly agreeable person of opposite gender who works two cubicles from you just because, well, you're getting old -- thirty -- and you need someone to be with you, to take care of you.
Take care of yourself you idiot.
Do something. For once in your life do something. Pick one idea, any idea, you have a million of them and they're all gold, right? Pick one and do it. There you go.
Well, now, how do you do it?
I have no idea.
This is going to be fun.
Vishal
Vishal K Bharadwaj is a generalist; a writer, graphic designer, illustrator, photographer and all-round crazy person.
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I don't know that I agree that there are only two options, as you outline above. I think that may be a bit of a bleak view.
The way I see it, the life of a person who suffers from an excess of ideas is a balancing act between what you *need* to do and what you *must* do. You *need* food, shelter, basic human necessities, so you do what you have to - work and pay bills and make phone calls and all the dumb crap you do so you can have a life. And in there, you carve out the time and opportunity for the things you *must* do or else your life ceases. Under these circumstances, you get a very clear view of which of your million ideas are whims and which ones are Musts.
Is this "middle way" easy? I will tell you, from bitter personal f***ing experience, that it is not. You get tired; you risk buying the notion that you job *is* your life; you get overwhelmed by the mundane and make your spouse nuts with your occasional inability to cope with adult responsibility. You wish for more hours in the day and more years in your life to do all the wonderful things you dream about. You probably aren't exactly what your boss wished for, either (and neither are you exactly as you advertised yourself in order to get the damn job), since it's most definitely not what you really care about putting your effort into.
But - as I said, you get to know in a hurry what your priorities are, if you listen to yourself. Many who say, for example, that they want to write actually mean that they want to *have written*. There's a difference between the stuff you're interested in and the stuff you're dead without. This is also the thing that will tell you that one idea is most certainly *not* as good as any other - the really good ones are the ones it kills you inside to leave undone.
Neil Gaiman's advice to those who want to be writers is that you must do two things: Write, and finish what you write. The same thing applies to any endeavor, and it's what separates dabbling from actual passion. Also easier said than done, and maybe in part because, as Neil also says, the problem with getting what you want is that you end up having what you once wanted. A perpetual work-in-progress means never having to say goodbye, dunnit?
So. Yes. Pick one and do it.
Whatever it is, it had better break your heart to not do it, or you may as well just put all that energy into hating your boss.
Ideas are bright and lovely. But, as you point out, they're a penny a score. It's like Uncle Bill says: "The Work is the mainsail to reach the Western Lands." The work - which is why it's not called an Idea of Art, aye?
Yes, Dan I agree; there is a middle path. I'm just not self-disciplined enough to take it, and if I try that middle path it will end up merging with the path I'll regret.
Perhaps the only thing more addictive than ideas is Security; financial security (God I need that), familial security, being able to give a succinct, finite answer to the question "What do you Do?"
Samir and I think of getting a job, on average, about 50 times a day. No joke. "Maybe I should just get a job" is the second most uttered phrase in the household, right behind "I \\don't\\ want a job."
We don't want to be struggling artists or monks; we want to make money. \\Lots\\ of it. We just don't want jobs. Because for starting graphic designers we'd get paid lousy and work ungodly hours. Ad agencies routinely work their lower levels 20 hours a day, and if you don't comply you're fired. Companies also expect their designers to do things that are not their jobs, like soliciting advertising for company publications; if you don't comply you're out.
I don't want to do that. Samir doesn't, so we've decided to be freelance from the get-go. I don't want to go into a place wanting a job and end up being a slave. I don't want my paycheck held for ransom. There is no middle path for us. This or that.
And yes, there are things I \\need\\ and things I \\must do\\. It's taken a few years for the \\musts\\ to take over the \\needs\\. Slowly but surely I've managed to whittle down my options; I've knowingly backed myself onto the plank.
I must complete my education, but have no money to complete my education with (student loans are unheard of here). In order to make money I could get a job, steady if small income, but nobody's going to hire me with my current qualifications, and if they do I'll be working too much to have time to even compelete my education \\part-time\\. By the time I have enough money and time I'll be too used to the steady job and success that I'll say "Oh hell with it, I've come this far without it." I don't want to do that. I must complete my education, even if it takes me a lifetime. I'd be incomplete without it.
And then there are the things that I Must Do. If I don't do them now I'll never do them. I'll be one more of those people who want to \\have written\\. One more person who is old and comfortable and suddenly looks through his old things and weeps at the fact that he could have been everything he wanted to be and didn't even try.
I at least want to try. Once. Twice. A Million Times. I'm a stubborn Bastard.
Vishal
Yes, pick an idea and write a Nanovel.... I didn't even have an idea, and I still wrote a Nanovel.... Um...
My ideas can't fit into testicles, because I don't want to fit my ideas into anyone's testicles. Perhaps they'd fit into boobs, but that's a hell of a lot more ideas than what can fit into testicles.
Idea boobs. Now that's an idea.
:O Sorry. I interrupted you being all serious here. :blush:
Serious? We don't need no steenking seeriousness here! :hehe: :hehe:
By the way, do you know Anabukin Chan?
Vishal
Jaysus, I wouldn't want a job under those conditions either. That's not a means to live; that's just soul-crushing horror.
Maybe I'm just lucky. I have a 40-hour-a-week job that doesn't follow me home and that doesn't require my unwavering attention while I'm there (as I post this from my desk, in between scan jobs). This is a different animal from what you're describing.
And, yes,security is awful nice. It lets me have a home, and toys to play with so I can Make Things. It's never stopped being a means to an end; I suppose there are folks for whom it does, but I don't think they're the kind of folks who get Ideas.
But it's never the answer to the question "What do you do?" - only "Where do you work?" And that's the difference, innit?
but people so often expect the answer to the second question when asking the first - so many people don't really care past the first sentence - unless you say you're unemployed or job-searching, in which case they feel it's their duty to share their wonderful knowledge and experience of how they found their current emplyoment... (not quite on this discussion but ...)
We all have the Art Headache, it seems.
We are Gods in our own right. Creators and Dreamers, if we stop believing we will fade into nothing.
Create Something. Anything.
oO(Forgive me for being Odd. I have been up many many hours and require sleep and/or coffee... but its true.)
No, I didn't know Anabukin Chan.
... what the HELL is this?
Anabukin Chan is the spokes-girl for the Anabuki Construction corp. The link above is for their TV commercials, which feature fuzzy rabbits and raccoons with large breasts and testes.
Don't you love the Japanese? :D
Anabukin Chan is the spokes-girl for the Anabuki Construction corp. The link above is for their TV commercials, which feature fuzzy rabbits and raccoons with large breasts and testes.
Don't you love the Japanese? :D
... yeah.
... okay.
I repeat my question: what the HELL is this?!!!
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