I was talking about SimStan with Jan Slaby late last night during my night out event, and we observed that my time hasn't been especially crazy, but has given me a heightened awareness of how much of a normal day is consumed in "stupid little stuff": doing the dishes, finding mismatched socks, debating whether or not to bring a jacket, chatting with neighbors in the hallway, running out to buy some milk and then realizing that you've accidentally purchased whipping cream.

The other observation, which I should have seen coming, is that I am much more comfortable skipping out on tasks that assigned myself than those put there by my friends.

Thus the lack of updates in the past days, as I've consumed the "SimStan Maintenance" events with stupid little stuff.

This experiment has also shown the fluidity of most events: I missed lunch appointment on Friday because of trying to shift times to meet Crisi, and a lack of feedback from the system when the date got changed. Then on Thursday I thought I would have lunch with Manuel instead, but he go stuck at work and needed to shift to evening. My goals of "not making any decisions" and "having my whole day scripted out" are clearly not happening. Life is slippery!

The final observation is how much of my "normal" life is filled up with reading my feed reader, Google news, and talk sites like Metafilter. Never realized how much time I spend there until they were taken off the schedule!

Interesting that only 2 people have dared instruct me to spend money: Cornel to buy a online game for playing, and Josh to buy tickets to a Spanish Sci-fi comedy show.

There is more to be said about how the "experiment" is running, but alas, I'm already running behind schedule today... :)

Summary of the Days

On Thursday I enjoyed a nice nap, and then was off to the Kunst-Werke museum for some modern art, courtesy of Ken. I almost missed over half the museum because the second exhibit was titled "Organic Food Store." From in the main hall I saw the door labelled as such, decided I wasn't hungry, and thought "gosh, this sure is a small place."

The art was cool. Super detailed photographs of unusual but somewhat ordinary objects. E.g. a series of photos of a baseball cap woven out of bamboo. To me, however, the real star was the museum itself, which had a very cool feel just to be in the space.

After that it was a Skype call with my parents, who seemed genuinely amazed that by fiddling with Facebook they were able to grab some of my time!

Friday began nice and easy with reading an online essay from Robert about "The Search."

Cornell wanted me to play some old-school video games, but I was thwarted by stupid regional problems: even though I was buying a "download", their system could not understand how I could be in Germany but be buying something with a credit card from the United States. Even paypal didn't work, as it had a U.S. address on file. Ugh!

Rob Johnson had a nice event scheduled: to send a note of thanks to the director of the Arestua Mountain hut that I have visited so often over the past 10+ years. Per his instructions I tweeted my thanks, and also posted some photos.

Friday night was Josh's Sci-Fi comedy show in western Berlin. (Outside The Ring, no less!) The show was fun; wordless physical comedy in the vain of Blue Man Group, but scenes taken from Sci-fi tropes and R-rated.

(No idea why I look so serious...)

And lastly, Fabian scheduled me for typical late night (i.e. early morning) in Berlin. I made it only to about 4am. Oh well.