3.1-3.2 Working for the weekend

Goal: 5hrs/day of working exclusively on my BA. No distractions.

Friday I pulled off two and a half hours before I had to go to a play, and yesterday I pulled off all five, resulting in a glorious eight pages. I decided to celebrate by going to a party--I would go for a little while, I reasoned, and then come home, eat some ice cream and watch "An Education." Except turned out it was a really good party and I wanted the socialization, so cut to me interrogating this French guy named Basile and then seeing and talking to everyone from the Weekly and from the Pune program and discussing all matter of things with this group of guys in the kitchen and then walking/running home at 2am. Horrific hangover today. Add rum and sparkling white wine to the list of drinks I should not drink in concert.

Anyway, here's what I can say: work is significantly easier to do if you break it into time segments. I timed myself by setting the alarm on my clock for an hour at a time, and it's so easy to talk yourself into another hour or thirty minutes or twenty minutes when you get into the project and get a feel for how time passes. Seriously. Do this. Try it. Increase your productivity.

Alright, back to hungover work for me.

[Break Day]

Weeee.

2.3 How 'bout remembering your divinity?

So it turns out that if you aren't threatened with mortar fire, and you're an atheist, it's really hard to pray. Like, really, really, mind-explodingly hard.

I just can't bring a God into the picture. He (or she, for that matter) just isn't there, on the line, listening in. I can't make it happen. I might as well be dialing up the big purple monster in my closet, because that's how seriously and earnestly I can take sending a prayer to God.

Every time I tried to say my own prayer, I felt like I was fabricating something and thus, didn't need to take the project seriously. Maybe it's like when you were so terribly in love with someone once, and then years after you've fallen out and you try to regain the feeling you can't. I don't remember what it felt like to believe in God, not really, because I've so historically situated and academified and broken free from the concept. God used to look at me and shake his head disapprovingly, but then I took off his mask and realized it was just my conscience.

Karma may make just as little sense as God in a cosmic sense, but somehow I find it much easier to play along. My sister, who first brought scary, black-hole atheism into my good-and-evil childhood, explained this belief to me previously: if you have a really bad day, you are owed an equally good day. If I do nice things, nice things are coming my way. If I'm an evil bitch, I have some lessons to learn. Balance.

Maybe it was the trip to India. The spiritual epicenter of the world begets karma and mantras, and I can get behind mantras. Which is why me and the Prayer of Saint Francis click. "Make me a channel of your peace," I instruct myself. Who's your? The universe, the wisdom, the possible. I get a little squeamish with the later "O master, grant that I may never seek," as I find the self-flagellating master-slave dichotomy somewhat less inspiring. But I can go on to "It is in pardoning that we are pardoned" and absorb the message as greatly human and compassionate. We are engaging with morality, and pardoning ourselves. And that is, in my opinion, so much more moving.

The verdict:

• Mantras in, personal prayers out (for the heathens). Those are for the blog.

2.2 I say a little prayer for me...

Last night I dreamt that I had FOUR babies. This is how it worked, I remember distinctly: one baby was born in November, the other three (all at one time, but somehow not triplets) the following February. My pregnancy dreams usually happen in this way, where apparently I begin the dream in some state of pregnancy or motherhood and have to resolve my shock and figure out how to care for the little squirming insect-like creatures in the cradle. Last night they were definitely insect-like, which is maybe a shout-out to the Franz Kafka I read Sunday night.

But FOUR babies? All at once? Clearly this is the manifest quadruple-shebang of BA/find-a-job/other-classes/date-someone. Each of these struggles and mewls for my attention, like a big-eyed insect in the cradle.

If you made it this far I assume you're committed to this update, so let's move on to the project...

After I wrote last night, I was thinking more about prayer, and about the fact that some people submit personal prayers to God, while others stick with pre-written, church-stamped prayers. I think I used to do a combination... I would do the Lord's Prayer, a childish German prayer my mom taught me when I was young that I completely muddled over the years, and occasionally a Hail Mary or something in that vicinity. A good Catholic cocktail. Then, because I was a lot more comfortable with it, I'd end with my own thoughts, issues or concerns I had with myself and a ticked-off list of people to bless, because that seemed nice.

As I thought about these pre-scripted prayers I remembered one I'd always found really touching: The Prayer of Saint Francis. In a world of meek and devotional prayers to an Old Testament God of wrath, this one seemed refreshingly Humanist. And really, I've always liked Saint Francis. He had a connection to animals and was particularly devoted to poverty.

I printed it out and read through it a few times. I prayed The Prayer of Saint Francis before bed and I've gone through it several times today. We used to sing it in church--and there's also the Sarah McLachlan version--so I quickly remembered all the words.

This is my favorite part:

...Grant that I may never seek

So much to be consoled as to console

To be understood as to understand

To be loved as to love with all my soul.

Really lovely, right? How often do I really think: I want to love more than I am loved--? Not often. It's usually all ambition in my brain, ambition and jealousy and compassion too, but I am far more focused on self-elevation than anything else right now. Forcing myself to turn that on its head is... calming. It puts me in a place where being a good person is not equated with being a successful person.

And this seems to be where we enter the valuable aspect of religion, when there is one. I am reminded of David Foster Wallace's commencement speech from several years back:

...Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you...

I suppose, if you say the same prayer over and over, it's more of a mantra than a prayer. Are they the same thing? I'm not sure. But it's a lot more centering than asking for things.

2.1 Like a little prayer

I have a lot of work to do. I have a few weeks to write up ~25 pages of my BA, and I'm shot through with intermittent panic. Thursday I have to have read Ernst Junger's "On Pain," mix it with some Nietzsche and figure out a paper topic. I have a bunch of jobs to apply for. Etcetera.

So what better miniproject to focus on but prayer? Alright, so I'm an atheist, or maybe an embarrassed agnostic. I don't typically pray. But that doesn't mean I can't pray. The religious may pray more than the rest of us but they don't have a monopoly on the action. Whose to say an atheist can't pray?

There are some interesting Google results on the subject, including this reflection by an atheist who was struck with the impulse to pray during wartime mortar shelling. After working on my BA this weekend I feel a little shell-shocked myself, though admittedly not to the point of prayer. But Case makes some good points. It might cause a round of cognitive dissonance, but is there really a downside to prayer?

Here's how I see it: prayer is time spent in earnest self-reflection, disposing of your fears and doubts in a higher power. You acknowledge you can't do much about the things you can't do much about, and you accept it and resolve to let them go. You focus on what your drives and ambitions are. You sort out what matters to you from what doesn't. These are the sorts of things you uncover in prayer, God or not.

So really, isn't it something of a self-therapy? A meditation? It isn't any wonder that studies show prayer can improve things; no matter what, you're taking some time to calm down and address the issues at hand. If you do it sincerely, that has to be a drain on stress.

I've prayed maybe about three or four times today. I woke up resolved to do it before each meal but I forgot dinner, and I did it a few times at random. I was probably around 14 when I last prayed consistently.

Alone in my room with folded hands, I felt very self-conscious. Was someone, somewhere laughing at me? And the other thing--I had the most difficult time focusing. I could barely come up with a line of thought. I attribute this to the fact that I don't really imagine God sitting on a cloud, waiting with bated breath to hear about the poor little prestigious college student's troubles with her paper. If God is on a cloud with ears perked up, I'd hope the attention would be directed toward a newly orphaned Haitian child. I folded my hands and talked to a dial tone.

I also feel a routine compulsion to start with the greeting "Dear God," like I'm writing a pen pal in fourth grade. "Dear" is something of a falsehood, which is I why I still bristle when I find myself resorting to the word in addressing emails to professors and professional contacts.

And worst of all, I found myself committing the most obnoxious habit of the faithful: Dear God, could you do this for me? Could you give me this thing? Could you make this work out? Could you remove the awkwardness and failure from my life and make it pretty much smooth from here 'til graduation?

Ugh. Who wants to be on the phone with that kid? "Can I borrow ten bucks? Would you give me a ride downtown?"

So much for my visions of earnest self-reflection. I will pray before bed, of course, but meanwhile I'll be looking into how to address the vague, floaty entity and get something honorable out of it in the process. If any of you heathens have tips, shoot 'em my way.

1.3 They (inexplicably) call her Dawn.

Yup. Another gray morning. Actually, at this point today's daybreak feels so long ago that I'd swear it happened yesterday. Or maybe that's just because it looked the same.

Last night I went to a friend's dinner party (I made these, seriously) and drank three glasses of white wine and played Celebrities and, of course, got home around 12:30AM.

Still, I felt less whiny when I got out of bed today, even though one look at the sky promised it would be just another gray walk (no people at all out, today). It was a bit warmer, which was nice. But I just couldn't get much out of it. I caught the morning routines--hysterical screeching birds over the kid's park, a couple of people getting ready in bakery. But I just can't squeeze an ounce of soul-soothing feeling out of an overcast sky so dull it looks like children forgot to color it in. Or the hunks of dirty ice-snow and puddles of melted dirty water.

SAD is real, people. And it's sad. And it's not because it's cold that people feel terrible, in my opinion, but because the sun ceases to exist for days at a time. Where does it go? Why doesn't it love us anymore? What time of day is it?

When I got home I crawled right back into bed and it felt sublime. Cloudy blankets are better than cloudy skies. When you go outside, experience the morning and conclude you aren't missing much, your bed isn't such a marker of failure. See, usually naps and late-morning sleeping depresses me as I see the sun outside my window and feel a little closer to death in my nest of hibernation. This morning it was a soft and inviting refuge.

Today and yesterday, I simply couldn't get myself to feel that an early morning overcast walk at dawn is anything more inspiring than an overcast walk at noon, or 3PM, or 10PM. Because it'll look about the same every time.

But if there's a sunrise to see, by all means wake up, commune with it, rejuvenate and start your day. The blues and reds and purples and yellows all melting together and expanding and shifting are calming and centering. The first day was a lovely morning despite a late night. The point is to see the beauty you take for granted. And when it's there, it's worth it.

The Verdict:

• The sunrise requires the sun. Check the weather, or look out your window.
• Wear legwarmers if you're going to watch it in Chicago in February.

1.2 Dawn Breaks Me

I really didn't want to get out of bed this morning.

When I did get out of bed and looked out the window, I really didn't want to walk to the Point. I knew what was coming--it was darker and more gray. Yesterday, even looking out of my West-facing window I had hope for a red, springtime, eggs-for-breakfast kind of sun. You can tell by the blue in the West what the sun in the East will be like. Today it's the familiar Chicago winter overcast and I could tell even at 6AM.

I put on the clothes (more layers this time--especially leg warmers. There's a lesson for watching the winter sunrise.) But today was less cold. And--this surprised me--more people were out. I passed two people walking on the way to the Point, and saw a number jogging there as well. Walking toward the lake this time, no colors were beckoning me. The sky was uniformly gray somehow, before the sun was even up.

And then there I stood at the gray lake, looking at the gray horizon. I stood until exactly a minute or two past "sunrise" as per my commitment, but didn't even see a hint of brightness behind all that cloud cover. Then I turned, plugged in my iPod and listened to music on the way back. I don't think I was really violating much--I had walked a mile or so to look at gray skies that looked much like the gray skies outside my window when I woke up. I wanted my bed.

What I thought about though, was the way I'm going to have to be careful with this Project. Surely some miniprojects will be frustrating or disappointing, but I'm going to have to vary it such that I have a break from certain frustrations and don't continue them over time; for example, my next miniproject won't involve my sleep cycle. If I do something with food, the project after that will deal with something else. Just as important, I also need to do things that are decidedly fun and wholly cerebral and not endless toying with my body.

When I got home I slept for three hours (repaying my sleep debt) and had strange dreams. I have done little since then and feel dazed. It seems like a headache is brewing. Now I figure, a cup of tea and then my BA.

Take-home lesson for the day: If you're going to watch the sun rise, make sure it's going to rise. It's the colors that wake you up.

1.1 Breaking Dawn

I know what you're thinking and no, my first miniproject isn't reading Stephanie Meyer's infamously bad final installment of the Twilight saga (although I am filing this away, with intrigue and a smirk).

Instead, I thought it would be cute to kick off my Project by doing three days of watching the sun rise at the point. So instead of taking a nap right now--which is what I really want to do--I will take a few notes.

Something I didn't know about the sunrise, though I guess it's sort of intuitive, is that it crawls forward a minute or two every day. At least it does at this time of year. This morning it was 6:41AM, tomorrow it's supposed to be 6:39AM and Sunday it's 6:38AM. I usually wake up at 7AM, so waking up at 6 wasn't devastating but it was a little jarring. I threw on a hat and a hoodie and all the necessary layers and got out the door in fifteen minutes or so.

Once I got outside I wasn't tired anymore, in the get-back-in-bed way. I haven't really thought about this before, but in paying attention this morning it's really only the prying-yourself-out-of-bed part that's awful and inhuman about getting up early. After that things become mechanic. So the next time you set an alarm early only to throw it against the wall and roll over, instead promise yourself that if you're still feeling tortured 15 minutes after getting out of bed you can go back to sleep. Odds are you'll feel fine by then.

I thought it would be really dark out, but actually it's never really dark out in a city. The sun was 20 minutes away from coming up and was spilling its early gradient lighter blues all over everything, but the ubiquitous all-night street lights and apartment building lights and other kinds of lights made it all a little less exciting. We're not exactly Stone Age.

But in a way, 6:20AM kind of is Stone Age, because no one is outside walking around and things are quiet. And when you're walking out of dark blue toward a growing hot pink on the horizon, it feels like the oldest church ceremony in the world. It's a big production, sunrise.

One day in India a couple years ago we went to go "watch the sunrise" over a hill outside Pune, but what we actually saw when we got there was a dark blue get absorbed by a light gray-blue. The sun had "risen" without anyone realizing it happened. It just suddenly wasn't night anymore.

Given Chicago's attachment to gray skies, I feared that might happen, but instead it was a fiery show of purple-magenta, that, as I watched it, literally overtook everything. I sat right at the point of Promontory Point, and the sun was directly in my line, though I was freezing. I saw it along with a couple of joggers and someone walking a dog. I rejected popular wisdom and stared at the sun for a few minutes, and looking away left the slime-green image of a circle on everything for a while.

And then I left. That was it. I tried to drink water but all the fountains at the Point were shut off for winter. My thighs and nose were pointedly freezing--bright red, I realized after getting home, and my shower stung. But when I was getting dressed my room seemed different subtly, in a way that was satisfying. I was somewhere different and unusual and striking for the morning and then back in my room getting dressed, having spent the morning in some kind of ritual.

That was the most noticeable thing about it--it felt like a sort of spiritual ritual. For a million years people have gotten up with the fuzzy blue gradients and turned to pay the sun its due every morning before getting back to whatever they were doing. People don't often look at the sun anymore. But like I said... it feels like the oldest church ceremony in the world.

Pilot: The Inception

I created this blog around two weeks ago, but have been avoiding the first post, as the first post means the beginning of this Project and subsequent posts and the Work that it entails. Really, any project, no matter how enjoyable or recreational, is work, and when I should be working on something else (i.e. my BA, finding a job, other classes, etc.) but really I'm going out for long dinners with friends and looking up LOST theories, it's maybe a little dangerous to tack on recreational work that distracts me from my actual substantive work.

But if I play my cards right, it won't distract me from the good things, only the bad. Allow me to elaborate.

The project I have in mind is really a series of projects, all lasting three days total. There isn't really a theme to these projects, except to say that they're things I wouldn't normally do. I could limit myself to eating pears for three days. I could listen to Metallica every possible waking moment for three days. I could be superhumanly kind for three days. All of these are things I don't normally do. They could be personal or interactive in nature, dealing in the unusual or extremes. At the end of each day, I will write about the project's effects on that day, and what I've thought about.

The qualification that each miniproject must be three days is, to me, an important one. It is the perfect length of time to dip into an experience, experience it, and phase back out. It is a beginning-middle-end. A day is too short to meaningfully think about whatever I'm doing; a week is too long for the kind of pseudo-arbitrary things I want to do, and also might not be possible for some of the more extreme things. Three days is a substantial bite, not a crumb or a meal.

The point is that I want to push myself to think and feel a little differently. If I did eat only pears for three days, what effect would that have on my life? What would I be thinking about? Maybe I really like Metallica, or maybe their music makes me really angry and listening to it ruins my day. Or maybe in the morning I can't stand it but by the evening I have found an unparalleled love for the group. I won't know until I try. But I can be sure it will have some impact and provoke at least a few new thoughts.

Here are some of my limitations:

• Money. Unfortunately, one of my projects cannot be centered on shopping sprees, as my major investments at this point in time are monthly bills and food. I have a list of things I want to buy when I do have money (some necessary, some for joy) but as it stands I don't have the corporate status to shell out for three days of buying collector's art, say, or three days of exploration on a new continent.
• Health. If I get mono again, or (the better alternative) swine flu, consider the projects on hiatus, unless you want to read about three days of walking like I'm ninety years old.
• Ethics. Penultimate example: I am a vegetarian for a whole slew of ethical reasons. So three days of the Atkins Diet ain't happening. Same with kicking kittens and homeless people. I may experiment with things that could be considered annoying or mean, but I'm not about to seriously violate my moral code. The point is to refresh things a bit, not cause undue suffering in the name of experimentation.

I can't guarantee that this will be exciting. In fact, I can more accurately guarantee that it will be decidedly unexciting, and rather reflective (possibly even meditative). I want to think about things, not collect stories that demonstrate my quirkiness.

Some of my interests include self-improvement, food and body, physical environment, disabilities, extremes, social norms, self-discipline, creativity, religion and spirituality, philosophy, beauty and ugliness, comfort and discomfort, mystery and whimsy, adventure, truth and change.

I reserve the right to use this project for the benefit of my Real Life (i.e. look for three days of non-stop applying for jobs in the near-future).

I invite you to read about and comment on my experiments, which should help me to keep going on them. If you have ideas, let me know. If you want to participate in anything, let me know that too (and then comment or talk to me about how they go).

I start tomorrow.