A New Experiment

Hi,
I've been gone for a long time, and I may leave you again in the future. But for now I've decided to pick up the blogging again because I'm planning on performing an experiment on myself. I'm hoping it'll take about 2 months. See, sometimes I have trouble doing the things that I really want to do. Then I get all frustrated with myself and I start to feel down. I've been working on that last part recently (feeling down for stupid reasons), and I hope to write about it in the near future. But for now, here's my idea...

There are things that I want to do on an every day basis such as meditate, work out, eat healthy food etc. The problem is that sometimes I have excellent will power and sometimes I do not. Often I do not. One idea I had for overcoming this is to tell a friend that if I break my vows to do these things I'd give them a certain amount of cash. Maybe it sounds like a good idea to you, but here's the problem for me: as weird as it may sound, cash isn't very valuable to me. I don't mean that in some kind of new-age, Indian mystic kind of way. I mean that giving up a few bucks to a friend isn't sufficiently painful to make me to stick to my guns about my vows. So if I decide to eat only meats, fruits, and vegetables, and 12 days from now I feel like I'll die if I don't eat a Marshmallow Pinwheel, I'll probably eat one (or the whole carton) and just pay my friend the $20 or $30 or whatever it is. Then I'll feel shitty for having eaten the Pinwheels and then I'll pile on some more shitty feelings for having lost the $30 for such a dumb reason.

So, my latest idea is to find something that DOES have some value to me. What I came up with is any object with historical importance. I have always felt like it's a huge tragedy for anything old and rare to be destroyed. Things from a previous era are a direct physical link to that time, and they always seem to boggle my mind. I'm intrigued by them and I treat them like a valuable treasure. So in thinking through the idea for this experiment I remembered that I used to keep a coin collection when I was a kid. I'm sure the actual value of the whole thing put together isn't more than a couple hundred bucks. Most of it consists of American coins from the 20th century, and a few older pieces, and some pieces from other countries. But I also have some paper money, and it's amazing! I have a dollar bill from 1891 and one from 1920. I have a Confederate $10 bill from 1863. I have a $5 and several $2 bills from the 1950s, and I have bills from Spain, Cuba, Amsterdam, and Germany from the 1960s. Like I said before, the actual street value of these bills doesn't add up to much, but if someone were to light them on fire as I watched I would probably feel sick. As though someone were destroying an important, one-of-a-kind piece of art. Something that could never be replaced.

This is my idea... to put these items up for sacrifice if I fail to comply with my vows. Tomorrow I will ask my friend to agree to throw these beautiful old bills into a trash can and light them on fire the minute I break a vow.

Here is a quick and dirty list of the things I vow to do for the next 2 months (approximately):

1. Stop eating shitty food (follow the Paleo Diet)
2. Stick to my study schedule
3. Stick to my exercise/work out schedule
4. Meditate every day, if only for 5 minutes

These are the main points. There are some more subtle rules too, but I'll write about those in the days to come. I'll also be talking about why I want to follow these rules for the next 2 months. But this is enough for now.

Wish me luck. DO IT NOW.