Saturday, September 4, 2010

Week long experiments

I've been thinking about this blog and things I've done in the past and came to the realization that a year is a really long time. I was thinking about what I wanted to do for next year and had trouble committing to some new project for an entire year. So I thought I could try some experiments or set goals for myself and then write about them here. There are two reasons why I kind of want to do this. Number one: it will give me more things to write about. Number two: I like the feeling of accomplishing hard things. I got the idea for this after listening to The Guinea Pig Diaries by A.J. Jacobs. It was funny/interesting because he did this sort of thing for a month at a time. His projects included doing everything his wife told him to do, being completely and brutally truthful at all times, outsourcing his life to Indian assistants, and other weird things that came to his mind. I don't think my ideas would be that extreme and I don't think I could do things for a month at. Here are some ideas that I have come up with:
  • subsisting on a liquid diet
  • never saying "no"if someone asks me to do something
  • become a perfectly overachieving student (reading each assignment twice, emailing questions to my professors, taking copious amounts of notes, etc.)
  • write a poem a day
  • no music for a week
  • do "x" amount of push-ups of run "x" amount of miles per day
  • meditate for an hour a day
  • not using any contractions in speech and written word
  • no internet
Any other ideas? I think there should be some limits, such as: it shouldn't hinder my school work or job, it shouldn't annoy Katie (too much), and it should be something that I would find fascinating. So this could be something that you might see in weeks to come. Or this might be just a passing phase that will never come to fruition.  

3 comments:

Chris said...

i thought you hated exercise. have you changed your mind?
also, i have a goal to memorize the substance of every chapter in the book of mormon. so if someone said alma chapter x verse x, i would have a good idea of what happened in the verses around there.
i have considered memorizing the book of mormon, but that seems to big to do without some other goal first.

Bryan Lewis said...

I do hate exercise. That just makes it an even bigger accomplishment if I do something exercise related, I guess.

Kathy Haynie said...

April is National Poetry Month, and you can participate in NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month - write a poem a day and post it). You can google the website. At Oregon City HS, we do OCPoWriMo, with our own blog of poems that students and teachers write during April.