A few self-improvement things I'm trying right now:
- Exercise every morning, no matter how little (doing 50 weird version of situps two days ago has my core aching every time I cough or laugh, still... also getting back into pushups again). At the very least, tai chi. I actually have pretty good ideas about work when I'm doing tai chi - something about clearing the cobwebs out of my head, I guess. I haven't got any cardio going on, so I should get into that again at some point. Perhaps. I don't know if I can entirely give up my lazy ass trophy.
- Eating non-junk food at proper times every day. Including breakfast which I was skipping for the last few months. It keeps my mornings so much more productive than staring at the clock waiting for lunchtime. Who would have guessed -.-
- Sleeping at proper times every day. Or at the very least sleeping a decent amount of consecutive hours. Last night I got drowsy rather early so I went to bed before 10pm, but woke up at 4:45 to do some more work. It was really productive, plus I feel a lot more clear-headed and energetic. And I still managed to eat breakfast (at 5am, but still)!
- Voice recorded journal entries. This one is for my own curiosity, because I'd noticed some weird speech patterns when I was recording mail for F. I haven't gone back to listen through any of them yet but I'm hypothesizing that I will be better at speaking fluently without so many intermittent pauses by the end of the month, as my thinking-to-speaking conversion may speed up with practice. It would be interesting to do this for a month or two and then to count my gaps in Audacity and make some graphs. OKAY. I'm a nerd. I admit it.
- Learning Chinese characters using Pleco, a Chinese-English dictionary app. It's slow going since I only do this on the commute to/from work but I really enjoy being able to look up components of various characters and using that as a mnemonic for the character's meaning. My favorite so far is the word 想 which means "think" - composed of 木 "tree", 目 "eye", and 心 "heart". Pretty perfect (especially for a plant physiologist-in-training)!
- Banning the laptop from my bedroom and cutting out TV from my day. This is actually a big one because all of a sudden I am left with more time on my hands than I know what to do with, which has led to some random creative bursts - I did some oil painting, writing, started that voice journal thing, and am also starting to read poetry aloud, something I enjoyed doing in high school. Right now I'm about 2/3 through a book of Russian poems translated to English by Nabokov. It's pretty great stuff. Although my favorite poem so far* isn't Russian at all but is by Scottish poet Thomas Campbell. "Lord Ullin's Daughter" is an extremely vivid, lilting poem with a lot of Gothic undertones (dark stormy weather, eloping, people dying for love, etc., etc.). It's really lovely to read aloud (and I presume even better if you have the right accent, har har). The original was translated to Russian by Vasilij Andreevic Zukovskij, which was then translated back to English by Nabokov. Somewhere in the translation it lost a lot of the power, lyricism and imagery that was in the original, but it is still very interesting to read the different versions side by side.
- Thinking positive. Not allowing negative thoughts to take root, at least not longer than ten minutes (e.g. yesterday). And being forgiving to myself and other people about less than stellar situations. Shit always happens, but it doesn't always need to be owned by anyone.
* just read that link and found that lines 25-32 (along with lots of quotation marks) are missing from my version. Not sure if that's from Nabokov's editing or not. Also, surprise: rhyming poems are so much better when you read them aloud. I used to hate rhyming poems because I thought they were tacky.
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