Copy and pasting this bc I’m lazy but: If people don't mind I'm doing a mini-project at my university and need people to fill out this shortish survey. Only native Europeans, I'm afraid though :P But if people would be willing to do it, I'd be very grateful, thank you!

Yesterday was my birthday; so here is a belated birthday present from me to you! 

It comes in ten variations and 2 different colored bells (patina & regular copper). It is found under Misc Decor and costs 32. The package includes 3 height variations, so pick which one you want or use all three. Enjoy!

Mini-Project!! I call these “Pictures Quatro” - they are mostly tiles or abstract designs and each has a custom frame and matting (gold/gray/wood/black/etc) that matches the pictures. Pictures are crisp. Costs 252. Hope you enjoy!

Hi everyone!

Despite it being July, this post is not about my July Cold Showers project -- all updates and results of that will be posted at the end of the month. Rather, this post is about a spontaneous one-day Experiment that I conducted recently

On Sunday, July 5, I did an experiment that’s been on my Bucket List for a curiously long time: I spent a full day without any electronics or clocks. I’m not sure where the idea for this came from – on Saturday, I had been perusing my Bucket List for some fun activity to knock out the next day, since I had no plans, and I came across this item, and asked myself, “why not just do this tomorrow and knock it out?” So I did just that.

The terms of the experiment were as follows:

The experiment would take place on Sunday, July 5, 2015.

I would turn off and put away all electronics and clocks in my apartment before bed on Saturday, July 4, 2015.

From the time I woke up until the time I went to bed, I     would not use any electronics

From the time I woke up until the time I went to bed, I     would not look at any clocks.

It was CRAZY. I was not expecting the way I felt during this day at all. For a long time, I’ve felt a rather conservative, Luddite tendency towards a lack of technology – a romantic wish for it all to go away, to live the way people used to. To go to Walden Pond like Henry David Thoreau, or Alaska, like Chris McCandless, or a village in sub-Saharan Africa to take bucket showers and read by candlelight. A harkening back to simpler times, so to speak. And so, I thought that a day without electronics and clocks would leave me feeling relaxed, refreshed, and more in touch with my priorities and what’s really important. For someone like me, this would be easy.

To be honest, it wasn’t at all what I expected. It was HARD.

Specific thoughts and findings:

Not knowing what time it was all day was SURREAL. Seriously, I thought it’d be refreshing, but it was just really, really disorienting. I’m currently reading 100 Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez), which is marked by lots of magical realism, and I seriously started to feel like I was a character living in the book, or in a magical realist book of my own. It didn’t feel like a real day. It felt like a dream, in which I was an observer of a strange world (perhaps my inner world?). The day felt so long, and it was supremely odd and kind of mystical-feeling. I would try to guess what time it was based on the sunlight and its direction, and I found myself thinking of early explorers, and how they had to rely on nature to guide them, and how we’ve mostly lost that ability in modern-day society, and whether that’s a bad thing or not.

It was really refreshing to wake up and NOT check my phone first thing in the morning. Because I use my phone as an alarm clock in my iHome dock, getting out of bed to turn it off is the first thing I do every morning, which inevitably leads me to check my email and Facebook, too. I think I’ve been vaguely aware for a while that I didn’t like this habit, but Sunday made it very clear how refreshing it was to wake up, hang out in bed for a while, make breakfast, and read a book, all without knowing what was going on in the outside world, at least for the first hour of my day. Why does it seem so urgent to know if anyone emailed me overnight? It’s pretty unlikely I’d get any earth-shattering emails at 2am anyway. It’s a habit I have no need for and that just bogs me down mentally and starts my day in the mindset of looking outward instead of inward, focused on my priorities and my own wellbeing.

Not having electronics made me more keenly aware of my actions, feelings, and general state. Without any distractions, I found myself literally listening to my heartbeat. I was intensely aware when I was hungry, or thirsty, or sad, or tired (curiously, I took THREE naps throughout the day…)

I rely on music a lot to set the tone of my day and its activities. If I’m exercising, I use pump-up music. If I’m chilling, I’ll listen to acoustic pensive music. If I’m trying to focus, I’ll put on lyricless music through headphones to keep myself on task. Not having music all day – and having to make my own – was strange. The world felt so quiet, so devoid of a specific mood, except solitariness. I started listening to my surroundings more, and discovered how musical the world around me is     inherently. But still, it felt oppressively quiet.

I rely on the Internet and my phone a TON, every hour of every day. I encountered my first no-Internet struggle when the toilet wasn’t flushing in the morning when I woke up. My first instinct, of course, was to call Maintenance, but then I realized that I couldn’t use my phone because that was an electronic, and thus had no way to reach Maintenance. My next thought was “no worries, I’ll fix it myself!” …but then I realized I would be using the internet to Google how to fix this problem, and I couldn’t do that either. It made me think hard about how much we rely on communication with others, and the global pool of knowledge known as the Internet, to function every single day.

In a similar vein: I rely on the Internet for entertainment … a LOT. I constantly found myself wanting to read Internet articles. I was suddenly desperately in the mood to read a blog post from The Minimalists, or Postsecret’s Sunday Secrets. Without the ability to access these sites, I suddenly felt like I was missing out, like there was nothing else in the world worth doing. Quite frankly, I was BORED. I considered my non-electronics-related options … and found very few that sounded appealing. I could play my guitar, but I didn’t really feel like dedicating any serious amount of time to working through difficulties on it. I could stretch on the floor, but I didn’t have any music to stretch to (the same obstacle stood in my way when I considered going to the gym.)  I could read, but I had already read for two hours, and I just didn’t feel like it     anymore. I realized I don’t have enough hobbies that don’t require     electronic assistance. I take for granted the ability to access any form     of knowledge or entertainment whenever I want it. [Side note: this made me realize how great of training this was for the Peace Corps, where I will have a lot of down time and won’t likely have consistent access to the Internet, and will have to entertain myself!]

I rely on clocks to run my body and my life. When I woke up and had no idea what time it was, I quickly realized that I didn’t know if it was breakfast time or lunch time, or an awkward in-between time. I didn’t even think to just listen to my body and see if I was hungry or not, and if so, what I actually wanted to eat, until that was my only option off of which to base my decision. Clocks tell me when to eat, when to sleep, and what to do with my life at any given moment. Wouldn’t it be     refreshing to be able to rely on my own body and its signals more – to trust myself enough to let me satisfy my needs without this external governing force we call time? It’s an interesting thought I had never seriously considered before. 

Some parts of life really do require clocks, though. When I was in the heights of my boredom and wracking my brain for activities that didn’t require music or electronics, I had the brilliant idea to go to a yoga class at Yoga To The People! ... until I realized that I would have no idea when to leave for it in order to make it to class on time. Clocks definitely do serve a purpose -- I should just rely on it less to regulate my body and what I do with my alone time, and use it only for events and planning with other people.

It was really, really isolating. I guess I should have expected this, but as an introvert, I thought I would welcome the solitude with my thoughts. Instead, I genuinely felt kind of lonely by the end of the day. I think often, when I’m alone, I will text my best friend, or call my mom, or use my smartphone to distract me with interesting articles and Facebook posts to make me feel artificially connected. I think perhaps I would have found the solitude more easily digestible if I had a purpose I was working towards that day -- a focus of sorts, or a project. But since I was just being, just existing, it felt arduous and difficult to just be alone with my thoughts for that long with no one to share them with. This brought up existential questions of what it means to be human, how we’re alone when we’re born and, ultimately, we’re alone when we die. People come and go in our lives, but we’re the only ones there the whole time, so it’s worthwhile to learn to love being alone with ourselves. This loneliness felt like an ugly problem that I often will just shove down and distract myself from by hanging out with friends, but at the end of the day, it’s still down there, an inherent fearful discomfort with being by myself. And perhaps it’s a balance – if I’ve been hanging out with people 24/7 lately, I embrace a day alone happily. But if I’ve been alone a lot lately – like I had been that weekend so far – I start to get antsy and need people again. All I can say, in the end, is that I’ve never been more sure that human beings are social creatures, built for community.

That’s all I’ve got for now – thanks for reading this unexpected post! I’ll talk to you all again in three weeks, when I finish up my cold shower challenge (which is, surprisingly, going quite well!)

Lots of love <3