The Force Awakens. Indeed!

I went to the latest Star Wars movie last evening. Like thousands others, I too had been waiting eagerly for the release, and wouldn't have missed it for anything.
Now come the obvious questions: how is it? (duh!), tell me more about it, etc, etc. Here's what I think of it, but I'm not about to give away any spoilers. Read on.

Remember this music-player?

Remember this?

A Plausible Solution.

As I mentioned in my last post, I often waste away a lot of my time sitting in front of the TV or my laptop, or even my phone. The general idea is to do 'nothing' as a means of recharging my batteries after a week of hard-work. But sitting idle does not work for more than a few hours. After that the lack of doing nothing except for staring at illuminated screens, eyes glazing-over, only adds to the lethargy and boredom.

Boredom.

When I'm not working, I'm often looking for something 'interesting' to do. It could be something to watch on TV, something to explore about on the internet, something to write, make, design, think-up/think-through, whatever. It could be anything, as long as its something that would snag and hold my interest. However, most of the time when I'm bored to death, I just can't settle on what this interesting thing should be. Because in that moment everything feels not 'exciting enough' for some unknown reason. 

Melancholy

Melancholy is good. Even though they won't quite admit it, most people enjoy melancholia more that the happy stuff. It's almost like a drug.

You take some and it gives you a bitter-sweet pain. But it's 'pain' and not 'happy', so you feel bad and sorry for yourself. It's so tempting, even addictive, to stay in that mood. You mildly feel like a victim, so the pressure to shake it off and dive into work, or take care of people, etc etc weakens a little bit. You tell yourself that you can slack off and do nothing. Even when you do manage to break out of this cycle of self-pity and inertia, you secretly crave to get back to it whenever you can. 

Photographs on Paper: the Old Fashioned Way.

Do you remember the times when photographs were seen on paper and not on back-lit screens? Many of us were quite young when we had to wait a few days to actually 'see' the photos from our latest vacation, a school farewell party, or an annual fest at college. Photos almost exclusively existed on paper. They were lovingly arranged in an album and stored away safely. When our friends and family wanted to see them, we couldn't just magically send them off: we had to meet in person. As the photos were passed around, stories behind them were shared, along with smiles and laughs, compliments, comments, often over some tea and snacks, in person and not expressed with emojis. We actually met and shared what we felt and thought to each other directly about the 4X6" (mostly) rectangles.