Experiments
Tracking my experiments, including reflections.
Active
Take a pic of Kathy+Rami ~daily: 25/30
I don’t take enough pictures of Kathy & Rami together, so I’m going to do it ~daily for about a month.
Take ~daily notes on Ramsters: 51/100
This post is the inspiration.
I’m curious if I take ~daily notes on fun things that happen with Rami and review them (along with pics/videos/Kathy’s insta posts), I’ll begin to see the contours of a longer art piece I’ll want to make. That would take more than 100 days of notes, but 100 feels like a good place to start.
20m ~daily meditation: 10/30
My meditation practice has been a bit haphazard over the last couple years, but I have found that I enjoy do nothing meditation the most, followed by metta and Existential Kink (EK) more recently. I’m curious how my days will feel different if I do one of these practices for 20m in the morning.
Reflections:
I can certainly notice the difference if I have done do nothing meditation or not in the mornings. My attention feels more scattered & more likely to get sucked down some mindless path (eg checking finances for no reason)
Making sure I take a few minutes to properly relax (I like progressive relaxation) before metta makes it soo much easier to feel body sensations & get into that positive heart space
No wifi mornings: 22/30
I’m curious what I will end up doing if I keep wifi off on my laptop until after noon.
I will still allow myself to check my phone in the morning, as I don’t have any timesuck apps on there (only use it for messages/Duolingo/Anki).
Reflections:
I’ve been meditating, playing with Rami, reading, writing, exercising
This combined with shifting my sleep schedule to wake up around 5am (so I can get some stuff done before Rami gets up) has seriously changed my relationship with my computer. Now I primarily use my computer for reading/writing, and it feels like random Internet browsing is WAY down. Substack/twitter scrolling is near zero.
Move anger when it comes up: 7/20
My sense is that my most repressed emotion is anger. Art of Accomplishment has a short series on anger (1, 2) and they suggest practices like free writing, going somewhere to yell alone, etc to “move” anger. The idea is to let the emotion of anger flow through you, but not get “angry at” someone/something. I’m giving them a shot.
Reflections:
It’s felt really good! I can feel a sense of spaciousness & less tension being held in my body afterwards. Things that tend to recur as sources of anger appear to be recurring less frequently.
Weekly links post: 5/6
I’m curious what effects writing a weekly post summarizing interesting things I’ve read will have on my reading throughout the week, my ability to come up with ideas, and my general desire to keep posting here.
Reflections:
Already feeling like I should move the longer single link that I choose to expand on into a separate post where I can develop ideas more broadly, and keep the weekly posts as links with only short context. But at the same time it’s been good to be forced to develop at least one idea/link weekly.
The Rami section is the most fun part to write and it’s easy as well – plan to keep that up regardless of the rest of it
Sunday has become kind of a writing rest day, then M-W are more generative freely reading and exploring things, and then Th-Sa is when I actually write. The Th-Sa portion is not nearly as fun ha
Noted a few times this last week where I had an idea I wanted to develop further and found myself wondering if I could find a link that discussed it
I’m done with this for now. Keeping weekly IRL emails but shifting to writing sessions with no fixed deadline for output.
Journal with my left hand: 42/100
How quickly can you become ambidextrous when it comes to writing? I’m journaling 100 pages (it’s a small journal) to find out.
Reflections:
Started out writing extremely slowly, so my handwriting was much better with my left hand than my right hand
Around journaling sessions 25-30, I am now able to write at the same speed as my right hand but ~10-20% less legibly. I’m able to journal as fast as my thoughts, same as with my right hand. Pretty cool!
I can sense that my skill will plateau here unless I deliberately slow down to work on handwriting (probably the same spot I’m in with my right hand)
Considering stopping here as it’s clear that 5 minutes a day for a month has gotten me to within striking distance of my right hand
Dormant
Write 1000 words a day for 100 days
Status: 40/100
Output: 40 posts (kickoff, see archive for all the posts)
Why I stopped this experiment: see reflections post
Summarize each paper in vol 1 of this book in a thread
Status: 4/89
Output: Thread of threads
Why I stopped this experiment: on hold for now – it wasn’t feeling as interesting to read papers without a clear question I was looking to answer & I got to a paper that was a lot less interesting than the previous ones. Realistically I should have just skipped the boring paper and only read ones that were interesting, to maintain momentum. I may unpause this experiment at some point.