Life maintenance
The move is done. Even with help from friends, it was an awful enough experience that next time I won’t mind paying movers to do it for me.
Now is the unpacking, which also felt like it’d be awful, but Saturday I got myself to sort my boxes into types of items, and now I feel a bit better about it.
While I was sorting my boxes, I listened to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up on my boss’s recommendation, and that also helped me feel more up to unpacking. I’m going to try her system. It’s the perfect time for it, since all my stuff is gathered together, ready to be purged and organized. But it won’t be quick. Honestly I’m expecting unpacking to take at least a month.
I’ve also started laying out the apartment in some free home design software. I already have a brilliant idea of what to do with my bedroom.
Last time I had a one-bedroom apartment, I spent most of my time in the bedroom, which felt like a waste. This time I want to make more use of the whole apartment. It has a balcony, so Saturday night I took my dinner out there. I could see myself eating outside regularly.
Spirituality
I finished listening to Eric Kyle’s Living Spiritual Praxis via my new Fire’s text-to-speech. Despite some copyediting issues, I gave it 5/5 on Goodreads. I’m thinking of using Kyle’s method to create a spiritual formation program for my own life. I’m also intrigued by his example of Tom’s contemplative spirituality course. He includes the syllabus in an appendix, and it includes several techniques and many sources I want to look into, such as Tom Holmes’ Parts Work.
Conceptual modeling
Living Spiritual Praxis doubles as an introduction to conceptual modeling, so it belongs among my sources for this project. So far its contribution has been to raise the questions of what level of abstraction I want my method to address and how opinionated I want it to be regarding types of sources and warrants. He also brings up several synonyms for “model” that could expand my source list.
Cognitive science
A while back this Twitter exchange with my friend Adam prompted me to get a better handle on the computational theory of mind. So while I was supposed to be listening to Living Spiritual Praxis, I cheated a little and started listening to a set of articles from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on various cognitive science topics related to that model. They’re giving me a better picture of the various viewpoints I’ll need to deal with and locate myself within.
Fiction
My online friend Ryan recommended Blindsight by Peter Watts as a look at alien minds, which is relevant to my interests in cognitive science. So that’s what I’m listening to currently.
Congrats on getting that move done. So many people I know are moving these days!
Yeah, it seriously seems like half the population around here is moving.