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Project #2
Challenged
Day 1 - wear glasses with wax paper taped over the lenses for one hour
Day 2 - wear earplugs for one hour
Day 3 - strap a block on the bottom of your right or left shote and walk that way for one hour
Day 4 - tape your right thumb to your right hand for one hour
Day 5 - tape your left thumb to your left hand for one hour
Day 6 - say everything backward for one hour
Day 7 - write about your experiences for one hour
These can actually be done in any order, but do all of them over the course of seven days.
What I wrote on day 7:
Being relatively new to the overall challenge of the "number of projects at number of years old" project, I found that Challenged, challenged me in more ways than it was probably designed to. More than anything, it was challenging to fit anything into a solid hour a day. I found myself remembering Scott's remarks not quite a year ago, as the 52at40 project was picking up speed. He was writing about how much of the project data was building up and how difficult it was to get it posted, which he seems to have mostly mastered. Now, here's what's considered to be a pretty easy week's project and I can barely find the time to try and meet the relatively minor 'challenges' of the assignment. After some minor frustration finding some good quality time to be challenged, I found myself wondering just why the heck I had decided to risk legal action and do this for a few weeks. I also found myself appreciating the project more, which is, I guess why I thought it would be interesting to play copycat for a few weeks.
As I was contemplating all of this, I began to digress and found myself thinking about Michael Jordan's return to professional basketball. I remembered being befuddled by Superstar Jordan's first exit from basketball to seek a career as a professional baseball player. He had said, at the time, that he had been looking for a challenge and I remember at the time thinking that if he really wanted to be challenged, he would give all of his money away, move his family to rural Kentucky, and take a job at a Kentucky Fried Chicken fast food restaurant. That would be a challenge, maybe he could become a manager in training, but alas, Michael was looking for a different kind of challenge, which is, I guess, more like the challenge(s) that I've been trying to find time to face this past week.
Having gotten off, slightly on the wrong foot, by getting a day behind to start with, I made liberal use of the instruction, "These can actually be done in any order".
Wear glasses with wax paper taped over the lenses for one hour
This was pretty difficult. I don't have any waxed paper, so I used some dark sunglasses that had been accidentally coated in epoxy long ago. The epoxy had dried, but it was still tacky on the lens', so it was easy to affix some paper to the front of the glasses. I'm not sure even what to say about this challenge. It was basically like being blind. There was a little light coming in, but we rely an amazing amount on our sight and it made it really hard to do anything very effectively. I moved around my home some, but chose to just sit and listen to some music. This wasn't too challenging, but it was the only way to make the experience less excruciating.
Wear earplugs for one hour
I found this to be the most pleasant of all of the challenges. I don't own any earplugs, nor have I ever used them, and rather than actually purchase any, I just made some out of some tissues. I think they worked, basically the same way as 'real' earplugs. When I had them in, I couldn't hear very well. I chose an hour to wear them when I was making some adjustments to a marketing web project for an online public radio consortium. I did this late at night, in my house, devoid of almost any sound. Why I'm doing marketing web projects late at night is an entirely other question? I found that after the initial feeling of having tissue in my ear, it really made almost no difference. Often, if I don't remember to, or unless I'm wearing glasses with paper attached to the lens', I forget to listen to music. I like music and I like to listen to the news on the radio sometimes, but unless I make a point of it, I often work in complete silence, minus the rat-a-tat-tat of the keyboard on my fingertips. This project was the only one that wasn't much of a challenge, though it did make me contemplate why I like the sounds of silence?
Strap a block on the bottom of your right or left shoe and walk that way for one hour
As a challenge, I found this to be one of the most dangerous. I've been moving from a studio that has been occupied for the last six years or so and am in the process of packing, weeding, and throwing away the gems and the garbage that has accumulated in the space. There's all kinds of scrap wood around, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to again, do some work and take care of my Challenged requirement for the day. Overall, it was a pretty safe environment to perform this challenge, however, the amount of shuffling around the studio I was doing made me feel like I was about to go down at any moment. I must admit I could not perform this challenge for the entire hour. I could of just sat down and read a book or leafed through some papers with the block on my foot, but that would have been cheating, so I hobbled around for a half an hour or so, and then had to remove the impediment. Even though, I had it attached to my shoe for such a short time, I still felt like I had just given up crutches, or was recovering from a broken leg. It's amazing the body's ability to adapt to odd circumstances and it's unwillingness to go back to thirty odd years of programming immediately.
Tape your right thumb to your right hand for one hour
Tape your left thumb to your left hand for one hour (performed together)
I tried to be creative in my attempts to catch up after falling behind from day one, so being doubly challenged one day, seemed appealing. After the initial difficulty of taping my left thumb to my left hand with my right thumb taped to my right hand (not an easy task), the challenge exercise went pretty well. It wasn't anything I hadn't experienced before through some traumatic injury to my hands, and there have been a few. My hands could have been broken, or had their tendons severed, but those injuries take months to heal, and this was only an hour. I chose to clean my home with my thumbs taped to my fingers (That's not a sentence on gets to write every day.). It went pretty well, except that I was pretty clumsy and it was really hard to hold the mop. I admit that I was glad when my challenge was over.
Say everything backward for one hour
I'm not so sure that I understood this. I've sung songs, reciting every letter in each word, dee-oh why-oh-you kay-en-oh-double-u tee-ehch-eee double-u-aye-why tee-oh ess-aye-en jay-oh-ess-ee?; and placed an ob before each vowel sound, dobo yobou lobike obice crobeam?, but saying everything backward begs a demonstration. One must think through entirely what one wants to say before saying it and then translate it to make it backwards. This was a baffling concept and incredibly challenging.
Write about your experiences for one hour
This was oddly, the easiest part. I don't write enough and it was fun to blab on paper about these silly and interesting challenges.