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entertained update:

have been doing the entertainment blackout thing for 11 days now. observations:

• the first three days we crazy; super-quiet. went outdoors a lot, hung out with friends much more than usual
• days 3-4 i definitely had kind of a “brain is on fire” feeling when home alone — the teenage kind, where you don’t want to do anything in particular but you know you don’t want to do what you’re doing
• cheated a tiny bit: read a few trashy meme blogs one night, watched some State while we played Scrabble (social activity, but, right on the line)
• i’ve played a lot of scrabble with mele, like we used to, only she’s gotten REALLY GOOD at it like OH MY GUH
• even though podcasts and ambient music are on the whitelist, i’ve been avoiding both, just using some solid binaural tones to concentrate at work.
• the few podcasts and netflix DVDs i’ve enjoyed were with complete attention, which really made them much more effective and enjoyable
• don’t really miss music at all, which is interesting. when it’s there, it’s there, and when not, not. apparently. it might have been different two years ago, when i liked cooler stuff that i Had To Hear About First — without that side of the experience, music’s just kind of a pleasant augmentation to day-to-day life, and i can apparently go for days without thinking about it

a lot of people talk about entertainment v. ‘productivity’, as in “if you didn’t watch so much TV you’d get a lot more done!’. turns out it was true, for me:

• spent three nights writing an EE plugin and publicly releasing it with two Textmate bundles to GitHub
• wrote a silly applescript that autostarts my work apps, opens content-specific todo notes, and git pulls all my repos
• played around with CakePHP for a while
• read more Unix stuff
• finished a freelance design, got most of the way through a buildout
• sold a bunch of DVDs
• took a carload of stuff to Goodwill
• read another 200 pages of Infinite Jest (counts as work, trust me)

most importantly, i’m finding more and more moments of the day in which i’m just calmer, happier, willing to sit for ten minutes and do nothing. i talk to the cats a lot, i notice voles outside, i notice the quality of light, and only deal with occasional pang of missing a particular entertainment.

i feel like i’m onto something here, but i’ve only really got my hands around half of it.

YES, cutting some of the purposefully repetitive and numbing entertainment forms has had a positive short-term impact, but completely cutting ‘entertainment’ seems both impossible and unbeneficial — the behavior pattern that pursues distraction and fears stillness will keep pursuing, no matter what avenues one removes. no one ever dies of boredom, not even in long prison stretches, your behavior pattern FINDS some pursuit and MAKES it entertaining. jumping from one pan to another isn’t really freedom.

but i suppose that while we’re overcoming our fear of boredom, we can at least attempt to seek out richer, less expensive, and more connected experience. maybe that’s all i’m hoping to get out of this for now.