Mixed Feelings
I am happy to be home.
I am happy my sex drive is finally back, and with it, my chi.
I am happy I hooked up with a cute dyke in NorCal.
I am sad we were both from out of town and had nowhere to get a room.
I am sad my wife isn't home.
I'm sad my house is a mess, and especially my bedroom.
I'm really sad my garden is TOTALLY DEAD.
I'm happy my animals are fine.
I feel motivated about a lot of things.
I am sad that all the aforementioned sadness is fucking up my motivations.
I've been reading a lot lately on how the Internet fucks with our heads. There's a growing body of research that shows that our constant connectedness and Internet addictions are changing the way our brains work, mostly in negative ways. The main ones I keep coming back to are here and here; you should read/listen to them! I also bought an audiobook of The Willpower Instinct a while back because I heard an interview with the author and it sounded compelling, and I finally listened to it on the train home. The former things got me motivated to change my Internet habits and the latter gave me a roadmap for doing so. I'm going to plan all this shit more in detail later, but for now I've set myself the following, rediculously attainable goals:
-Meditate for 5 minutes every day.
-Exercise for 5 minutes every day, even if it's just a walk.
-Open doors and eat food with my left hand.
By being ridiculously attainable, I will for sure achieve them, get into the habit of doing these things daily, and not get discouraged. The left hand thing is just a neat way I learned from the book to strengthen the self-control part of your brain - that'll probably be the most challenging one. Getting into the habit of having to pause and think before you do things does wonders for working out that self-control "muscle." The daily meditation thing is apparently by far the most useful thing you can do to increase your focus and self-control, as well as decrease your stress and anxiety. The book makes a crazy-good case for it, citing tons of studies and a really long list of benefits. I mean, I've seen that case made many times, but reading it in the book at this particular point in life, and seeing the scientific evidence all laid out in such a clear way, has pushed me into actually making meditation a thing I do. That's something I really like about this book: it's based off of a class the author teaches at Stanford so it backs up every assertion with a pootload of research. It's fascinating.
And reporting on your progress helps you actually do it, so here I am reporting. To myself, mostly; I know no one uses LJ anymore.