Raising the Second Derivative

Insight for half an hour today. I raised my cushion slightly which helped my posture a bit. I noticed for the first time that part of what I thought was my breath was in fact a feeling distinct from breathing - I first noticed noting it after noting "holding" which didn't make sense, then looked more closely and discovered I could switch back and forth between it and my actual in-breath.

I spent a good bit of time procrastinating on working on social effectiveness by purchasing some more of my wardrobe kernel and then some groceries. Now I have some good t-shirts, enough black socks, boxer briefs, and Fabric. I did eventually go talk with some random people. One dude was coming back from a playtesting session at Microsoft, I didn't even know we had those! But it makes sense. http://www.microsoft.com/playtest/default.mspx if you're in the area.

I've now got enough of a handle on what to do for next Friday's meetup at my place that I feel confident it will go fine, though not much beyond that. My procedure was to think of things that people might be doing, write down what would help them, find the things I hadn't thought about and make a list of things to get/plan/etc during the week. This list was surprisingly small. Apparently meetups are easy, but I guess we'll see after Friday rolls around.

Best for last: my hour of metaness was fan-friggin'-tastic. Here's a summary: I knew I wanted to go back over my schedule, so I did, and rearranged it somewhat, and transferred some time from meetup-planning to finance, since that's what I wanted to work on last week. Then I asked myself why I found it so hard to actually work on social effectiveness. The answer was that I had no cached thoughts on how to work on it! Well, I had one, but my day wasn't set up right to go to a bar. So I took 3 minutes per category of thing I had scheduled for the next week to brainstorm concrete activities to do. I got a bunch of great stuff (and a lot of crap, 'cause it's brainstorming) and I feel like next week's improvements are going to be larger than this week's improvements. Raising the second derivative of my life felt really, really good.

Also it was very amusing to brainstorm ways to be meta during my session set aside for being meta. And since I had about 15 minutes left, I got to implement a couple of the things I had just brainstormed, and they worked well. Namely searching for large categories of things from the mini-camp that I didn't currently have scheduled to work on (I found one - developing the skill of self-modification), and brainstorming non-brainstorming-ways to generate new ideas about how/what to do.