dannDESIGNS

I’m turning 31 next week. Just 3 years ago, I couldn’t begin to imagine being in my 30’s, and here I am taking a full year stride into them.

I’ve been watching a documentary on Netflix about the cultural shift in music purchasing trends and it made me realize that I’m losing my creativity.

In my teens and early twenties, I was constantly creating. I was writing songs for a punk band (Action Figure) and a ska-punk band (Potato Gun) I was in a metal band (Silence/Absent Of.) and I was creating show flyers and hand-outs for each show where I would cut out and draw images and photocopy them at my Inventory Control job at United Healthcare hoping a supervisor wouldn’t notice. I was learning HTML and creating Geocities websites for fun. I was writing stories for friend’s English reports because I enjoyed creating tangental worlds. I would be up late at night talking to my girlfriend (now wife) while drawing a comic book about a robot who only spoke broken spanish with a translation key at the back of the book. Falling asleep at 4am to get up and go to school at 8am.

Even in my early/mid-twenties, even though I was no longer in a band, I got into graphic design and my first iMac opened my eyes to GarageBand. So I spent my time making music loops and rap songs to entertain me and my wife while I honed my skills and started my first career job at an ad agency. This was the point where I was introduced to the t-shirt designing industry and jumped in head first with horrific designs I was very proud of. I even got into video editing as I collaborated with my daughter making home videos that can be fun for strangers to watch rather than just documenting her growth.

Now I’m in my 30’s. My rose-tinted glasses have dimmed. I have pawned my electric guitars ages ago and my two acoustics gather dust. I created a video with my daughter under deadline and great pain last year. This is the longest bit of writing I’ve done in God knows how long. I only open GarageBand to loop Bollywood music for my mother’s Belly dancing classes. I keep at the shirt designs, but I’m only happy with 3 out of 10 designs I make each month.

I need to find my next obsession, and quickly. After watching Beast Wars with my friend Ken before catching the bus to school in Eagle River Alaska every morning in the 90’s, I started collecting Transformers. Now I have 9 tubs filled with loose figures and a room in my home dedicated to my mint in box collection. I worked at video stores for 9 years, so I have 300-400 DVDs and Blurays taking up real estate in my home. I have a backup drive filled with GarageBand and iMovie files after I became enamored with those programs.

I’ve enjoyed writing this. As stilted and random as it may be. Maybe I’ll get into writing. More importantly, maybe I’ll be less introspective the next time I drink :)