Today was National Cinema Day. Every cinema in the country was selling its tickets at $3, regardless of movie format with many offering discounts on concessions as well. I love going to the cinema, I love good deals, I’ve always wanted to go to the movies all by myself and to watch movies back-to-back. I tried to time them as smoothly as possible but still ended up with an hour between movie #2 and #3. But I managed to walk home and get a quick workout in during that break. And now I’m writing. I spent a whole day at the movies, I went to the gym two days in a row for the first time in months and I’m writing my third post in two weeks after a close to three-year break. I think this was the most personally-productive day I’ve had in a very long time.
Spider-man: No Way Home was re-released yesterday with a whole eleven minutes of extra footage, which wasn’t enough to pull me to the screens at full price but for $3, I’m in. Then there was, Where the Crawdads sing, which had a very interesting trailer and stars Daisy Edgar-Jones, who I’ve been in love with since Normal People. Finally, it was, Three thousand years of longing, starring Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba which also had a pretty twisted trailer. My point is all the movies of the day were extremely unique and satisfying and I’m glad I picked these. League of Super-Pets and Bullet train almost made the cut at one point simply because of show timings but I doubt either of them would’ve been that great. Fun, for sure, but nowhere near Crawdads or Three thousand. Movies are nice, they are probably the last thing I have right now that can hold my attention – I don’t get distracted or itch to check my phone or even look at the time. Time is always with going to the cinema, especially those evening shows where it’s bright and sunny when you go in and totally dark when you get out. It’s like you were teleported or something because within the cinema itself, time barely touches you.
I’m glad the cinema day came up on this weekend because it’s the first weekend since my whole plan of reviving old interests started up and I was worried I’d get caught in a staring contest with the ceiling again like most weekends before. I had been doing so well these last few days. Like I said in the last post, I figured most of the issues could be brought under control if I could just work on my impulses and my screen time. I’ve known that for a year and constantly failed, so, I figured I’d do things a little differently this time. Instead of relying on my sheer will, or what’s left of it, to attempt to hold myself to a rigid regimen, I decided to automate my life into a routine using the very technology that was holding me hostage. One of my close friends recently got a job and moved out of my house and he left me with a smart bulb and a smart plug. I used to think they were pointless vanity when he got it and roll my eyes to myself every time I’d hear his, “Okay Google, turn on my lights” through the bedroom walls. But I’m glad they dropped into my lap now.
It started simple – I was looking into the digital well-being section of my phone that every android phone has – just to set up some screen time monitors and app-timers and then I noticed the bedtime mode had an option to ‘wake up with smart devices’, courtesy of SmartThings by Samsung. I opened up SmartThings and saw that even though my smart lights were rated for Google Home and Alexa, they showed up in SmartThings too. I also realized that over the years, I had sort of sunk deeper and deeper into the Samsung ecosystem. I had a Samsung phone, earbuds, smartwatch and very recently came upon a brand-new tablet for free, also Samsung. It meant all my devices can talk to each other in some very specific ways and I didn’t need everything to have the same apps and music and settings all the time. So, I delegated the tablet to basically be my hobbyist device – only ebook readers, writing and sketching apps. My watch would monitor my health and sleep. And only because everything is Samsung, my buds can seamlessly transfer between the devices based on whatever I was using at the time without having me to manually switch, which is sweet. The phone, however, is still my biggest menace.
But this is where Bixby comes in. Let’s face it, Bixby is a shit voice assistant but simply because it’s a Samsung creation, it has some privileges in the phone that Google Assistant can only dream of. Specifically, Bixby Routines lets me program little automations in my phone of the ‘If This Then That’ format. So, I made ten routines. Some basic housekeeping – turn on/off the lights and Wi-Fi when I enter/leave the house, automatically turn on power saving mode if I forget to plug in the phone at night, throw a notification if I leave the house without my earbuds, those kinds of things. Then there are my ‘focus’ mode settings, which controls what apps I can and can’t use based on my locations – home and work, conveniently turning off during weekends and public holidays. I usually never have the heart to turn on the specific focus modes when I get to work either out of laziness or a serious case of FOMO when I realize I’m about to turn off notifications but now I don’t have to think about it. Finally, there are my screen-time impediment routines. I uninstalled reddit everywhere, it starts with news and science and TIFUs but always ends in porn. I don’t even want to get into that, therefore no reddit. But WhatsApp and Instagram are now on strict timers and also notifications are off. That helps a ton. Plus, Bixby let me set routines which allows notifications from specific people or containing specific keywords through even if the phone is on DnD. Setting those up helped relieve the FOMO-alert voices in my head. Notifications I absolutely don’t want to miss (regardless of the probability of them actually happening), I now won’t.
I was really guilty when I bought the watch earlier this January, as I usually am when I spend in the triple digits on something that’s a want and not a need. For a while I didn’t really use it any differently than I would a normal watch except maybe glancing at how many steps I’ve walked that day or to note my heartrate during a few weeks I biked to work. But now it controls my workout schedule and monitors my sleep. I took the time to set up actual workout sequences and it actually auto-detects what exercise I’m about to do and counts reps, rest time and everything. I also wear it to sleep now, and, in the morning, I’m presented with a nifty graph of my light, deep and REM sleep periods as well as my waking hours and assigns me a ‘sleep-score’ out of 100, which has been doing wonders to motivate me to sleep. The alarm auto-adjusts closest to the sunrise of that day to wake up during my REM cycle so I’m not groggy, and I get reminders throughout the day to drink water and get up and walk if I’m sitting still for too long. I’m basically it’s bitch now.
Through all this, my smart lights turn on with the alarm, at sunrise at a warm color and get brighter the longer I snooze my alarms for. They turn off when I leave the house, turn back on at full white when I get in the evening, dimming with the sun until sunset when only one of the lamps stays on. That continues to dim until around 9pm, when my phone screen starts to dim as well and at 11pm everything goes dark. At sunrise the next morning, we repeat.
So much hassle to be a normally functioning human being? Yes. Do I need it? Hell yes. Maybe all of it is so easy for most people and someday I hope it is for me too, but right now, I suck at it. I suck at taking responsibility for my own well-being and it is so much easier to mindlessly follow my lights and the chimes of my phone or the vibrations on my wrist. I functioned so much better when my mom was waking me up every morning or smacking the phone out of my hand at night, or when Pandi was banging on my door at 6am every day to go for a jog. Not forever, just till I got into the rhythm, just on the days I slip. Now my tech is the authority figure I’ve handed my life over to and as pathetic as it sounds, it works. I’ve had 7 hours of sleep every night for the past 4 nights compared to the 4-5 I used to get. I still can’t get a sleep score over 87 though. Its bumming me out a little. I finally dragged my ass to the gym on the third day and then again on the fourth when I realized it’s not actually as crowded as I had assumed it’d be and I’m not as out-of-form as I told myself I’d be. My screen time is still a work in progress – I want it under four, but I keep slipping to five or more. But not so bad for the first week. Instagram has particularly gone down. I kept going back because of the micro dosing of dopamine from every single vibration and it is impossible to go cold turkey. So, I derive my fix now instead from these little numbers of sleep-scores and calories burned and steps walked and generally feeling like not a walking failure. I’m actually getting work done at work because I no longer take the phone for Spotify only to end up on reels, I carry around my playlists on my watch instead. I’m reading two books on the tablet, slowly, not even 10% as engaged as I used to be but at least I’m reading, for the first time in three years. I’m writing this blog, and I’m noting down verses every time they come to me, and they’ve slowly started increasing in frequency. They’re still pretty dark though, don’t know what chemical reactions are responsible for turning slight discomfort into peak melodramatic rhyme but apparently, it’s the only one I’ve got in stock right now.
I’m doing okay, for week one. Twenty-one days makes a habit, right? Two more weeks and then it’s over for you bitches!
What fourth wall ?! 
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