For the last several months I’ve been using a neat app called Habitica to help me, well, develop good habits. You can use it as a personal checklist, but the real fun — and support — begins when you join up with a virtual party of other habit-forming adventurers and do D&D-type “quests” against foes like laziness and recidivism. You choose a class (I’m a healer) and earn various critter eggs that you hatch with various potions, and you feed the resulting critters with food drops that happen after you finish the tasks on your list.
There are three types of lists that you keep: Habits, which are actions you are trying to cultivate; Dailies, which are the things that you try to do every day; and Tasks, which are the other to-dos that pop up. Habits are color-coded as yellow, and they change toward blue and then green the more often you do them. Dailies are blue; you do them or you don’t, and a fresh blue list shows up every morning. Tasks are initially yellow, but turn orange, then red, then dark red the longer they are left undone (ask me how I know).
You could, of course, just delete the Tasks that you leave undone. But if your party is counting on you in the big Boss Battle against sloth, you want to finally finish off that old, dusty Task and give sloth a great big wallop. Then the whole party gets more experience points, potions, critter eggs, or what-have-you. Maybe it sounds silly, but it’s a lot more fun than just making lists on Post-Its every day, then beating yourself up for not getting everything done. I have actually developed some better habits after using the app for a while.
I’m giving you this background so that it will make sense when I tell you that, this week, I’ve started to look at the Tasks list and see if I can’t work from the bottom up and finally finish some of the oldest tasks. Do I get more hit points that way? Maybe. The one thing the game doesn’t do very well is explain how every little bit of it works. Some members of my party have been using the app for years and it feels like we’re all figuring it out together. But I hope that the coding underlying the app has factored in the deep satisfaction you get after you finally take care of the first task you set for yourself a long time ago.
I’ve been getting research done for Black Walnut, in the form of listening to more bluegrass music. But it’s for Marginal Mystery that I’ve really been working. I finished reading the book about deciphering pencil erasures, I re-checked all of the annotations that I noted in my local copy of Development of Mathematics, I am in the process of negotiating with two friends who can serve as field reviews for copies of the book held on other campuses, I updated my list of university-held copies of both editions of the book, and I finally broke down and ordered a copy of the science fiction novel that my math-historian author wrote under a pen name at the same time he was writing Development of Mathematics. As if revising a 550-page math history into a 595-page math history wasn’t enough, he was also composing a complex time-travel novel. And teaching university-level math classes. I cannot understand how he cranked out so much content in less time than it takes to read it. Usually these things seem to work out the other way around.
Last weekend I finally took one more step in a huge project that I originally thought I would be able to complete in mid-March. It started taking on so much more complexity that I needed to give myself a break, quit kicking myself for not getting it done, and be more realistic about the amount of time that it would require to do it well. Now I have worked out a process for getting each section done, and it will be done when I say it’s done. (I’ll be sure to let you know.) It involves watching a lot of movies, being thoughtful about the movies, drafting reviews, and collecting all of the screenshots and other images that I need in order to complete my review. I hope that it will be worth the wait. I’m able to enjoy the process — now that I’m not rushing at an impossible pace.
The Impossible Read is coming along well; most days I am able to sit down to read the next chapter in The Mists of Avalon. I’m currently on page 544 and looking forward to each twist and turn in the plot. I can sum it up at the moment by saying that things are soon going to get much worse for everybody. (Tl;dr: keep your vows, people.) And I have a courtside seat better than the one from which Jack Nicholson watches the Lakers.
Knitwise, I was so proud of myself for finally moving forward on my owl-themed wristwarmer. Recently I bought the needles that were necessary, and on Friday I knitted the next few rows before the cables.
Don’t do the cables yet, I told myself — do those at home, in good light.
I ignored myself and pushed forward, even though I had trouble looking up the acronyms for the different cabling instructions.
Stop now, I told myself before row 7.
I ignored myself and pushed forward.
This pattern has a mistake, I told myself when I finished row 7. It really ends with 4 knitted stitches instead of 6.
I ignored myself and stared at the project and at the pattern for a while.
Oh, wait, I started to tell myself. Perhaps I am wrong and the professional designer of this published pattern is correct. Maybe I looked at the wrong instructions or didn’t understand the instructions.
Then I tried to undo the row, which was a bit difficult considering (a) it was black yarn in a wool/alpaca blend, (b) I was undoing cabling sections, and (c) I had not done all of the cabling sections correctly. Which sections had I done correctly? Which sections had I done incorrectly? More precisely, what had I done wrong and how could I possibly undo it if I didn’t know what I did?
Now the knitting is in the project bag and I’m in time out until I understand what I did wrong and promise not to do it again. I may have to start over completely, from the cast-on. We’ll see if that is enough for me to learn my lesson.
Chocolate Sheep 