\ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
I settled on a furniture layout for my apartment. It’s based on a set of furniture that includes pieces I don’t have yet. My thought is I can place the ones I already have and then add the others later without moving everything around again. I have the bedroom set up and a bit of the living room. I’ll need to move a bunch of boxes to finish that room.<\/p>\n
After I finish setting up the furniture, I’ll unpack, declutter, and organize at the same time.<\/p>\n
\ud83e\udd14<\/p>\n
Last week was a week for rethinking my life. You need those now and then. Part one of the rethinking made me wonder if grad school should be a last resort for me instead of the default course.<\/p>\n
One evening when I got home too late to move furniture, I decided to do some more research on grad school instead. I’d been realizing I didn’t really have a handle on what I’d need to do to apply, so I Googled “how to go to grad school,” and what I found was a lot of articles on deciding whether to go at all.<\/p>\n
Several years ago, articles like these<\/a> had convinced me not to go into philosophy, because there are no academic jobs in the humanities. But this time I ended up questioning the idea of grad school in general. My main inspiration was the blog 100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School<\/a><\/em>. It helped that I’d been thinking a little along these lines anyway, idly wondering if I should plan my next steps around the idea of an AI job rather than a cognitive science degree. But now thanks to these articles, I’m asking a new set of questions:<\/p>\n So my new plan is to research these and any related questions, especially the last one. The public has a lot of resources these days. I’m curious to see how far I can get on my own and through an industry job (as opposed to an academic one) that’s close to the kind of work that interests me. Eliezer Yudkowsky<\/a> did it–why not others? And for various reasons the idea of skipping grad school actually feels like a relief to me.<\/p>\n \ud83e\udd14<\/p>\n Part two of my life rethinking was more constructive. I want to take another stab at mapping out my goals and projects. Maybe this time I can arrive at something I can post on the site, maybe a diagram, and then some of my readers will feel less lost when they watch my shifting priorities. (Yes, a debate on that issue is what prompted this little project.) It’ll also help my weekly blog updates fulfill their original purpose, to help me align my active projects with my horizons of focus<\/a> as part of the GTD weekly review<\/a>\u00a0I haven’t been doing.<\/p>\n \ud83d\ude0d<\/p>\n I finished Middlemarch<\/em>. 5\/5. I never thought I’d actually love a classic. I always assumed they were written only to be tolerated, like eating unpleasant vegetables. But Middlemarch<\/em> kept my interest and sometimes amazed me. The whole way through I felt like George Eliot had dug into the depths of my mind and fanned out my personality in the form of several characters. I got to watch myself deal with major life events as they would’ve taken place in an English provincial town of the late 1820s. If I had to pick a favorite character, I’d say Dorothea, despite some obnoxiousness at the beginning.<\/p>\n \ud83e\udd14<\/p>\n The next book I’ll listen to is Spiritual Disciplines Handbook<\/em> by Adele Calhoun. Especially after enduring a whole July of stress from moving, I’ve been feeling the need to put some spiritual practices in place. Consuming books about spiritual formation is great, but to actually ground and strengthen and orient yourself, you have to do things. So I’ll use this book to organize my thoughts and get me started.<\/p>\n \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n I’ve reworked my audiobook categories a little. I’ve been using three subject categories to schedule my audiobook listening: professional development, personal development, and leisure. I rotate through them, usually in that order, listening to usually one book per category. But sometimes topics come up that don’t fit neatly into my three categories, such as politics.<\/p>\n Now, I could just pick a category for these extra topics. But that would dilute the categories. The purpose of the categories is to feed myself information on these topics on a regular basis so I don’t neglect and lose touch with them and delay the goals I have in those areas. If I make the categories too broad by cramming more distantly related topics into them, the more important topics could easily get pushed aside.<\/p>\n So I’ve added a category for miscellaneous nonfiction and made some others more specific. My new rotation is professional development, spirituality, other nonfiction, and fiction. These categories will probably acquire sub-rotations, such as for the various fiction series I’m working through.<\/p>\n \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n The Minecraft<\/em> server I’m on was being reset and updated to the latest game version, and I hadn’t played there for many months, so my friend Sumurai8 made me join him on Saturday. We had a nice time caving. This is how you get me to play multiplayer games, by the way. We have to schedule it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Life maintenance Apartment \ud83d\ude42 I settled on a furniture layout for my apartment. It’s based on a set of furniture that includes pieces I don’t have yet. My thought is I can place the ones I already have and then … Continue reading \n
Life agenda<\/h3>\n
Fiction<\/h2>\n
Spirituality<\/h2>\n
Audiobooks<\/h2>\n
Video games<\/h2>\n