It's What You Know That Aint So

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."
Mark Twain.

This sums up my problems in Dvorak.  I have noticed some mistakes that I am making almost systematically

I hit "e" instead of "o" (actually, I make a bizarre "n," then "e," then "o" sequence)
         "f" instead of "y" (this one is because of the location of the key in qwerty )
When going fast, I type "." instead of "e" -- also because of where it is in qwerty.

The key now is not learning, but unlearning.  Typing in exclusively in Dvorak gives me a purpose to learn -- each of these mistakes cost me time.  So often while typing I will repeat a mnemonic a few times after I make a mistake.  For example, my mnemonic for "o" is that it is a ring on my ring finger.  In this manner I hope to rewrite the habit more quickly than bumbling around.

Mental Gymnastics

My second post in Dvorick.

This one is a bit of a goofy journey.  It started with me watching a few basketball documentaries, you know, to celebrate the start of the summer.  One of them was about when the Knicks were actually good.  It focused briefly on Jerry Lucas, one of the great eccentrics to play the game.

He was odd because he played a lot of memory games, including memorization, counting, and rearranging words by alphabetic order of letters -- the example he gives is "cat" rearranges to "act."

This made me want to get back into memorizing.  I had learned the major memory system on memrise.com and used it to learn a large framework of historical dates.  So I went back to looking for dates to learn.  And as a by-product I started back with French, so that has been fun.

Anyway, I was at a social gathering today. and so I thought I would exercise some of this active mind stuff.  First I tried counting, but it was too dark and it was a bit boring.  I decided to rearrange  the letters in words, but I ran into the problem that I only know the alphabet through the "abc" song.  My solution was to go through the alphabet and use a peg list to associate a number to each letter.  The first five I knew, and of course "z" is 26.  I set out to learn the number for the other 20 letters.

Big progress was made today.  I should more or less have it down with review tomorrow.

My First Post Written In Dvorick

I'm now going cold-turkey.  I'm doing everything in Dvorick.

Slow-going, but it gives me more motivation to learn.

So It's Summer

On the bucket-list, I will be moving toward lower body-fat, being able to read Spanish fluently (after finishing my million word challenge) make progress on 100 push ups, and turning my Roth IRA into equity in my home (getting us close to having the whole thing paid off).

Also, on Monday, I plan on making the cold-turkey switch-over to Dvorak typing.

Other than that, and working on cooking (especially after I build a rocket stove), my over-arching project will be working on meditation.  I need to elaborate on it more in the future, but to give a sketch here, I have 3 meditation projects: 1.) be able to mediate for a long time, as part of the goal of decreasing wants 2.) go through a protocol to be able to get "in the zone" instantly 3.) be able to mediate through noise.  All three are about taking where I am and gradually building up, or the in the case of the "zone protocol" working down the time it takes.

Another way of saying it is that I'm working on self mind-control.  And while that's the ultimate free hobby, I am really doing it to make the best life possible.

Walk to Work

It is well known that I love the site Early Retirement Extreme.

I wish I could do more of it.  For example, today I walked home from work.  It'd be nice to do that every day.  If it were feasible, I could get rid of a car (saving thousands of dollars in the process) and I'd be much more physically fit.  

Those thousands of dollars aren't exactly chicken feed.  Once my house is paid off, the biggest expense I will have will be transportation.  Or at least, this is true considering I do know how to cook and garden, and will continue to expand my skills over the summer.  In fact, I should get chickens and use those transportation costs as chicken feed.  

Anyway, I really could lower my yearly costs to something like $3,000-4,000.  Which I know sounds crazy, but I honestly believe holds up.  I'd be healthier, less cluttered, more spiritual, and possibly happier.  

And a cost basis like that makes it so much easier to find a way to achieve goals like active employment that pays my bills in 8 hours of work a week (because I am only half as smart as Tim Ferris, of course).  It also means I need a small fraction of the same reserves to have enough passive income to live off as well. 

That's enough talk about that.  For now, I'll just do what I can.

Dao Yourself a Favor

Read this translation of the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) of Laozi.

There are certain passages, including my core 5 favorite, that I like rendered better in other translations, but the scholarship of the one above is just fantastic.  Some of the passage that make no sense to me finally do through this translation.

A Week Now to a Mini-Retirement

As I set up for a bout of mini-retirement, an Onion article.

In an effort to help working individuals improve their fitness and well-being, experts at the Mayo Clinic issued a new set of health guidelines Thursday recommending that Americans stand up at their desk, leave their office, and never return

Progress in a Time of Decline

This is an idea I'll probably need to expand on some other time, but I wanted to get it down. I believe that civilization is on the decline. I believe we are in a time of pretense where that truth is going to be pushed more and more out of the collective conversation. Americans are going to have to give up their absurd waste habit -- and they will go down kicking and screaming the entire way.  So be it.

I want to point out that a person can make progress in their health, spirituality and social life even in a time of political and economic decline.  In fact, on all three it is almost certainly easier.  Happiness and virtue remain paths that can be walked even as the mass production of stuff weakens. 

Also, realizing the truth of this decline -- reminded forcefully by reading the article linked to above (please read the 2nd to last paragraph) -- makes me want to spend a lot less time playing Diplomacy and more time working on my garden, and learning to cook with a rocket stove.

Procrastination Chronicles # 11: A Paper (Zuuuummba!)

On the path to greatness, there will be 100 overcomings.

I will chronicle my attempts to overcome procrastination.  My technique is to start small, really small.

My favorite post in the series is #3 Dealing with a Bunch of Crap.

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To help my students have the motivation to write there final papers in English, I committed to writing one as well.  I had a reasonable plan of action: I would stay late on Friday and start the paper.  Or failing that, I would go eat an early dinner and start the paper.

So . . .  of course . . . there I was midnight on Sunday, feeling really pissed off and not at all wanting to start a paper. . . "What kind of madness is this", I thought, "I'm a grown up, I retired from being a student.  I wrote all the paper I need to write." It felt in that moment as though it were the most uninteresting task in the world. (All of this should help me feel sympathy for my students -- which was part of the point of the exercise).

So I busted out pretty much all of my techniques, including a new one.  I want to first explain that new technique.

I read about it in Poder Sin Limites por Tony Robbins (ie it was Tony Robbin's Unlimited Power, which I'm reading in Spanish (go million word challenge!)  Anyway, I'm hazy on it, because, you know, other language, but I reckon Robbins was pointing out that your imagination uses all of your senses, and that you have the power to do some really cool manipulation.  For example, you can take any image and just make it brighter in your mind's eye.  You can make it louder.  Try it.

So, when you feel that dread toward working you are seeing something.  Take that image, which is probably already a dull image, and dim the heck out of it, and in your imagination implode it, kind of like crumbling a piece of paper.  Shove that imagine off to the side.  Replace it with a bright, vivid image of you doing the first step of the task, or even better yet, of you being in a flow state doing the work. . .  Repeat this about 6 times in rapid succession.  Crush the old image, push it to the side, see the vibrant image that you know the work can be.   And for some reason, Tony Robbins wants to you say something dorky while you do this.  In the Spanish translation it's Zuuumbaaa!  (Yeah, I didn't really do that step; my wife was sleeping.)

Still, that was the initial push I needed, even though I was already tired and cranky.  I also pre-warded myself the way I do, playing some music, eating some ice cream while doing the first step (my weekend are my free days again -- and I did not live up to the no sugar challenge).

After that, predictably, the work got done, and it turned out to be really fun work.

Finally. . . Learning French

After I got done with my Dutch course on Memrise, I just felt  . . .  itchy to keep learning (the site's addictive, man).  So I started working on French courses.  And I can tell that it is going to be great.

I have a lot more resources for French than Dutch -- not only good, fun courses (ie ones with no typing), but I own more books in French and have a bunch of movies with French dubbing and/or French sub-titles.

I have held back from French for a long time because I didn't want it to interfere with Spanish, but that I've started, I just don't feel like I can, or even should, stop the rush.   I don't see too much interference so far, but the combination of being a native English speaker and knowing a goodly amount of Spanish makes it so I can already read parallel texts of French much, much more comfortably than I can in my current level of Dutch.

If do several thousand (or, I dunno 10-20,000 words) of French on Memrise and read my two parallel text books of French short stories two or three times, and watch some movies in French here and there, I can probably be at a pretty good level in French by the end of the summer.

That and my million word challenge in Spanish might make it two reading languages down and one to go when the school year starts back up.

The Diet . . . Working

175.9

That was certainly pleasant to see.  I'm 25 pounds less than my cringe-inducing high.  

It's nice to see results with this diet of 5 days of calorie restriction, followed by lifting and 2 days of eating a bunch to fuel muscle growth (and the psychological benefit of getting to eat a bunch of good tasting stuff).

Practice Silence . . . Or Stillness

Last week I wrote about changing the wording of something -- talking about self-employment instead of (extremely) early retirement --  to make it more palatable.

I think a similar change might be in order for "go into the silence."   I think I prefer "practice silence," or, even better, "practice stillness."  First of all I am often wary of "the" formulations.  They seem big and official.  Secondly, I like "practice" because it is expresses our capacity to improve -- most people aren't going to be very good at silence/stillness at first.  Thirdly, "silence" is simply not making noise yourself.  "Stillness" more readily has connotations of working both the inside and outside.

I believe that the good life requires the removal of unnecessarily movement, both physical and mental.  This is more fundamental than just a tool for more accomplishments.  This is the best way to live.

So my last problem with the phrase "go into the silence" is that in the formulation by Howard E. Hill treats silence only as a tool.  Silence leads to creativity, creativity leads to money.  That is a path.  But practicing silence stillness can mean much more than that.

177

177.7, to be exact.

Well, for the first time since I was 201 pounds, I am now down to the weight where I used to start diets in my 20s.

This gives me some confidence on the "just eat less (6 days a week) plan."

But the goal on the bucket list isn't really weight.  It's body fat percentage.  So, theoretically, if I could gain 10 pounds of muscle that would still shift the body fat percentage more in my favor.  So while hitting that 177 mark is a milestone, I should keep my focus on the right things.

Furthermore, if I gained muscle, it should move up my resting metabolism, thus helping me to speed up fat loss.

The problem is that building muscle is a lot of work, and that takes a lot of calories.  So my solution is to go back to something I was doing during the summer, when I had more time to tinker with this stuff: lift on a day, eat huge that day and the next, and then do 5 days of some kind of restricted diet.  In this case the restricted diet will be 1,300 calories a day or less.  Add in plenty of light exercise like walking and gardening on those other five days, and we'll see what happens to my body fat percentage.