Word Of The Day
In 1732, the year George Washington and Richard Henry Lee were born in the English colony of Virginia, and the year 27-year-old Benjamin Franklin first published Poor Richard’s Almanack, the words unincorporated, boardroom, detective, and vampire were all used for the first time in print.
They have a little thing on the Merriam-Webster website called Time Traveler; it tells you the first year a word was published, but then you can find the other firsts from that year. It’s always fun to try to imagine the scenarios under which these words all popped up in print at the same time, and we’re all about the fun in this house.
I was just looking up the word ennui, though, which was stolen from the French in the 1660s, apparently, but didn’t wind up spinning through a printing press for another 70 years. It comes from the same root as the word annoy, although it’s always been used in pretty much the way it is now, to describe a sense of boredom.
More than boredom, really. Dissatisfaction and emptiness are other synonyms, I guess, but usage is pretty specific. I almost always hear it (it doesn’t seem to be that common; I just know it from a Cole Porter song) used to describe a situation when the speaker is bored even though there are plenty of options.
So, ennui it is. That’s the word for now. It’s been the word for a while.
I have other words, obviously, and lots of other emotional states to try to describe. Fear and paranoia are old friends, and anger has been way more common in the past 18 months than I’m comfortable with.
Gonna stick with ennui, though. I actually was pretty busy for the first 14 months of the pandemic; I’ve mentioned to several people that this didn’t really begin for me until it started to feel like it was ending for everyone else. Four weeks after being fully vaccinated, I headed south for two quick trips to see family, and when I got back my life looked a lot different.
Suddenly my days were emptier than they’d been since the second week of March 2020. I was used to spending 50-60 hours per week on video production, with eventually nearly the entire Adobe Creative Cloud suite open every day on my desktop. I jumped regularly from Illustrator to Photoshop to Premiere Pro to After Effects to Animate, an insane change from normal, and then whoosh, nothing.
You know what I was doing, though. I was happily moving pixels around so I didn’t have to look out the window at all the places I couldn’t go. I was keeping ennui at bay. You and me both, buddy.
***
I was busy because churches shut down, and needed video help from someone who knew them. Eventually there were more needs. I’ve been fooling around with video for decades but it was a lark, man, not even a hobby. Months would go by without doing anything, and I’d have to relearn 30% of my meager skills.
Any year I learn something is a net positive, even though I’ve always been aware that every tiny magic trick I figure out has already been mastered by an army of 14-year-olds. There’s a youthful sensibility to this that I can’t grasp but I can see, so I’m really just waving from the slow lane as I fool around with After Effects.
When in-person church started back in late May, then, 80% of my work disappeared. I made funny videos with special effects to send to my grandson, but he kind of has a youthful sensibility, too.
And over the 14 months that I was hunched here, moving frames back and forth, mostly trying (and failing) to develop a sense of style, I really wanted to explore character animation but never found the time.
Most of video editing is animation; a title that fades up is animation. That part I know how to do.
Character animation is very different. I don’t have any real drawing ability, so I was thinking more along the lines of animating logos, talking graphics, that sort of thing, but the material can be dense and I began to think it wasn’t going to happen.
When I went to Texas a few weeks ago, though, and had to leave my video work station at home, I watched a few tutorials without the ability to watch a little, then stop and try it out. I had forced patience, then, and it made a difference.
So I might make some cartoons now. I might post here more often. I don’t really know what I’m doing, just what I’ve been doing for the past year and a half. Now, maybe, it’s time to change things up. Maybe I’ll get to work on a short animated feature about a detective in colonial America who enlists the aid of a vampire to solve something about an unincorporated boardroom. The ideas are flowing now.
But this one, I think, is pure ennui.
