Productive despite distractions

Saturday I spent the majority of the day doing schoolwork. My effort paid off though, as I easily made perfect scores on both of the quizzes, which were on the longer side. In the afternoon I climbed, and did better than last week but still got tired around the hour mark, and just barely held out for another thirty minutes. In the evening, I was tired of working, so I played an idle game for three hours until I was too sleepy to stay awake. I woke up on Sunday and played a little more, but soon got bored of it.

I was resolved to go to church on Sunday, and was even ready to go except for changing my clothes, but as usual the idea of spending so long traveling and then meeting people and having to talk to them dissuaded me. I had watched a short video about how in Japanese it is rude to use the word for you, because it sounds like you can’t remember the other person’s name. At church, that is absolutely the case for me. I’ve been introduced to most of the people a couple of times and yet I only remember the names of the pastor, his children (not his wife) and a couple of other people. So not only is it uneasy because it’s in Japanese, and I don’t know the people well, but it’s difficult to talk to them because I can’t even remember their names. At my church in the US I also had this difficulty, but because the names are familiar and most of them were printed out sooner or later, I learned most of the people’s names eventually.

The time spent not going to church was only partially invested in school assignments. After that I wanted to get inspired, so I went to Youtube. Why do I think that Youtube is a good place for this? For a while I was inspired by tiny home videos, but I stopped watching those about a month ago because I had seen enough that the differences were insufficient to keep my interest. Videos motivate me to work on my climbing, but since I climbed on Saturday, there was no point in gathering motivation for that. They’re also good for dance, but I try to do my exercise later in the day to keep a consistent schedule for the weekdays. In conclusion, I need to reconsider my source of motivation, because rather than motivating or inspiring, Youtube distracted me.

First, I watched nearly thirty minutes of a Terraria speed run. Of course, this made me want to play Terraria, and I might have done so if I had it installed, but fortunately the combination of resistant will and the hassle of downloading and installing was enough to dissuade me. However, this video led me to a dwarf fortress video. I had started reading the Silmarillion on Friday, and Dwarf Fortress plucks some of the same notes in my heart, so I downloaded the new version and set it up. As usual, the setup alone took hours, and often I never get to the point of actually starting the fortress after doing all the planning. The last time I got past that stage so was probably five years ago. This time also I pushed through to the actual playing. For some reason I wasn’t held in the game’s thrall though, and after about an hour of actually playing I stopped and did my dancing for the day.

The dancing was not great, and I think I got tired overly quickly, after just half an hour, but I tried a couple of new moves and felt slightly better about a couple of old ones. At night I ate some kit-kats (snack-size) but I avoided ginger ale based on my hypothesis from the previous night that it disrupts my sleep. Nevertheless, I couldn’t go to sleep until about 1. This ended up being a good thing though, because my restlessness incited me to continue working on the assignment that is due today at 2 PM. Working on it last night meant that I managed to finish it before breakfast this morning.