60 pushups a day! Considering bumping up to 70. Really motivated by looking at the increase on the slope over time and the very large sounding cumulative sum of pushups.
Dropped the Kant goal, added a general touch-philosophy goal. So far making reasonable progress through a Philosophy of Language textbook. I specifically wanted a text that I could feel like I’ve made concrete progress in even if I only have less than an hour to put into it a week. So far the chapter I’m working through is essentially a series of problematic sentences that bring up classic issues with naive theories of reference. So I can just memorize a sentence, make sure I understand the issues, and call it a day a lot of the time.
My handwriting improvement is slowing down, which is probably pretty natural. I need to narrow focus on patterns of imperfection now rather than learning all the letters in Spencerian.
My achilles tendonitis is finally healed up enough that I can run again!!! The slope of my weight graph is maybe kind of tending down again as of today!
I worked through this set of books independently. Assuming one is sufficiently motivated, they’re relatively easy to work through independently because they’re so systematic. After finishing (most of) those, I’ve found it really helpful to print big guideline sheets with angle markings and use those for daily writing practice.
Just bumped to 70 pushups a day! Was putting that off but I’m starting to see strong visual results so I thought I would expedite the process.
My Spencerian cursive continues to be amazing: as a side effect I’ve started sending letters to people and keeping a journal. I feel like I turned a corner just after my last posted update when I discovered mechanical pencils make beautiful, subtly shaded lines with none of the fuss of dip pens. I like ink still but I’ve mostly been sticking with the pencil.
The success of teaching myself cursive has got me thinking about finding more things in the same category to learn, which I think of as “stuff most people don’t do but that you can get pretty decent at within 1-3 months. Ideally physical rather than intellectual things.” So far along those lines I’m practicing my juggling and learning to imitate a Cork accent. I’ve been a language nerd for almost 20 years, and I’ve always enjoyed how language learning strongly motivates cultural interest, but language learning is hard and I’m already focused on learning another one. Accents are relatively easy in comparison. Curious to see if learning an accent has a similar cultural effect.
edit: wanted to add that it was Rajiv Surendra’s video on accents that piqued my interest in learning accents independent of both acting and language learning.
I can’t believe it’s been two weeks. Seventy pushups going well.
I made a change to my philosophy studies that’s making touch-philosophy more manageable/fun: I’m oddly perfectionist when it comes to studying philosophy in a way that I’m now seeing is completely counterproductive and unlike me in other pursuits (I’m hardly a perfectionist overall). I’ve decided to allow myself to just read the text as a first-pass without any notes. Or anki cards. Or memory palaces. The horror!
I finished reading On Sense and Reference today because of this. Making a second pass through now.
Gah! Failed my daily weighin goal and my cursive practice goal due to temporary insanity from missing an entire night of sleep.
Retiring:
worksummary - I am fully habituated to this and enjoy it since I write my daily work summary in pretty calligraphic cursive. Just removing manual goal clutter.
sightwords and hebrewlesson - We bought a chore chart touchscreen thingie and the kids get “stars” for doing their sight words or hebrew lessons and so far that’s way more effective than me asking them, so I’m retiring these
New ones!:
shabbat_prep - As part of a gradual move towards a more observant shabbat, I need to do pre-shabbat prepwork like: getting laundry done, cleaning the house, prepping pizza dough for Saturday dinner, prepping dough for challah, etc. Only done this once, but it meant that I didn’t do any major cooking before sundown last Saturday. Success!
phone-time - inspired by the discussions on here, I decided to aim for less than an hour of phone usage a day, first with the caveat that utility apps were ok, but now I just aim for less than an hour overall. So far easy-peasy, I have good habits around this. I’d like to crunch it down to 30 minutes a day, but no rush.
breaks - I am bad at taking work breaks except for, like, lunch. But even then I sometimes don’t take a break. I am enforcing an easy-peasy 15 minute a day break. Tied to a toggl timer. Will step this up assuming I don’t fail. Never thought of myself as a workaholic type but I’m definitely quacking like a workaholic duck, so…
Cursive practice since I write in cursive all the time now.
Breaks, since now in addition to basically never taking breaks I have to fuss with an annoying timer every day.
Thinking about retiring my screen time goal. Like, I’m really close to just not using my phone at all. Feel like I should just take the leap. I’ve been inspired lately by some hardcore people over in gopherspace who manage to be both super geeky but default-offline. Offline map apps, offline reference texts, most communication done with old-school terminal email applications if the need arises, etc. I’m not there yet but a lot of my ideating is in that direction. Beeminder is actually one of the main things keeping me on the mainstream internet at all. I guess I could use the API. Sounds like a fun project.
(I’ve been quietly following your journal, found inspiration in it now and then, and even shared some of your stories with a few people offline. I hope you’ll find a way to keep us updated that works well for you, on the forum or elsewhere.)
Derailing all over the place. Twice on Shabbat prep, once on daily weighin and daily touch-hebrew. The Shabbat ones felt good – I was like “This is a cost I am willing to pay to not have to do any Shabbat prep today” rather than “whoops I forgot to prep.”
I think I will retire my screen time one. Here, I’ll do it now. I’m organically heading in the direction I want – no reason to use the goal.
I don’t think I’ve talked about it here, but I have a minor pushup related injury in my left arm from overuse. I’ve been keeping my goal as-is but loosely substituting other activities than pushups at made-up exchange rates (pull-ups count for two, holding a static pushup position counts as 1/2 per second).
I hate injuries.
But why?
I’ve started typing an answer here a few times but haven’t felt good about any of my attempts. I think mostly it’s that I romanticize a certain kind of quiettude and a certain kind of cognition. I sometimes feel like the world is on fire and the fire is closing in and I don’t want to die with any additional part of my life spent on a screen than necessary. Something like that but less morbid than it sounds.
I feel energized about my habits in the new year! I started waking up an hour early so I can be a little more hardcore, and it turns out that “being hardcore” for me means alternating sets of under-the-desk pullups and writing out Hebrew verb conjugation tables for an hour.
You never know what kinda weird shit your neighbors are up to at 6am.
I really like my new poetry-grind goal! It’s easy! I just do 1+ pages of reading sequentially from the Norton Anthology of Poetry. No skipping pages! No looking for pretty poems! It auto-ratchets so no matter how many pages I read I’ve always gotta read at least one page of poetry except on weekends.
The idea here it to correct my underexposure to poetry. I always think I should like poetry or should have read this or that poem, and I’ve decided that mostly I just never had enough poetry thrown in front of my face relative to prose, and I aim to correct that.
It’s so enjoyable that I’m considering something similar for philosophy even though I’ve dropped my past philosophy goals. I think the key constraints that make it fun so far are the lack of choice and the easy daily win. I don’t know how to do “lack of choice” for all of philosophy. Maybe I should get some big honking philosophy anthology. But I’ve already read a lot of philosophy historically, so I was thinking I could do something contemporary and topical? But if I do something topical, I’ve already got a lot of philosophy books. Maybe I should just read those? But which one? AGH CHOICE.
I’m a big fan of gradually beeminding my way through books a page or two a day! I’m doing so at the moment with “The Man Who Knew Infinity”, about Ramanujan.
I watched the movie of that! Wasn’t the best movie I had ever seen but I was on a quest for mathy movies and enjoyed myself.
I decided tonight to resolve my ordering problem tonight by picking out all the philosophy books off my shelf that I haven’t read yet & that I’d be willing to read, ordering them by means of dice rolls, and vaguely committing myself to a page or two a day reading schedule for them. If it feels good in a few days I’ll beeminder it!
I beeminded the page-a-day philosophy goal. I’m still unsure if it’s a good idea but so far so good.
I don’t think I have much to report. I am super stressed out and dragging myself through my goals.
I watched some videos on pushup progressions recently and now I’m doing ARCHER PUSHUPS which are very impressive. I assume it’s much better to keep escalating to more difficult forms as far as repetitive stress injuries are concerned. I’ve been trying to take more rest days and do more pushup-equivalent things but I can tell that my elbow tendons are still displeased with me, but they’re at least not getting any worse.
Whoops I did all of my pushups but then forgot to mark them ugh. Been a while since I did that. Kinda painful; my pushup failure cost is quite high for me.
Nothing else much has changed. Really enjoying the philosophy-page and poetry-page goals. Still very much at the beginning of “Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity” by Alasdair MacIntyre and nearly at the beginning of the transition to early modern English in the poetry book. Enjoying the middle english stuff much more than I woulda thought.
My current untracked obsession is a resurgence of interest in memory palaces and related techniques, and it’s (finally) reignited my interest in making use of my Latin: Renaissance thinkers were really into memory palaces and there’s a lot of seriousness and creativity and wild experimentation that just isn’t present in contemporary mnemonics writing…and they all wrote in Latin! I’ve read some Bruno, some Erasmus, and some other dudes in the past couple weeks and had a good time.
My daughter has been doing some memory work too! She’s excited to know the American colonies in order of founding. Took like 10 minutes. We’re gonna do the top 10 highest-population countries in order next. Got started today writing out the information.
