Symmetry | yrtemmyS


                I am an extremely unhealthy person. I don’t sleep enough, I don’t eat enough, I don’t exercise enough, I never stand up straight, I slouch when I sit, I practice music for hours without a break, and in most other ways I am not kind to my body. So how am I alive? What is the secret to living the mildly idiotic lifestyle I enjoy daily? The answer, dear reader, is symmetry.
                I confess, to draw you into reading this essay I may have said a slight lie. I did tell the truth but not the whole truth (so I guess I will help god? Isn’t that how that goes?). To become the moderately functional human being that I am I always balance my terrible decisions with slightly better ones. In this way I am able to enjoy the nonsense while still living and growing as a human being.
                To begin I would like to start with my incredible sleep schedule. On days that I need sleep or that I am feeling remotely tired I sleep between 9 and 12 hours. This usually only happens a few days of the week, mostly often Sunday night and a few other week nights, and on the rest of the days, when I’m feeling fully rested, I sleep between 3-7 hours. Because of this I have found that my most productive hours of the day are between 11 and 3, which is probably why my blog posts and comments always end up a few minutes late. Being awake super late at night, epically in a family that sleeps before 11:30 at night, is incredibly calming. There are no distractions, no younger sisters running around upstairs, no parents yelling something about doing homework, and in a normally busy household this is a welcome relief. If I am practicing I can go for hours at a time without having to take a break. If I am composing I never have to force myself to come up with ideas, they just come naturally. If I am doing homework the flow of it is many times faster. I have qualitatively tested this as well. In the early afternoon my WPM (words per minute) while typing is, from a sample of 10, on average 80.43. At 2:30 in the morning, again form a sample of 10, it is 116.54. This is changes the speed of writing an essay, assuming I know what to write, significantly. The only way I can achieve all of these amazing benefits is by retaining the symmetry. If I didn’t catch up on sleep a few days of the week I would not be able to benefit from this productivity.
                One of the most prominent physical examples of symmetry in my life is how I sit. I am your friendly classroom slouch. I almost never sit up straight, and this used to be a huge problem. I play violin and viola for 2-6 hours a day and this has a severe physical toll on me. I started having intense shoulder pain at a summer cam that I was doing where we would rehearse for 10 hours a day. I noticed that when I was playing my torso was slightly rotated to the left causing a slight twist throughout my whole body. I wasn’t symmetrical. After consciously rotating to normal every 5 minutes for the next day of rehearsal I felt much better. Ever since then I have always sat with symmetry. I can slouch as horribly as I want as long as my left half is aligned with my right half and I won’t cause any damage to myself. Symmetry has changed my life by providing a means to do almost anything I want, no matter how unhealthy it may seem.

Comments

  1. samilMarch 15, 2018 at 8:45 PM

    Nice post! I know you and your habits pretty well, and I've always been confused by how you can function, sometimes even how you are still alive. The essay has a good flow and progression, and it kept me engaged the whole time. Your voice comes through clearly in your writing, as you tell us the secret to your productivity and success. It's also compact and overall pretty clean, but if I could make one suggestion, it would be that at the sentence level, I think you can try to streamline some of your phrases a bit, by rearranging sentence order and cleaning up words to make the meaning come through more clearly. Some sentences were a little stumbley, but nothing a revision wouldn't fix. Good job!

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  2. ChristelleApril 5, 2018 at 5:01 PM

    At first I thought you actually slept 9-12 hours per day and could not comprehend how that was not sleeping enough. Throughout the piece, I noticed there was a really nice flow, there was nothing that stood out as being abrupt or in need of major revision. There were maybe a couple sentences which could reworked for repetition or clarity but that was about it. The only other “issue” I had apart from some sentence structure was that I was sort of confused on the WPM thing. Is that something you actively calculate whenever you start writing?

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