Devoid
The sound of the nearby highway always comforted her.
She could never explain why, of course. It was something about the sound of activity, of something moving or working that wasn't completely automated. The sound of the highway wafted into her apartment, falling onto the pale blue carpeted floor, a mix of stone and metallic. It was her personal reminder that she wasn't alone.
Except for the fact she was alone. She had barely left the apartment all day. She hadn't even washed her clothes as she often did on a Sunday. She had instead, spent the entire day reading. This was a rare occurrence for her now. She typically frowned upon “media consumption” in lieu of producing something creative. In addition to laundry, the young woman often concluded the weekend writing or drawing.
A while ago, there had been a burst of such activity. For nearly three weeks, it seemed, she had spent most of her time drawing. They seemed like such idyllic times to her now. Tess liked herself best when she spent the majority of her free-time doing something creative. The medium didn't matter. Programming, writing, artwork, music, they were all the same. They were an avenue of expression. Music had always troubled her the most. Even today she can't quite figure out how to create music. Riffs, lyrics, none of it seemed to make sense to her. Somehow, it was a medium she couldn't master. It was a impasse that was aggravated further by nearly 8 years of music education.
A voice wondered in through the windows. Male, young. It sounded English, with a rounded Latino accent. Kids, she thought, to the sound of the security door snapping closed. The voice trailed off into the opposing building three stories below.
Last week she had decided to change her free-time habits. She had discovered that she was spending a great deal of time each evening watching television. This was something new to her, since she hasn't had a television for years – not the boxy kind at least. She did have a television card in her computer. It worked well for nearly two years. Then she decided to buy a laptop. She merged the hardware of her old computer into that of her ancient web server, assembled from donated computer components. She had hoped she would be able to continue using the television card, but somewhere in reconstruction, the sound card failed. It didn't matter much to her anyways.
When a friend had borrowed her his TV for the summer, she became hooked. It was so easy to simply turn it on and watch a documentary, or a science special. Occasionally, she would even watch some science fiction, but rarely anything else. Despite this selective exposure, she had found her creative output dropping, and dropping and dropping. Her imagination was growing weak from disuse.
This is partly why she had spent a great deal of time reading this week. She hadn't read a book outside of an airplane or hotel room for months. When she wasn't traveling, she barely read at all. There was something about travel that made it more attractive. There was something something about travel that also fired her imagination. People-watching at a departure gate always roused her writing muse. The problem was, she couldn't control when the travel was going to occur. The occasion for it simply came up when it was necessary at work. Tess felt a mix of disappointment and frustration at the thought.
Tess was also reading for another reason. She felt she was empty of words. She hoped by reading for several nights in a row would somehow fill that void. After two days, she began to believe she was right. Her muse had woken, and began, as she typically did, to run a monologue in the back of her head. It spoke in her voice, somewhat idealized, of her thoughts and actions at the moment. It was curiously third-person, only with one character.
Tess yawned, deeper than expected, the action causing her eyes to water. I can't be tired yet, can I? It's only 8pm... she thought to herself. Today she had finished one book, Starfish by Peter Watts. It was a near-future novel, similar but less technologically oriented than the cyberpunk novels of Gibson. It had the same dystopian flare that Tess hedonisticly enjoyed. She had read the book before, but too quickly. She barely could remember anything about it. The same was true for her teal copy of Neuromancer, splayed upon her desk. She had also read it before, and read it too quickly. Tess didn't enjoy the novel as much as one of Gibson's later novels, Idoru. That one happened to be her favorite work of his.
The young woman wasn't happy with how her weekend had turned out. No, she wasn't exactly unhappy, she was Guilty, she thought with a sigh. She hadn't done anything creative during the entire weekend. All she did was read. She had hoped that today she should have been able to produce something, but nothing came of it. Somehow, she felt she had been lazy. That she had wasted the precious free time she had been given before returning to work.
Wasted, lazy, guilty, the words swirled in her head. Starfish and Neuromancer weren't the only two books she had picked up this weekend. She had also read a few pages of a philosophy essay entitled, The Hacker Ethic. The essay involved a comparison between the cultural concept of the Protestant Ethic, versus the so-called Hacker Ethic. When Tess had read the book years ago, she had felt she sided with the latter. When she paged through it yesterday, however, she discovered quite the opposite was true. How in the hell did that happen? she asked herself, When did I change so much?
It used to be that Tess would spend hours and hours at a time on a project. It infected her. It obsessed her. She would find herself doodling concept art or UML diagrams in the middle of class in high school. School didn't even matter much to her anymore, she felt she had discovered something enormous. Now, it seemed, projects weren't fun anymore. They were...work. They were obligation. They had become nothing more than a task to be completed, with enjoyment far down a long list of priorities.
She tried to trace this back to when it happened. There was no single event. There seemed to be a collection of events that edged in the direction of responsibility over enjoyment. Even when there wasn't a palpable responsibility to be had, she invented them. If there wasn't a point to something, then it was meaningless. She had said these things increasingly for the last few years, not realizing how much needless frustration she was causing herself. And today, she found herself wondering about those motivations and thought, Man, that's fucked up. Enjoyment should indeed be on the top of the list.
Tess, however, just didn't want enjoyment. She wanted to create something. Enjoyment alone wasn't enough to do that. For that, she needed something else: Passion. She needed the sort of passion she felt for a project as she did in high school. Couldn't that be dangerous?she asked herself. In college she often preferred to work on her projects over social occasions. She regretted many of the missed opportunities. She had been burned by that passion. It became an obsessive sanctuary during some of her more difficult years. That was the problem then, I burned myself out. It wasn't passion I was feeling then, it was need.
The question still remained, carried by the distant sound of the highway. How does one create passion?
