Update for 9/25/2016

It’s even later this week, but it’s a good one.

Project updates

• Math relearning – My unnamed critic is having a very bad day because I have posted my devastating rebuttal! An overly long discussion of how programming can work as an approach to learning, though you could get the general idea by reading the Description and Reservations sections. Now at last I can get back to the actual programming, and my next step is to write some more of the supporting code, though I’ll be focusing on other projects this week.
• Life maintenance
  • Health – I still have a little congestion, but otherwise I’m back to normal.
  • Diet – My TLC diet experiment ended this week, so yesterday morning (Tuesday) I did my home cholesterol test to see if the diet managed to budge my lipids at all in the face of Humira’s side effects, and I was astonished to find that the results were not only vastly improved from two months ago but, for the first time in at least nine years, were all in normal ranges! I’m going to get a lipid panel at my doctor’s office to double check, but in any case I’ll probably just continue with this diet, though I won’t track it as much because by now I have the gist of how much of what I can eat, and recording every meal and snack gets to be a pain.
  • Exercise – I think exercise must’ve been the main reason my triglycerides lowered, since low carbs were supposed to help but didn’t, maybe because of the Humira, so that motivates me to get back into walking, which still didn’t happen last week. I’m also feeling a little more motivated to settle on a workout log app and start the weight lifting part of my exercise plan, if I can fit it into my schedule.
  • Daily routine – Recording every activity is also a pain, and I haven’t done much with the information, so I’m ending that too for now. In any case, at the moment I’m more concerned with getting things done than keeping a regular sleep schedule, and I’m starting to seriously wonder whether I should care about that at all or just accept it as one of my quirks that I’ll always have this conflict between activity and sleep and that sleep will often lose.
  • Housekeeping – An organized living space frees my mind, so cleaning up my apartment will be one of my projects for this week so I can be more mentally prepared for my upcoming projects.
• Existential crisis – The issues are still there, but they’ve receded into the background, and I feel better about them, though they’re still influencing my priorities, but in a good way. Whenever I’m troubled, life’s less gloomy parts tend to trickle in, expand my perspective, and improve my mood, and that’s what happened this time again, plus a good conversation with my boss, because we have that kind of relationship.
• Media
  • Books – I finished The Magician’s Land, which was excellent and satisfying and thought provoking, and it somehow put me in the mood for the Magic Thief series, which I’ve started over because I couldn’t remember the plot of the first book. Maybe I thought of it because there was a certain bleakness to the Grossman book, my illness was putting me in a similar mood, and I remembered feeling the same way about the Prineas book (though it feels less so this time around), and I know I also wanted a story that took place all in one, urban location. Anyway, one effect of my existential crisis has been a desire to prioritize and manage my entertainment more carefully, since life is short and I don’t want to be mindless about it, but I also don’t want to cut it out of my life, because lately I’ve been reminded that stories and music are some of the things that expand and enrich my perspective and bring me out of dark places.
  • Movies – We had our final Star Wars marathon on Sunday with episodes 3 and 7, the latter of which Jeremy’s family hadn’t seen, and I might as well have not seen 3 because I barely remembered any of it, though that’s probably because I’d only seen it once. Jeremy loved the look of 7 because it reminded him of the original trilogy, and my curiosity about the connection led me to the term production design and the fact that looking like the old movies was totally on purpose.
  • Music – I’m collecting piano rock (Pandora station, Spotify playlist) to give me ideas for my improvisation at church, since I always feel in danger of becoming stale. I’ll probably try to get around to learning to play some of those songs.
• Wishlist – My other project for this week is to update my Amazon wishlist, because this is about the time certain people in my life start to pester me because they like to do their Christmas shopping half a year early. Christmas lists are tricky because I have to think of things that would be fun to get at Christmas that I’m not going to want to buy before then myself, which I know is an extremely first world problem and also feels very self-centered, but I also know it’s annoying to shop for someone when you don’t really know what they’d like, so it’s only right for the recipient to take a thoughtful moment to be selfish.