Spring Self-Improvement.

This is not me, but I would like to hoist rope while flying.

You can’t change your life all at once, but you can improve some things, and I suppose spring is as good a time as any because you’re in dust bunny-slaying mode anyway.

So here are a few nice changes I have made and quite like:

1. Regular cooking. It helps to have a partner in this programme, which I’m lucky enough to have. With time my eating experiments have become less hazardous, and hey, who would have guessed that zucchini had so many facets? A few months ago, who would have cared? (Short answer: not me.)
2. More physical activity. One thing I discovered about myself is that I get bored with over obvious rituals, so I’ve managed to keep this up by registering for a variety of things: the tango, swimming, yoga. It is okay if I only do one of these things a week, but on a great week I do all three. And sometimes I reward myself with hammam, which in my mind also counts as physical activity because wow, sweating is tiring.
3. Taking an online class on model thinking. This is actually pretty rigorous, but now I know how to calculate standard deviation and build decision trees. Think of all the applications!
4. Joining a writing workshop. It happens in April but the teacher has already given me homework: five minutes of daily freewriting on a random theme, which will apparently teach me how to divide my writing capabilities between the daily-grind mercenary stuff and creative pursuits. Today I wrote about mice, and curiously, five minutes is not nearly enough time to say everything I want to say about them.

Maybe in a year I will be significantly different as the direct result of one or all of these changes. But even if not, hopefully I’ll still know how to calculate standard deviation.