This Sunday will bring up the end of a week full of life experiments. Things just sort of happened to overlap, but it's making for an interesting and enjoyable week. What "experiments" am I talking about?
(1) No TV except for Jeopardy. I pushed for 30 days, but I'm not the only decision maker around here, so a week was a compromise. We don't really watch that much TV anyway, I've refused to get cable, but it's almost always on when we're home. The silence takes some getting used to, but after only three days I've already shed that feeling of being "lost" without background noise. Jeopardy was also a compromise. It happens to be on around when we get home and are eating dinner. Tonight we missed it anyway, so for once we sat at our dinner table and talked while eating (and fighting off our cats). It was actually a more pleasant experience than making fun of people on TV (or ourselves) for not knowing trivia. I've been falling asleep in bed reading instead of the usual falling asleep on the couch watching a movie. And as it's much easier to pass out without noises and flashing lights, I've been getting more sleep without sacrificing any meaningful part of the day. Take a minute to think about what you watch on TV. Does the majority of it really add anything to your life...?
(2) Running a half marathon this weekend. Never done that. Never done any sort of organized race before. Nor did I really train for this thing other than going out and running until I felt like stopping a few times. One of those was mapped out as 14 miles, so I should be able to wing the half marathon ok, but I decided I probably shouldn't push my luck on jumping into a full one so unprepared. I've never been a distance runner, so why get into this? Why not? To say that I did? Good enough for me. Maybe it's just to say that I've done something that was challenging and painful. Maybe I just fell like paying a hundred bucks for a cheap t-shirt, a medal, and two "free" beers at the end of the race.
(3) No alcohol week. I had already set goals to cut back on the boozing, both for health and finance reasons. It's way too easy to come home after work and go through a bottle of wine between two people. Both to avoid that cost and to make sure I don't feel awful while running this weekend, I figured I'd give it a break and give some time to get everything out of my system.
I'll probably be writing again on Sunday to talk about how sore I am and how slow I ran, and I might be doing so while enjoying a glass of cheap whiskey, but if things continue as they are, it will have been a very good week.
p.s. I'm trying to get others to do life experiments, too. My cat, however, has no willpower and only lasted about six seconds with his "no sleeping in cardboard boxes for a day" challenge.
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