Life management
😎
Monday the mail delivered a sunrise alarm clock I’d ordered. It has a lamp that’s supposed to help you wake up more naturally by gradually raising the light level starting half an hour before your alarm time. So far it’s working well!
If you want your own, I recommend the one I linked over the other low-end models because the others have very few or mediocre reviews after you filter out the apparent bots and reviews for incorrect products. I think some of these sellers are cheating.
Projects
🙂
After another productive debate with Jeremy about my way of life, I added a section to my Life Agenda essay about the goal of goal pursuit. Is it the destination or the journey?
I also made a list of all the things that were making this project difficult, gave myself advice on them, and added it to my task list. I’ve been working through the list, and hopefully I’ll have a more substantial update this week.
Music
😎
In my Composing Music pages I’ve refined the general rules a little and added the rules for the rest of chapter 1. Someday maybe I’ll do some more of the exercises! I’ll try to do that this week.
Tutoring
🙂
Every year our church volunteers for an after-school tutoring program at a local elementary. I’ve been curious about it for years, and this year I decided the time was right to look into it. The coordinator let me come observe before I made a commitment.
The tutoring was on Thursday. I sat at a table next to a first grader who had math homework, so I helped him with that a little while his real tutor helped her other child read a book.
Overall the observation was a good experience, but I decided that tutoring there wasn’t a high enough priority for me for the level of commitment it would take. I’d have to adjust my work schedule a bit throughout the week to accommodate it, and it’d be every week for most of the school year.
Fiction
🙂
While I work on projects related to books I’ve already listened to, I’m listening to fiction and other non-project books.
It’s October, so as a good citizen I’m obligated to listen to scary stuff. Dathan Auerbach’s Penpal is a novel-length creepypasta. Creepypasta is basically amateur horror written for the web. Some of grows to take on the status of Internet folklore. A lot of it is poorly written, but Penpal is one of the gems. I haven’t read a lot of horror in my life, but I find that creepypasta has its own distinctive tone that I sort of prefer, and I hope the publishing industry will pick up on it.
After that I decided to take up Jeremy’s recommendation of The Circle by Dave Eggers. It was like a long episode of Black Mirror. Maybe a tad unrealistic, but still a good examination of where big social media companies might take us if left unchecked.
That alarm clock looks nice. I usually use my phone as my alarm clock but the sunrise clock is worth checking out.
The Circle looks good!