My Experiday

In her post, Elizabeth wrote about her experiday and I’m here to tell you about mine.

• I woke up at 5am sharp and haiku’d about it. (Check check for June and September)
• I wrote in my journal and read in silence from 5am-6am (check for November)
• I ate an apple and went for a swim. After my swim I was suuuuuuper hungry and wanted eggs, but instead I had another apple and a Lara bar, and continued to eat raw until dinner (check for January)
• My little brother and sister had the day off, so they watched a good bit of TV, while I stayed in the other room reading and working on my computer and not watching TV (check for August)
• I interviewed my dad–I asked him his favorite moments of this year and where he wants to be by the end of next. (check for July)
• I took my dog and little brother on a mile walk, and came home and did a few push ups (check check for May and October)
• After much deliberation, I decided to write my future self a letter. I’ll put it in a time capsule and hopefully read it next year (check for April)
• I bought no coffee even though I wanted to go to a coffee house and work (check for December)
• I went out to a fancy cooked dinner with my whole family (which is usually hard to do since I’m often out and about, and my older brother has a girlfriend and doesn’t live with us) and took a picture of it. (check for February and March)

All in all it was a really good day. I liked everything about waking up at 5am (except the actual waking up at 5am part), as I felt really productive all day. And dinner with my family last night was super enjoyable, although it wasn’t actually planned.

Experiday Recap

Erin proposed that it would be interesting to try to do all of the Experimonth experiments together in a single day. I agreed it would be pretty doable to fit them all into one day, but probably too hard to keep up for a week or a month. So that’s how it started. And we set the day of December 28, 2009 to be our Experiday. Here’s a recap of how my day went yesterday:

• Woke up at 5am (June, check). Immediately went out for a mile walk (May, check), then came back in and did 10 pushups (October, check). And for the first hour of my day, while walking and doing pushups, I didn’t talk to anyone or consume any information either (November, check).
• I tweeted a haiku first thing in the morning (September, check), during my raw breakfast of clementines and a banana.
• I continued to eat only raw food and watch no television throughout the day.
• I went out to dinner with my sister (February, check). We went to a sushi restaurant, but I ended up having sushi rolls instead of all-raw nigiri, and a glass of wine (wine is raw, but it goes against by December experimonth). I decided I needed a real meal because I was feeling pretty lousy by this point in the day. I had a bad headache all day and was feeling really weak. I’m not sure how I got through all of January eating only raw! Yesterday was hard for me and about halfway through the day I figured out that I must not have had enough a) sleep, b) caffeine, or c) protein. So I will give myself 75% credit for January and 75% for December (because I’m still planning on donating the $7 I spent on the glass of wine).
• During dinner I took a picture of my sushi meal (March, check) and interviewed my sister (July, check). Interview: “What would you like to have happen by the end of the day?” “Eat sushi and watch the basketball game.”
• After dinner we went home and watched the UNC basketball game on TV. That was my only TV of the day. If the no-TV experimonth had been during basketball season, I wouldn’t have done it, so I allowed myself this exception (August, check).
• Before going to bed I wrote a letter to a friend. The letter is in the mail as of this morning (April, check).

Focusing on the Give…

…more so than the Give Up.

To me, the point of an experimonth is to learn more about yourself and your habits, not necessarily to deprive yourself. My favorite experimonths have been the ones where we’ve tried to add something to our daily routines to see if we could make it into a habit. Taking a picture a day, writing a haiku every day, walk a mile a day — I think most of us did well at and enjoyed those months. Giving up something (cooked food, television, alcohol) is a lot harder in my opinion.

I’ve ended up having drinks each of the past 7 days — with dinner with friends and with my siblings while we were decorating the xmas tree and hanging out while we were all home for the holidays. So everyone who told me it was crazy to try to give up alcohol over the holidays, you were right. There was just too much eggnog around and it felt too abnormal to not have a glass of wine at dinners with my family this week.

Even though I’ve fallen off the wagon, I am still tallying up how many drinks I’m drinking and am still planning on donating the grand total to my chosen charity or cause (yet to be determined). Once I realized I was basically giving up on my goal of giving up alcohol, I decided that I would still donate money for each drink I had as well (essentially paying twice for each drink — when I drink it in the first place, and then as part of my donation total at the end of the month).

mid-month update

Overall I think I’ve done pretty well avoiding alcohol so far this month. One of the reasons I’ve been successful is that I’ve been really busy at work, and so working late a lot of nights instead of socializing. My busy and stressful work week last week was also one of the reasons I broke down and had drinks out at Pinhook happy hour last week. Although I had some drinks last Friday, the plan was and is to still donate the amount I spent on drinks even though I already spent it instead of saving it.

Last night I had a vodka tonic and a beer at Bull McCabe’s for Trivia Night. The vodka tonic was given free by our server — he had accidentally made the wrong drink and needed to get rid of it, and perhaps he decided to give it to me because I’m the Mayor there.   A friend bought me a beer later, under the agreement that I would still donate that amount.

Tomorrow is Eggnog Night, one of my planned exceptions for the month, and after that I think I should be able to finish out the month strong. Looking forward to New Year’s Eve though!

PS – Any suggestions for charities I should give to at the end of the month?

I certainly didn’t give up procrastination

I’m already vegan and working on going gluten-free, so there isn’t much left to give up in the way of food.  And up until three days ago I thought I was pregnant, which would have meant giving up my two favorite things to drink, caffeine and alcohol.  But as soon as I found out I wasn’t having another kid, I poured a nice, big glass of wine  – so I’m not giving up my drink, either.  Then I considered giving up procrastination, but considering it’s taken me until the 4th of the month to make up my mind, it’s a pretty sure bet that that isn’t going to happen.

What I’ve finally decided to give up this month is cynicism, in particular any cynicism that’s directed towards my mother.  I have a pretty dry sense of humor and tend towards cynicism in general, so it’s not like she’s the only target.  But, we don’t have one of those Mother-Daughter-Best-Friends! relationships, in fact we have a LOT of differences, so Mum’s always been an easy (and I’ll admit, satisfying) outlet.  A couple of weeks ago we had probably the best Thanksgiving ever, I mean Of All Time, in the short history of my immediate family.  So.  For this month, at least, I will make a conscious effort to not roll my eyes every time she expresses an opinion I don’t agree with, to be informative rather than condescending whenever we discuss food or lifestyle, and to accept any motherly criticism with grace.

And when I’m really tempted, I’ll just pick up my favorite novel, The Corrections, and lose myself in one of the greatest dysfunctional Mother-Daughter relationships of all time, experiencing all of the angst and bitterness vicariously through Enid and Denise.

As for giving back, I hope that being proactive in mending things with Mum will have long-lasting effects on both our relationship and the dynamic of our immediate family.  I’m also making a concerted effort to tell her about all of the positive things she’s done as a mother and how those things have and continue to inform the way I’m raising my own child.

An amendment to my exceptions

When I declared my alcohol-allowable occasions in my introduction post the other day, I left one out. I forgot I had already made plans with some co-workers to have an after-hours meeting in order to finish off some beer we had purchased for a previous event.

So I did have one beer this evening (a bottle of Magic Hat #9). It was already paid for and planned for.

I take my temptation black

There’s nothing I like more first thing in the cold morning than a steaming cup of temptation. My co-worker was headed out to a 9am meeting at a coffee shop and asked if I wanted him to bring me back a coffee. Heck yeah I would’ve. Instead, I got a tally in my coffee savings log. Yum.

When Given The Opportunity, Do the More Generous Thing

Thus, my philosophy for Give Up and Give.

I plan to spend every day of December doing “the more generous thing.”  It’s impossible to receive when our hands are clinched tightly holding on to what we have.  This month, I allow and encourage myself to be exceptionally giving with my time, ears, heart and wallet.  I look forward to seeing (and blogging about) how that effects my understanding my own generosity and others’.

No Alcohol

We went into the 2009 year of Experimonths with an extremely challenging experiment (only eating raw food for the month of January), so I figured I’d go out with a bang too. I am giving up drinking alcohol this month.

Alcohol is something I partake of consistently and spend a fair amount of money on, so I thought it would be a challenging yet beneficial thing to give up this month. (A few $4 pints of beer a few nights a week adds up!) I don’t yet know what I’m going to donate my alcohol savings to — honestly, I think that will depend on how much money I end up saving by the end of the month. My plan is to tally up how many drinks I think I would have consumed each day, and I will report the grand total monetary savings at the end of the month. I think this should be a pretty easy thing for me to estimate, because I know my average number and cost of drinks when I go out to dinner with friends, Pinhook for Friday happy hours, Bull McCabe’s trivia on Wednesday nights, etc.

I have two planned exceptions for my No-Alcohol December: 1) one night to have friends over and make eggnog, and 2) New Year’s Eve.

Cheers!

December Decaffinated (but not really)

Hello. My name is Erin, and I’m amazed that it’s Decembermonth. I can’t believe that it was a mere 334 days ago that co-experimenter Beck and I were staring in the face of lemon bar o’clock, on the eve of the year of Experimonth. Well, goodness. How time passes so quickly. And so very slowly (the raw month passed veeeeeerrrrrrryyyyyy slowly).

For this month, I’ve finally settled on what I’m going to give up, but not what I’m going to give away. There was an internal debate involved. I thought about going vegan for the month, because that would be a challenge, but then realized that it wouldn’t leave me anything to give away. If anything, going vegan costs more. I thought about giving up soda, but of late I really haven’t been drinking soda all that much. Co-experimenter Elizabeth had a great idea when she suggested I give up buying coffee in restaurants and coffee shops. That’s something I’ve been doing a lot lately, definitely several times a week. It will be challenging, save me money, and that saved money will be easy to track.

My rules: I will not buy coffee in a restaurant or coffee shop for the month of December. Coffee brewed at home, at work, or at friend’s house is allowed. Coffee included in the price of admission that cannot be subtracted from admission if you don’t partake is allowed (I’m going to a vegan brunch at the beginning of the month, and coffee is included in the cover price, so I can drink it since it wouldn’t save me any money not to). I’ll track all the times I would have a coffee when I’m out and don’t, and then give that money away to something. I’ll be thinking about and researching what during this month. Maybe something coffee themed, but I don’t know. Suggestions welcomed.