Well, it’s the first week of my new project: +EW42w- in which I choose one thing each week to either add or subtract from my life for the following two weeks for the purpose of enhancing my life and learning more about myself. I decided to kick off the project with something that I know will be a challenge but that I also desperately want to do: give up TV for two weeks.

So here’s my guilty secret – I “watch” TV pretty much all day every day. I don’t actually watch it all of the time. I tend to have it on in a corner of my computer screen while I’m working, more as background noise than anything else. But I do actually watch a lot of it (on my computers – I don’t actually own a TV set). I watch a variety of different stuff, mostly documentaries, dramas (especially crime dramas) and really bad reality TV (guilty pleasure, I know). Yesterday it was a full day of Sons of Anarchy.

I used to be really anti-TV but that’s not the case anymore. I think it has a very definite place in my life – somewhat educational, somewhat entertainment and distraction. However, I also tend to go through these cycles where I’m only watching it a little bit and then that amount grows and grows and then I get to the point where I’m avoiding doing other projects because I’m totally sucked into the TV and just want to lay in bed. That’s not good. I’ve struggled with some serious depression in the past. The last time that it got bad, it nearly killed me. And I know that if I let myself get into a space where I’m just in front of the TV most of the day that it can be really dangerous for me.

So, it’s time to go cold turkey for a couple of weeks. I’ll admit – this one actually feels totally difficult, embarrassingly difficult really. I live alone and my mind’s been a little bit nutty lately and having the TV going is a great distraction to numb that out. But that’s not how I want to live my life. And the whole point of this project is to do some difficult things to see how they improve my life (or don’t) so that I can continue growing into a life that’s totally right for me. So, I’m giving up the TV.

I’ve made two exceptions to this rule for the following two weeks:

1. I’ve decided to allow one movie per night during this two weeks. I think this will help reduce the whole terrifying challenge of just being alone with myself every night. I also think it will help me be more discerning in what I want to watch. And I’ve been wanting to watch more movies instead of TV shows anyway, so all in all, I think this is a good modification.
2. I’ll watch TV one day with my best friend. We get together once every couple of weeks to catch up on Project Runway and this is really more of a social thing than a TV thing so I’m not going to cut that out.

Tags: +EW42W-, personal goals, projects, self development

Yesterday I explained that I’m launching a new self-development and creativity project called +EW42W-. You can read all of the purpose and details here. The premise is that each week I will add or subtract something from my life and do it steadily for two weeks. Here are some of the things that I will be adding and subtracting, in no particular order, over the course of this personal project.

 +EW42W-: Personal Goals To Add

• Read daily
• Watch a documentary per day
• Eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables daily
• Drink 6 glasses of water per day
• Long walks 3 times per week
• Super good attention to dental care
• Solid 2-hour creative writing time chunks
• Read poetry
• Write poems
• Explore new music
• Zero waste
• Devotion to art projects already in progress
• Spiritual exploration

 +EW42W-: Personal Goals to Subtract

• TV
• Complaining
• Blaming
• Sugar and sugar products
• Alcohol
• Ambien (not that I’m an addict but I’m prescribed it for terrible insomnia and I’d like to not use it at all)
• Caffeine
• Worrying about money
• Making new purchases
• Interrupting when someone is talking

These goals are just the start of my list. I intend to keep on growing it. What do you want to add and subtract from your life?

Tags: +EW42W-, personal goals, projects, self development

I have decided to launch a new personal project to assist me in setting and meeting goals in a new and creative way. The goal is to increase fulfillment, creativity, adventure and moments of contentedness in my life through exploration of self and experiences. And I’ve decided to go ahead and blog about it all as a way to track it, keep myself on task and hold myself a bit accountable to moving forward with it. It’s called +EW42W-.

What is +EW42W-?

This term is short for “every week for two weeks”. The plus and minus signs reflect the fact that each week I will be adding or subtracting something from my life. The idea is that each week I will start something new that will last for two weeks. It’s all geared towards self-exploration, self-development, adventure and self-understanding. I am always making lists and goals and I’m usually good about pursuing and meeting them. I make work goals and personal goals. I make goals at the start of each New Year that range from concrete financial goals to esoteric “if I could do anything” goals. So why this new project? I just feel the need to launch a few way of looking at things, exploring things and seeing what does and doesn’t work for me on a personal level.

Why +EW42W-?

Why start something new each week and yet have it continue for two weeks? Here’s why I feel like this process is right for me:

• Starting something new every week works for me for projects. It keeps me refreshed about my ideas and enthused about projects and constantly challenging myself with new things.
• Doing something for only one week, however, doesn’t work for me. Either I don’t stick with it because something comes up and missing one or two days feels like missing too much of the limited allotted time. Or I don’t learn much from it because it’s tough to learn lessons in just one week.
• Doing something for a full month also doesn’t work for me. For many new things, a full month commitment feels daunting. Yes, this is how you develop real habits but my goal here isn’t to develop habits – it’s to learn more about myself and what makes my life feel fuller and happier and healthier.
• Since one week is too short of a commitment and one month is too long of a commitment, I think that two weeks is a good happy medium. I feel like I can do most things mostly-daily for two weeks and get something out of it.

Parameters of +EW42W-

I’m keeping this project pretty open for myself because I just want to see how it develops. It’s all just a personal journey. But here are a few of the things I’m kind of setting as guidelines:

• I will choose the week’s new task/goal on Sundays.
• I will choose based on what “feels right” at that time based on whatever is going on in my life at that time. However, I am about to start a list of +/- things that I can refer to each week to help me choose.
• I will blog regularly about my experiences with this – what I learned, what it was like, how it worked or didn’t work for me. This is to hone in on the purpose, which is self-understanding through the entire experience. I’m not doing it just for the sake of randomly doing it.
• I will challenge myself to stick with things that are tough but I won’t force myself to do something that really starts to feel wrong. I will, however, explore why it didn’t work for me.
• I will start this immediately (this coming Sunday will be the first task) but will not place an end date on it at this time.
• I will be honest with myself through it all.

Want to join +EW42W-?

Tags: +EW42W-, projects, self development

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time on Twitter lately. After a lengthy period of adjusting to using the site, I’ve finally come to really like Twitter. I feel like it’s giving me a great opportunity to share links and ideas with other people.

One of the really fun things that I’ve gotten into doing on the site is participating in a daily poem project that @dragonblogger does. Almost every morning, he puts out a request for people to send in random words. These random words are then worked into a poem for the day which is posted on the Wanderer Thoughts blog.

These poems are always really interesting. Sometimes the words that are submitted are really challenging. For example, check out Unstoppable Disease which included a lot of medical words in it. (My word for that day was simpler: productivity).

This is just a fun little project to participate in when I think about it as I’m on Twitter. I think it’s inspiring to do little daily projects and this is an example of a good one.

Tags: fun, kathryn vercillo, poetry, projects, twitter, writing

I am head over heels in love with San Francisco. I am passionate about the city where I live. I have known since before I first came here that this was the place where I was going to make my life and create my world. When I tell people that I have found “the one” and they learn that I am talking about a city, they have one of two reactions.

The first reaction comes from those people who have also had this experience, often from people who also live in San Francisco and feel this same way about the city. They get this knowing look in their eyes and we don’t have to say anything more about it because the understanding is just there. It’s the same as when you find “the one” person that you want to love forever and you tell that to someone else who has had that experience. You both just relate to each other through that common shared human experience.

And then there is the other reaction which comes from those people who have not found the city that resonates for them like San Francisco does for me. It is an amused reaction or a befuddled reaction. It comes along with statements like, “yeah but it’s so expensive in San Francisco” or questions like, “don’t you think you’ll want to try out other cities someday?”

To someone who has truly fallen in love with a place, these reactions just seem ridiculous. Yes, the rent is expensive and there are a dozen other things that aren’t great about San Francisco but don’t you see that I love everything about her despite some flaws? And why would I look for something else when I feel so incredibly absolutely safe and at home here in this city.

Not everyone gets to find “the one” – in romance or in a hometown. But nobody should ever stop looking because if you do find it, your whole life is altered. This happened to me with San Francisco. I got the chance to write about it a bit for a collaborative photo project that I was a part of here recently. The project is called I Live Here: SF and it’s photos of the people who live here and mostly love it here. Check it out to see the cool creative people that live in this city, the collaboration of those people’s words with the photographer’s pictures and the passion that exists when people truly do fall in love with the place where they live.

Tags: cities, creativity, i live here sf, i love sf, kathryn vercillo, love, photography, projects, San Francisco