GOTTA GET AWAY
Oct 1, 2007 12:00 PM, Kylee Swenson Remix Editor
If you live in a city or big suburb, you probably have no idea how much you're missing out on plant life…or why nature is even important. I live in San Francisco, and I can go out on my deck and stare at a couple giant redwood trees in my backyard, but that doesn't really give me the same perspective as when I really get the hell out of dodge.
I've been lucky to go on a few weekend trips recently. Last weekend, I was staying at a cottage in the woods near wine country in California, and for a moment, standing in the midst of a zillion trees and plants, I looked all around me and suddenly felt very calm and, at the same time, perturbed that I spend most of my days taking in such words as Webinar, podcast, video, screencast, rich media, blah blah blah. I know I'm not the first person to pose this question, but why do we want to spend more time staring at a computer screen?
When I was a little kid, before I got my first Apple computer (a IIe) at age 10 and went to computer camp (yes, that makes me a bona fide nerd) at 11, I didn't even know what e-mail was. I spent every single summer day making sandcastles on my parents' beach in Minnesota and swimming in the lake. I remember checking out the furry caterpillars, going fishing and watching bumblebees fly around flowers like they were drunk.
Nowadays, I have to drive almost five hours to a rented houseboat on Lake Shasta just to get some peace. And even then, it's guaranteed that some of my friends will desperately try to access their Blackberries and cell phones and will feel cut off by the lack of service.
I've read up about how newspapers and other media are scrambling to save the bottom line as print profits fall and online communities take bigger chunks of ad revenue. To keep up with the world, we need to deliver more things for people to do online to bide their time. All the power to supercelebrity blogger Perez Hilton for getting 7.1 million page views a day on his site, but don't you feel that people like that are sucking away your lifeblood rather than telling you something vitally important? No offense, but with Remix, we're trying to teach you how to become a better producer, DJ, live performer, etc. So all the extras that we're working on for remixmag.com in the coming months aren't for fluff's sake.
You can learn anything you want online, and if the answer isn't there, you can post your question in a forum or blog and get the answer within a day, sometimes within minutes. But as the Internet sucks away your time, your life, your tan…shouldn't you try to remember to escape once in a while? After all, if you don't do something for yourself, give back to yourself, how can you give to anyone else? We're all so busy checking e-mail, reading people's daily musings and looking at embarrassing/funny videos and photos online, it's as if we've forgotten about the real life, face-to-face.
This month's cover artist, Paul van Dyk, has achieved more success in his music career than many of us will ever know, but he also makes time to lead several charity foundations. I suspect that if he didn't recharge his own batteries and spend his time wisely (I doubt he watches YouTube all day and checks perezhilton.com every 20 minutes), he wouldn't have the energy to give to other people. Maybe we should all put a higher percentage of energy into doing good for ourselves and, in turn, into more selfless acts.
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