It's been a busy week. My work responsibilities have increased, teaching keeps me busy twice a week, and I've been gearing up for my Halloween Party this Saturday.

Not a terrible situation. But tiring. I read about folks who work for fourteen hours a day, with great passion, and I wonder where their energy comes from.

Which makes me realize: I want their energy. I envy it. I want to be creating for sixteen hours a day, and I mourn my inability to do that.

And I wonder if it's a skill to be learned.

I sure hope so.

I'm watching a fascinating bit of internet ephemera: a sped-up video of a guy driving. This is not my first exposure to this type of web video; this one is genuinely interesting.

It's from Lileks, and I'm fascinated by the details. Sometimes he follows closely, other times at a distance. Sometimes he seems hurried, other times leisurely. Why? There are all sorts of little decisions and choices scattered throughout.

Plus, the soundtrack is one of Lileks' own techno remixes of a terrible song from classic Star Trek, which makes it worth watching in itself.

But I wonder: What is it about these little windows into others' lives that make them so interesting?

The second episode of Gundam 00 came out last night. My geekometer is off the chart; this is a giant robot anime series I'm downloading off the internet the day it airs because of how much I've loved previous shows in the franchise. It's equivalent to a Chinese Trekkie downloading episodes of Enterprise as they come out.

Why do I have such devotion to an entire franchise? Because so much of it is so good. It tells serious war stories. It has some amazing action sequences. It's created some of the greatest characters in anime. And, while the quality has varied over the decades, it's rarely disappointed for long.

So, I've been watching the buildup to Gundam 00, the latest series, with some interest. It has a top-notch crew (the director of Full Metal Alchemist, the writer of Trigun, and the composer for the Ghost in the Shell movies), and planned to springboard off a popular past Gundam concept: that the Gundams are rare, super-powerful war machines dropped into a gritty militaristic conflict.

I greatly enjoyed episode one, but first episodes are poor indicators of an entire show's quality. It was a solid, action-oriented, broad introduction to a large cast of characters. Episode two was a better test.

And it performed well. A narrator explained the general political situation, a welcome addition to typically politically-oriented Gundam. Several characters were developed a little, also welcome after that broad first episode.

And, you know, making any large-scale artistic work is hard. It's hard to balance characters, story, character design, setting, artistic style, music, sound, voice acting, backstory, mechanical design, and a hundred other elements in a way that keeps them all from stepping on each others' toes.

So, it's nice seeing something that works. And works well.

This afternoon I dug through the closet beneath the stairs, wiped a layer of dust off a large tin, and hauled it upstairs. I popped open the lid and pulled out my Halloween decorations.

Since I try to pack and live light, I only own a few items that I scatter around on Halloween. I have two china Jack O'Lanterns that hold votive candles. There's a great scultpure of a boy nervously holding a Jack O'Lantern on a stake while a cape billows around him. I bought a large black Halloween Tree this year, too. Plus there are the spider webs.

You can probably tell that I'm not hugely enthused by all this. I love Halloween, but I spent an hour or so skimming through Halloween websites looking for decoration ideas (particularly yard ideas).

There's a trend. I kept coming across phrases like "spooktacular" and "creepy fun" and "ghoulish delight."

Delight?

Folks are trying to make Halloween mundane and plastic. I get the feeling that they want Halloween to be handing out candy to toddlers in princess costumes holding plastic orange Jack O'Lantern buckets, and that's it. Maybe a cardboard skeleton on your door. Pardon, a "spooktacular" cardboard skeleton.

I see it in the Frankenestein's monster cut-outs that make him look goofy and cartoony. In the witches that look like church ladies wearing frumpy black dresses. In the removal of the weird in favor of the cliché--ever notice the ubiquity of the safe, abstract Jack O'Lantern? When did any merchant last mention that it held a piece of Hell?

Halloween's not plastic. It's not delightful. It's not even fun, in the way that it's often used.

Halloween is a celebration of the fantastic, of that which lies beyond, of the other. It's a tacit acknowledgment of things beyond our understanding. It is our Rational Age's last glimmer of awe at the boundless possibilities that exist outside humanity's little finite laws and models.

Nor should Halloween be a blood-soaked carnival of gore and entrails. That's missing it in a different direction.

Halloween is unsettling. It's spooky. It's a time to feel what it's like to fall from the top of the food chain.

And so, I put out my decorations, and I resolve to be unsettling this year.

:sigh: A day spent lounging around, feeling sick. I feel like I wasted the day, though I didn't; read a bit, coded a bit, watched a bit of anime.

I have a disconnect between my guilt at not being productive, and the amount of productivity I actually attain. It's never good enough.

And I got sick partway through my Creative Retreat. Still, I had fun. I read about half of Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat, and a few chapters of a Mechanical Design book (I'd like to understand mechanics more). I did a bit more work on the RTS game, mostly cleanup.

And I put up a big banner in my room that reminds me to accept discipline.

Overall, success.

Today begins another Creative Retreat, a weekend in which I sit back and read, meditate, plan, make, and mash-up.

Odd. My workday was chock full of training and meetings. Good training and meetings. I checked in to the PDM War Room every couple of hours to see if I could help, but they were blocked in other ways. So I always had something useful to get to.

And I came home, and I felt productive and energetic. I baked a pizza and planted some Tulip bulbs and went through five days of mail and filed some outstanding paperwork and watched some anime. And I still feel fine.

Perhaps I should learn from this, that work doesn't have to drain my energy.

Thanks to Brennen, I've decided to shut down my IM and Skype clients. They're both extra open loops. I don't need those to keep in touch with people, and they're distractions. Distractions from a huge, beautiful life that I could be living instead of typing "heh" in response to a link to a video of a dancing rabbit.

Enough. Enough. The computer is a drug, and I'm particularly susceptible.

It's an unavoidable drug, too. But I can buy less of it.

Roughed out a review of Gunparade March, based on my viewings through episode five. Tough show to watch, but very, very good.