Day Two: Success One

I actually did it today: I woke up on my first alarm, immediately got out of bed and started my day. It was an early alarm too. As a result, I had an incredibly productive morning and (probably as a result) felt really great all day. To repeat: I got up early for no reason and then got a bunch of stuff done. I think the only other times I've ever gotten more done before 10am were during Phool's Weeks. Hopefully the novelty of waking up with more time to use before leaving for work will not wear off too soon...

monday's exertions

Jeff and I just walked down to the Mayfair Market to get some bananas. The fact that I count this as "exercise" is perhaps an issue I should address at a later time.

Physical Fitness

The weather the past two days has been rainy, so I've been using the treadmill on the first floor. Yesterday, I watched MNN. They played a series of short documentary bits about labor issues, like how a Food Bazaar in Brooklyn has unfair labor practices, and then some examples of how past picketing actions have worked out well, like at Zen Palate. It was ideal, because they had a lot of captioning in Spanish, and I find it entertaining and challenging to try to understand written Spanish. Today I watched El Gordo y la Flaca and Primer Impacto on Univision. Primer Impacto had a pretty good story about exorcism which I vaguely understood. The main story was also on religion, it was about a nude man who climbed up the outside of a large church and sort of hung out doing whatever up pretty high above this large decorative archway. They had shown a couple promos for this story during El Gordo y la Flaca, too - it was one of those "video bites" (?) where they keep showing you the same three seconds of footage over and over in the ad, and then once you're actually watching Primer Impacto, they keep repeating the loop more. In this case, it was grainy footage of the dude with his crotch blurred out. The shocking ending to his saga was that someone got up to the roof of the church and held down a big red banner or something to him, and he grabbed it, but slipped off or let go, and fell to the ground.

Anyways, exercising is pretty annoying.

Day One: First Failure

Maybe "First Failure" is too strong of a phrase because I did achieve Semantic Success today; I got out of bed without ever hitting the snooze button on my alarm clock. However, my alarm clock has three alarms that can be set for different times - a radio alarm, a buzzer alarm, and a nature sounds "alarm" that could also be called a "nature sounds sleep inducer." I set the radio and buzzer alarms every night, the second as a backup in case I do the exact thing I did this morning.

This morning, I was awaken by my radio alarm, got out of bed, walked over to my alarm clock, shut off the alarm, and then got back into bed and slept until my second alarm went off thirty minutes later. I did not hit snooze when my second alarm went off (a thing I do often). That minor victory eases the sting of today's major defeat.

also exercise

I also have some bigger-picture improvements I would like to make (becoming a better-informed and better-read person; making an effort to arrive at a more distinct creative identity, especially in terms of visual art; learning camping and survival skills) but for now I'll start with something I already do half-assedly, which is exercise.

I tend to exercise in extended bursts but then, if I find myself getting even remotely busy (and that includes being "busy" drinking beers), I forget about it for several days. I would like to stop doing this.

There are 3 kinds of exercise I've been doing lately -- arm thingies, a "Pilates for Dummies" DVD (which I have memorized and can now do while watching programming of my choice), and taking walks up in the hills. So, my new goal is to do ONE of these three things every day, ideally alternating in some fashion. I will even try to do this immediately after I get home from work (that is, before eating dinner), so I am the least likely to get distracted by other things. Besides hunger.

No Promises

I overextend myself. There's some virtue in this but not really. zB: MLI is the tenth blog I've signed on for, despite the graveyard of others behind me: a mixtape blog, a blog that's basically a meta-Gawker, a blog about East Village bodegas, a blog that was being written in the voice of mashup king N*ck C*tchdubs at the age of 75 (that is here), a comedy photo blog called, brilliantly, Rifftreous Humor. (The vitreous humor is the clear gel that fills the space between the lens and the retina of the eyeball of humans and other vertebrates. It is often referred to as the vitreous body or simply "the vitreous." Waste of a great pun.)

The irony of this post is painfully noted.

In less insignificant ways, this problem has affected relationships too. I end up flaking on a lot of engagements, simply because I can't say no. A lot of these engagements I don't even want to make either, so I'm doubly upset at myself. It'd be a lot easier if I just said, "No, I can't make it." To an extent it's an urge to please, to do everything or at least try to do it all. But I've decided it's probably better to be stand-up about fewer plans than to be impossibly precarious w/r/t more of them.

Right now I'm strapped $$$-style and see I've made plans to meet someone for drinks Tuesday night. I'm going to cancel that now, not tomorrow, when I was planning to send an email about being too busy at work and not being able to get out. I also told a girl at work I could magically pull W*lf P*r*de tickets out my subpop for next week. I am going to let her know that's not going to happen. I'm going to tell her I'm done spinning plates.

Write It Down, Asshole

One of my biggest shortcomings productivity-wise is the time that elapses between when I decide I need to do something and when I actually do it. Tasks like "buy new running shoes" or "call aunt who broke arm in four places" that I could accomplish in minutes instead take days or weeks, during which they just bounce around in my head and make me miserable.

I think the reason this is happening is, I don't have a good procedure in place for logging these decisions and holding myself accountable to them. Up to this point I'd resisted writing them down because I wanted to believe that my brain was capable of handling this sort of thing on its own, but it's time to acknowledge that evidence suggests otherwise.

So, this week's MLI is that I am going to write things down -- tasks, appointments, reminders, grocery items, etc. -- as soon as I think of them. I've tried carrying a moleskine but found it a bit bulky, so for now I'm going with the "piece of paper folded in quarters" trick.

It would be nice to eventually dump these handwritten notes into an organization system like iGTD, but that's next week's MLI.

Yikes!

Friends, I won't lie to you, not for a second. My life could stand some improvements. But here, thankfully, the operational word is "minor." I've never been one to do things by halves — I slap my gross white body on excellence and mediocrity with equal enthusiasm. But I need a minor goal, one unlike my major goals, like "find work," "find love," etc. (For the interested, I'm so close to perfect enlightenment, that attaining perfect enlightenment is a relatively trivial goal for me.)

But I have a wealth of minor life et ceteras. For example, to actually exercise. I hate exercising. I hate it. I have exercised regularly in the past, and never seen the results of greater clarity and greater ability to fall asleep, which are my main targets. But friends, I shall persist despite the clear futility, and do it. And I shall not just exercise, but I will exercise every day before I have a cigarette. If you don't understand the weight of the last part, you don't understand a lot of stuff.

But I'll do it, I'll damn do it. I'll exercise strenuously for a half hour every morning. And believe me, friends and readers, I will hate every stupid second of it. Stay miserably tuned for miserable updates about how much I hate this idiocy.

(For those readers and participants who exercise routinely - you are mentally insufficient. Exercise is a terrible use of one's time and I regret everything about this horrible dare.)

Short diary entries

First, I like this blog a lot. Second, this is BJN. Third, I set up a blog under this name to test out a template but that is not a real blog.

My MLI is to keep a notebook with a very short diary entry for each day, written before I go to bed each night. I got a Mead Composition notebook from CVS today and I plan to start tonight.

It won't be much about my feelings or thoughts or anything; it will be more in the style of the Reagan diaries. It will be 2-4 lines each night and I want to center it on one thing that happened that day that was surprising and made the day memorable. Recently I've felt bad that days seem to blend together. I'd like to reflect each day on something that made the day what it was -- someone I met, something weird that happened, something I saw -- so that I can look at it at night and be reassured that something happens each day. Hopefully, I'll even be more excited to start the day in the morning, wondering what will make the diary that day, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

The Premise

I'm pretty bad at running my life.

I think there are a lot of very small things, things that take almost no effort, that would improve my life. Often, I tell myself that I will start doing these things, but I never do.

The goal of this blog is to change that. Here's the idea: By this coming Sunday, all blog members pick something they want to do differently in their lives and post what it is to the group. Then every day each person reports on how (s)he is progressing. Hopefully this accountability will help us make Minor Lifestyle Improvements (MLIs). On the following Sunday, each member can (1) decide (s)he has made a MLI and choose another thing to work on during the coming week, (2) decide (s)he has not yet made an MLI and choose to try again during the coming week, or (3) conspire with others to have me killed so they can get the domain minorlifestyleimprovements.blogspot.com and use it for other purposes. I'm hoping few people decide on option 3, but I would be remiss had I not mentioned it.

My first Minor Lifestyle Improvement Goal (M-LIG) is to get out of bed in the morning as soon as my alarm goes off - without hitting snooze.

Email me or comment on FF if you're in.