My Experiment

Hey! My name is Mike; I am a freshman at American University. One of the classes I am currently taking is Living Deliberately in the 21^st Century, English class that focuses on ways of living and the way our living impacts society around us. In this class, we’ve read books from Walden by David Thoreau, to No Impact Man by Colin Beavan. This class allows us to look at the living styles these authors chose to liv in, and apply it to our own lives and experiences. To write our final paper for this class, we needed something more than just information from text to support our thesis, we need something with more hands on approach. The approach that we took was to change our ways of living, allowing us to have experience to back up our argument on the topics we will write about. This is why this blog even exists, so we can record our progress throughout our experimental week and share our experiences with everyone else. There are seven categories that we had to include in our experiment; transportation, food, consumerism, technology, positive impact/ political action, and health & happiness. Below is the list of what these categories are and what my challenge for each category will be. Because I love playing sports, I know one of the hardest things I will have to do is try not to eat meat for the entire week. This will be a very interesting upcoming week, and I hope you all have fun reading about my week and how miserable I will be by the weeks end. Enjoy!

Transportation:

Almost every day, I use the AU shuttle to get to the Tanley town, it’s very convenient, and it’s free of charge. For Living Deliberately experiment, I will choose to either walk or run to Tanley town. Most likely, I will run back and forth unless I have items to carry, in which case I will walk. This not only will benefit my fitness skills, I will also help the environment by not being part of the pollution that the shuttles cause from being on the road.

Food:

I am a very active person; on an average I play at least two sports every day, which means that I have to consume large amount of calories. I eat meat practically with every meal in order to maintain my current weight. For my experiment, I want to see if I can stop eating meat with my meals. This will be a very hard thing to do, but I would like to see if not eating meat, and consuming alternative foods with protein in it will allow me to maintain my current weight. I don’t think it’s possible, but I will enjoy testing out my theory.

Consumerism:

I am a person who eats unlimited amount of food; I spend around one hundred plus dollars on food besides TDR and tavern. That is a lot of food, so I would like to see if I can keep my costs for food under $50 for an entire week. This will not only be difficult because the budget constrain will be much smaller, but if I end up being hungry, I will have to be much smarter with what I buy. This hopefully will improve my shopping skills because my current shopping skills are very careless.

Technology:

I am one of the biggest procrastinators, and one of the things that help me procrastinate is TV, and Facebook. For the experiment, I will unplug my TV, and I will try to somehow block Facebook for the entire week. This will be one of the hardest things to do, because not only is it a habit, I will be blocking a social part of my life, which could prove to be too challenging for me. I want to do this because if I end up doing more work and less procrastinating that week, I may adopt this way of living to help me with school.

Positive Impact/ Political Action:

I try not to participate in any political movement, I don’t really like politics. For my experiment, I’m going to try to make myself more aware of the politics, and all the movements that are happening around DC. I don’t really like politics, but maybe this will be an opportunity for me to try to become a more informed citizen of the things that are happening around the community and the world. I will try to read at least one newspaper every day during the week.

Health & Happiness:

One thing I used to do in high school is dance, a lot. I stopped because I always felt like I never had the time to do it, and so I haven’t danced in over a year. For my experiment, at the end of the day, I would like to take an hour, and dance. Dance is not only a fun activity to do, but also it is a good way to get rid of energy or release stress from the school work.