Spicing Up My Life. Quick! Where's The Water Fountain?

Today is one of those scary on-the-cusp days, sweet-taste-of-lazy-freedom before the sweet-taste-of-blood days. Tomorrow I'm starting another two 30-day trials.

The ones I'm doing currently are of course staying; there is as of yet no cancelling feature in my brain. But being on track with those lends a kind of excitement to my life, and also, they're just too easy after a couple of days. Crunches? Psh. No cursing? I'm cleaner than Sunday morning cartoons. Water was the biggest obstacle, but my method of dealing with it is working beautifully. For the first four days (I kept it a secret in case it didn't work), I'd drink water and accompany the action with appreciative moans: "Mmmm...this water...mmm...it's so good...mmm...wish I had more...no...must ration it...mmm...mmm...mmm." And now I think I've managed to convince myself, because water is actually starting to taste better! At least it doesn't taste like plastic anymore. Maybe it's just my tongue slowly being weaned off everything having sugar in it.

But onto tomorrow. Tomorrow, two new trials start, and they are both time-related.

The first is meditation. I will meditate for a total of an hour and a half every day - one hour in the morning, and half an hour in the evening. These will be done sitting with back erect (no snickering, this has been an adult blog for two days now), so as to promote the wakeful state, and will be flexible in theme. However, they will be personal growth meditations, not rated R back-of-the-eyelid movies. I will recap my experiences here, daily.

The second is writing for an hour. This can be fiction, non-fiction, editing already written stuff, putting graffiti on police cars, whatever; no constraints as to the content or form. The point is to get me writing more since I claim to like it so much. The one exception is that writing blog entries will not count as part of that hour.

Ok, so now I've pretty much taken on a part-time job. It's still only two and a half hours a day, but if I continue in this vein, I'll soon have to give up sleep. And all for free! I feel like a volunteer for the first time in my selfish life. Still completely selfish, but volunteering nonetheless.

More excitement - I've roped another friend into the 30-day trial craze. Her first idea was ridiculous - to lose 2/3 of her body weight. Being of completely normal weight, I think the only way she could fulfill the requirement and survive would be to cut off her arms and legs. Make that into a 30-day trial and you'd have to use sandpaper instead of a saw. Bleh. Instead, we agreed that she would increase the content-level of eating time. Now, every time she eats anything at all, she must turn off all other input to her brain: people talking to her, TV's fighting for her attention, her mouth that wants to talk and eat at the same time, her eyes that try to seduce every passerby, and all thoughts that fight for control of her only-human brain. Sounds like fun, I might sign up in a few days.

Other good ideas for 30-day trials that I'm either not brave enough to attempt just yet, or are on the waiting list:

1. Communicating only in languages I'm learning - Chinese, French, Spanish (no Russian or English), except in emergencies - This one is extremely exciting, I think I will try it soon.
2. Give up sleep - This may never make it to 30 days. Maybe I'll do this one as the last 30-day trial of my life.
3. Recording dreams every morning - This is cake, I should really just tag it on right now, but I'll postpone it a bit.
4. Starting a new 30-day trial every day - Brilliant.