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I loved watching TV and movies as much as anyone else. My childhood was spent with Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse and as I grew older we threw in a little Charles In Charge and Facts of Life. Add to that a few years later with The Wonder Years and more. Now I look forward to Heroes and House. But all the while, I’ve always felt like there was something else. Very seldom did I just sit and watch tv. Usually I was drawing something, or building something with my Legoes while the TV was on. These days I’ve usually got my keyboard on my lap with the monitor swung in front of me (someday, I’ll include a picture of my setup) so I can work on my website and blogs, or, like last night, research what it would take to build and manage a chicken coop (which Joslyn says she won’t allow).

I was always okay with being amused, but there was always something else that I could be doing too. I heard a great definition of the word amuse or amused or amusing: To muse means to be creative and thing and write and do. When you put the letter “a” in front of a word it makes it the opposite (easiest example: someone who believes in God is a theist. Someone who doesn’t is an atheist). So to be amused means to not thing or be creative. When I learned that definition what a turning point for me.

Another turning point may have just happened. I caught this video of a man I’d never heard of speaking at a conference about. The title of the lecture was “Gin, Television and a Social Surplus”. He talked about how during the industrial revolution, because of the huge social changes in profession and time management, a whole generation got lost to the only thing they thought of to fill the time - Gin. The past few decades we have done the same thing only thru television. And it is now, with the internet, that we are starting to break out of this amused lifestyle. That we are starting to DO and Produce and Share again.

I like how he oversimplifies that idea: It’s better to Do than to not do.
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