This holiday season my last day at work was December 22, and I’m going back on Monday January 4th, which is tomorrow. This is my 12th day off in a row and it doesn’t seem like I’ve hardly started. I’d love to say the batteries are recharged and I’m raring to go but truthfully, I could easily do another 12 days if I had the opportunity. Thinking it through, I realized this is the longest stretch of vacation I’ve had since grad school where I had a job to go back to. I was out of work from layoffs for three months or so in 2001 at the bottom of the dot-bomb period but that wasn’t a vacation. It was more stressful than having a job, really.
While I’ve been on vacation, I’ve also kind of been on vacation from the computer somewhat. There were multiple days in that stretch where I didn’t touch a computer, and I’ve been mostly off of Twitter, Facebook, et al. I did read a lot of comic books, do a good bit of reading on my Kindle and we’ve been working our way through The Wire: The Complete Series, which we’ve been loving. We watched movies, leaning towards the stupid comedies but also including Slumdog Millionaire. I’ll be contrarian and say that while Slumdog isn’t a bad movie, it was completely nothing special to me. I’m not sure why it got the hype and buzz that it did. It was competent enough but I didn’t find it anything more than an average quality diversion of a film. I was much more enthused about The Hangover, which was like Memento with a raunchy sense of humor. After I watched it, I realized that it has basically the same plot as Dude, Where’s My Car? and that’s OK.
During the vacation I had vague plans of productivity in new media that never happened. In retrospect, that is probably for the best. I don’t feel bad about not blogging or podcasting and I only wish I had made that as a deliberate choice up front so I didn’t have free-floating guilt about my lack of productivity. I feel recharged and happy and ready to prosecute 2010 to my fullest. I’ve already recorded a podcast this morning, have another blog post lined up behind this one.
Hello new year, let’s light this candle.
That’s cool Dave-organic is where we all need to live and flow. Happy New Year to all.
I totally agree with you about Slumdog. I watched it for 30 minutes and that was enough. At least I didn’t pay to see it in the theater. I consider that to be like voting and I am very picky about what I watch. If people pay to see bad movies, they will just keep making more of them.