This is a manga recommended by Daphne a million and a half years ago. I read it in one single-hour sitting on my Kindle, surrounded by unknown Bulgarians in a hotel in Sandanski. They were sleeping in different beds.
I’ll be brief and to-the-point: this was self-reference taken to the extreme. I like it when artists play around with these things, when they break the fourth wall, for example, or whatever the equivalent for texts might be – I’m not feeling creative enough to come up with something better than the incredibly lame “burning the press” – but Monsieur Boilet went over the top. You did, Frédéric. I admit: it was interesting in a way, but in the end I couldn’t help but get the feeling that, were the veneer of pretentious self-reference, such as the sketches, supposedly the inspiration of this comic book, to be removed, there would be nothing left.
No. There would be something left: the small details that made me want to visit Japan (yawn, right?); the cute observations the artist made of Yukiko and masterfully put onto paper, most memorably the mole on her face that reminded him of the geography of some islands in the Pacific the name of which escapes me right now, and its art style, which had me wondering all along: “How did the guy actually make this? It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen.” The answer came at the end as part of the story itself. Or did it?
And to think I usually like this kind of stories… Alas: while reading it, I made the shuddering realisation that, if I chose to write a story or make a comic about something that took place in my own life, a few years ago or maybe even today I might have chosen this oh-so-mysterious-I-wonder-what-really-happened! style of self-reference. *looks around uncomfortably*
But seriously: this looked amazing on the Kindle (see above). Even though I didn’t enjoy the story so much, I would still recommend checking it out if you have one.
TLDR; in order to make a new habit stick, just try to do it every day for 7 weeks – 49 days. The catch? You have to have a card like a calendar on which you’ll physically draw a big red X on and for each day you’ve worked on your habit.
The above comment became such a hit (notice the 4× Reddit gold? That’s having won the internet) that it inspired a whole new subreddit, theXeffect, and even a whole new website dedicated to this idea, fortyninedays.com.
As you might have realised by now, I like this sort of challenge thingies, because they help me structure my life, which in its normal state makes a random splotch of red paint on a wall look like the epitome of predictability and order.
So I decided to try it.
On May 8th I made not one, not two, but four cards. I thought it would be challenging, but entirely feasible.
3 weeks + 1 day later, this is the state of things:
The habits I thought I wanted to make permanent in myself by using these cards are:
Making a daily sketch;
Watching something in the languages I’m studying;
Writing something apart from morning pages every day, be it posts, poems or working on those stories I have in my head;
Meditating.
Some of these daily habits were more successful in their conception than others.
The state of things right now is that, as you can probably see, it’s become pretty difficult to stick to my goal. Week 1 was more ore less smooth sailing, but since then I have been finding myself more and more in situations where I just can’t focus on my tasks, be it because of oversocialising (here in Sofia it has come to the point where there’s almost never a time when we don’t have a guest staying over – which means going out with them, spending time together etc, on top of the usual EVS chaotic experience), travelling, internet distraction…
Three weeks in, as things are now, I think I can safely say that I have bitten off more than I can chew . Two of the habits are creative, one needs me to clear my head from all the day’s little nagging things (which I’ve always found very difficult, hence I’ve found meditation to be so demanding and never really stuck to it) and the other needs me to have at least a block of undistracted 45 minutes to spare every day in front of a screen. It sounds easy enough, but my life right now is so disorganised (perhaps for good) that I’m struggling to find even the structure needed to work on structuring it!
The most trouble I’ve had with creative writing, which is just too broad a term. I combined it with writing something in the languages I’m learning at the moment, which has culminated into my polyglot diaries, but this doesn’t seem to be working out right now, since it’s already been a week since I wrote anything for them. At least today’s X has already been taken care of by me writing this post.
My progress on the rest of the challenges isn’t in much better shape: watching something in a different language has been reduced to watching Battlestar Galactica with Bulgarian subtitles – I don’t have the patience to watch anything else dubbed -, after many days, it was only yesterday that I sketched anything apart from logos or plants, and my meditations have been so full of inner noise I often come out more stressed out than I was when I went in. It’s adviseable to meditate in only certain altered states: experience says that mild-to-moderate drunkenness is not one of them.
I wanted to share my progress on this because I think it’s time I did something to make these challenges a priority. What is that which is most direcly influencing the way I spend my time, how much free time I think I have, and what I do with it? What is it that is so deeply influencing my capability of finding and creating stillness, the flow of my creative juices, my focus on my EVS and my language studying – in other words, how I use my alone time?
Yukiko’s Spinach by Frédéric Boilet
