Happy New Year's Eve's Eve

Don't tell her parents but I saw Yuan Yuan today. We synced up our trips to the local supermarket, though I gave her a head start of course.

New Year's Eve starts in about 15 minutes here. I guess it's resolutions time:

1. Eat less sweets. Yasha the dentist is going to retire early if I continue my current habits.
2. Practice singing more. I've only scared half the people in my building so far with rock screams in the elevator (an effective 0.5 second elevator pitch by the way), so it's time to initiate the rest. If that elevator doesn't reek of urine by next year then I'll have failed.
3. Be more tolerant. I think I'm becoming more and more cranky by the day, it's a little scary. I'd attribute it to Pissy Male Syndrome but it seems a little too chronic. If I live to be old, I'm going to be the crotch in crotchety...whatever that means.
4. Lucid dream more than this year. Shouldn't be too hard as I've had 0.0 lucid dreams in the last 364 days. Maybe I can make the job a little harder for myself tonight. Reality check!...damn, that would have been a nice New Year's present.
5. Learn to draw better. I've been avoiding improving this skill my whole life, not including the last 30 days, but the more it irritates me to practice it the more it seems like a worthwhile skill to have.
6. Get better at guitar accompaniment. I haven't actually practiced guitar in over a year. Time to learn a 2nd strumming pattern.
7. Learn my own songs.
8. Say yes more. I've been becoming more of a no person by the minute since 1986.
9. Write more happy songs. My lyrics are currently set to cynical by default.
10. Exercise more. Run in the spring. I'm going to wish I didn't write this. I wish I didn't write that. Oof, that was quick.
11. Read more books, watch less shows. It'd be nice if they had some books in English in Chinese libraries, currently I can only read on my computer.
12. Do a bit of programming. Here's to setting the bar high.
13. Run more experiments on people.
14. Run more experiments on myself.
15. Finish my novel.
16. Visit America. I hear it's pretty different from China.
17. Lie more. I've been pissing people off a bit too much with the truth.
18. Blog more. This way I don't have to do all the lying to people's faces. Lower that psychological barrier a bit.
...I'm sure more'll come up during the next few days.

Steve Pavlina would roll over in his grave if he could see my list...and if he were dead...or just doing a test trial burial. None of the resolutions are specific in terms of time or quantity or anything. But my balls just aren't big enough for a 365 day trial. I'll think of these as guidelines for choosing my 30-day trials during the year.

The Surgeon Knot/Join:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

The crazy thing is, being able to tie this knot is the only requirement for legally practicing surgery in 47 of the 48 states in the contiguous United States.

They should have progress bars available as titles

Still on track as of yesterday. The real test will be Saturday and Sunday when I have class most of the day and am forced to do pushups at my student's houses to avoid killing myself in the evening. It's hard to fit pushup sets into my schedule as my mom has inculcated all these health-nut rules into my head: don't exercise for an hour after you eat, don't watch TV while you sleep, pull down your pants before you sit down on the toilet, etc. And I'm not so sure what constitutes a meal. Does a bag full of candy count? Or is that not digested, just sweated out...that must how the Blue Man Group preps for their shows.

I have noticed a few benefits already of this new lifestyle. I can wear far less clothes in the room because the pushups keep me warm for long after each set. If I space them out just right, I can probably heat the room more effectively than the fake Chinese heater with its fake heat.

Yesterday's knot, the bowline:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

Not too difficult for magic hands.

Today's, the slip knot:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

Even easier than yesterday's. But I browsed pictures of the more advanced knots and I'm feeling in equal parts confident and screwed. Does beginner's luck restart for each new knot?

French is going smoothly. It's also producing lots of feelings I haven't had in a while. During today's hour, I looked over about a million vocabulary words and realized that I know none of them, which made me feel very Bill-and-Ted-esque. Then I felt excited, as in: "I'm going to know all these words...some day!" Then I felt motivated to study. Then I felt nerdy for feeling motivated to study. Then I felt excited about feeling nerdy as there's very little opportunity to be nerdy in China; people here prefer eating, and when they're not doing that--drinking. Then I felt nostalgic for MIT, where nerdism is both church and state. Then I felt guilty for living in the past. Then I ate some candy and felt the mini-heartattacks coursing through my teeth. Then I had to go to class.

Oh yea, drawing. Went OK yesterday, time passed a bit faster than the day before, but the results are still very disappointing. It's hard for me to draw what I see instead of what I know. I see a bowl, I know it's made of circles and I have to struggle to draw the squished ellipses instead. Hmm, maybe I should just draw all round objects from head on. "Excuse me sir, can you sit with the top of your head facing me?"

30 Day Supertrial

This morning I revisited my good friend Steve Pavlina who, though he's never met me, is a frequent participant in my life. At his hands I've tried many things I wouldn't have had the idea or motivation to try on my own. There have been many interesting experiments over the years: polyphasic sleep (the Uberman schedule), lucid dreaming, Site-Build-It!, blogging, staying unemployed, and probably a few others, but my favorite weapon of the arsenal of life-changers he's handed out has always been the 30 day trial. If you want the full treatment, read it on his website, but the basic idea is that changing any non-trivial aspect of your life is freaking hard. A 30 day trial lets you try out a new thing without committing to it as a lifelong change. It's a magical operator on life changes:

Hard Life Change X 30 day trial = Doable Experiment

Example: quitting smoking is hard. Quitting smoking for 30 days is doable. Eating healthy is hard. Eating healthy for 30 days is doable. Not going to the bathroom is hard. Not going to the bathroom...well, it almost always works.

Since I first happened on Steve's blog, I've done many 30 day trials. I've given up sugar, meditated daily, drank water, gone vegan, worked out, studied Chinese, blogged, and wrote jokes. I've even participated in a family 30 day trial, where we refused to get annoyed at each other for 30 days.

Then I took a break from Steve Pavlina for a while. His articles, although wonderful to a degree, make me feel wimpy. Plus, the last time I visited his blog he was blogging about being married and polyamorous (a friend of a friend of "promiscuous"), which seemed like a slight departure from his usual inspirational fare.

Anyway, I checked his blog this morning and discovered he'd posted another entry regarding 30 day trials. This time he wasn't addressing the average Joe, but the supermen among us, the above average Marks for instance. The upgraded 30 day trial was not particularly creatively but quite accurately called "30 day supertrial." Basically, you do several 30 day trials at once.

So here we go, the daily must-do's for the next 30 days:

1. do 200 pushups
2. study French for an hour
3. draw for 20 minutes (my patience for drawing is paper thin)
4. learn how to tie a new knot a day. This one's courtesy of Lucy, who apparently has people running up to her daily asking her to tie non-slipping knots on their poles...but not in the dirty way, whatever that would be.
5. write a blog entry (100 word minimum)

Doesn't sound too bad when you look at it in crisp Times New Roman font. I wouldn't even call it a supertrial, maybe a 30 day trial with extra cheese, but watch this:

1. Do 200 pushups EVERY SINGLE DAY
2. Study French for an hour EVERY SINGLE DAY
3. Draw for 20 minutes (my patience for drawing is paper thin) EVERY SINGLE DAY
4. Learn how to tie a new knot a day...EVERY SINGLE DAY. This one's courtesy of Lucy, who apparently has people running up to her every day asking her to tie non-slipping knots on their poles...but not in the dirty way, whatever that would be.
5. Write a blog entry (100 word minimum) EVERY SINGLE DAY

Capitalizing the first letter of the first word in each task description makes it so much more potent, eh? Oh and I suppose the EVERY SINGLE DAY adds that last grain of rice to the straw stack on the camel's back.

30 Days

Yesterday I made some interesting decisions that of course resulted in interesting consequences today, according to one of the more stringent laws of the universe. The yesterday me decided to take Steve Pavlina's advice and do some interesting 30-day trials. The idea is that you commit to giving up or acquiring some habit just for 30 days. It's interesting because it's actually doable; 30 days is nothing special, and you have a much greater chance for success than when you make more dramatic commitments like "I will never eat Komodo dragon or any other kind of dragon meat for as long as I live" or my little sister's favorite: "I will stop drinking cognac in the morning." These belong in the impossible-to-sustain-so-don't-even-bother-trying category.

Naturally, I couldn't let myself suffer alone, so I dragged every person that had the misfortune of being on my buddy list into this experiment. Luckily I regularly purge my buddy list of stale friends, so I only had to bother a few. Some of them needed extra motivation, so I agreed to do their 30-day trials as well. Currently I am signed up for the following:

No drinks other than water.
No cursing in any of the 18 languages I know or the 57 I'm learning. This is not as easy as it sounds. Innocent words in one language are X-rated in another.
50 situps/crunches a day for one friend.
50 situps/crunches a day for another friend.
Being vegetarian (this is actually part of another experiment, but I might as well take credit for it)

Some of these come with clauses. For example, should I have temporary amnesia and regain consciousness to find myself holding a half-consumed non-100%-water beverage, I must call my partner in crunches "master" for an entire day, and vice versa should she do 0-49 situps/crunches instead of the requisite 50. Initially we decided the punishment was a kick to the head in high-heel shoes, but plane tickets from/to China are back over a dollar these days, rendering such a scheme financially impractical. Humiliation was chosen as a close second.

Other people are signed up for situps/crunches, writing poetry, running in the morning, learning French for half-an-hour a day, writing in their journals for 15 minutes a day, and...I think that's it. Good luck to all of you (suckers)! That'll teach you to be my friends.

Recently I've been reviewing French in an effort to lower my overinflated self-esteem (I have no doubt that I totally rule). Chinese helps in that department, but I figure the more the better. So I've met some French girls from Paris on Palabea - a language learning site, and started reading Mysterious Island by Jules Verne, in French of course. In between, I read vocabulary lists and study verb conjugations.

All this is much more fun that it sounds (and this is only half-meant to trick you into doing it). I realized I forgot how cool the French language is; when I last heard it, it was being so uninspiredly taught that I lost my appetite for it for 5 years. Well now we're back, and without teachers standing in the way of my education, success is inevitable. Vive la France et la langue francaise!

Oh yea, lastly, some excellent poetry inspired by sitting on the edge of a bed all day:

I am sitting with bad posture
now I'm sitting with good posture
I sure am good about my posture
and we're back to crappy posture

Remember what I said about "rhyming a word with itself" being the domain of the incurably brave badasses? K, just thought I'd remind you.