west uptowner

awaiting traffic, originally uploaded by trevorsc.

Overcoming distraction is easier if you have a lot of deadlines looming. Focus is a kind of tyrannical thing we do to ourselves out of necessity. Last week I had just discovered a few new websites and started checking them out... emusic (not a bad downloading service, way cheaper and less draconian than the itunes store, though with a smaller catalog), digg ('social bookmarking'), some videoblogging tutorials, and so forth... I could have embarked on a whole new set of projects based on the things I found. Ridiculous. Meanwhile, four jobs pressed in, forcing me to get offline and live my life.

I'm grateful. I think the danger with being curious in an age of some much readily available information is that you could be constantly learning about things, and never doing much with that knowledge. It's so easy to be distracted by the next new thing. But really -- what so great about newness? I doubt there's a real answer to that question.

This week is a busy preparation for a show I'm designing lights for, The Arab-Israeli Cookbook. It is a big show, with a fabulous cast and solid script. We have been rehearsing in a church basement where people occasionally walk through to the washrooms, and pipes knock a jazzy syncopation every few hours. It's nice to be there, in the room. Helps with focus.

# posted by trev @ 8:18 p.m.