Here's an abridged list of my personal todo list:

Investigate gym alternatives
Talk to a prof
Buy clothes -- 2 pants, 2 long sleeve, 3 tees
Check out sports, music, singing, dance
French and Spanish
Greenway, rails to trails, creek restoration
http://www.assnforpublictransportation.org/
Investigate UN Global Studio
Livable Streets Alliance
Think more about cross-training your brain

I left out mundane things, such as paying bills, and this omits my huge list of work todo items. The above mainly represent activity which I'd like to initiate. Some are simply urban planning groups that I want to check out, and I won't discuss that here. The ones that are worth talking about are Talk to a prof, Check out sports, music, singing, dance, French and Spanish, and Think more about cross-training your brain.

Talk to prof
I speak up in my classes, but I'm yet to sit down with a prof since class started. We have a dozen professors for 100-odd grad students and no undergrads, so there's no reason not to take advantage of them.

Check out sports, music, singing, dance
The music, singing, and dance are a preoccupying force. I need to get better at playing music and singing, and I need to once and for all learn how to dance. Luckily one of my housemates teaches dance and has bee teaching our house and upstairs neighbors salsa. I'm hoping the individual attention will finally help me turn over the new leaf. Music and singing are a bit more complicated. I know I want to improve my vocal harmonizing and get better at playing pop on piano and guitar. But I don't know how to do any of them but with CDs or books. That's not a social activity but might at some point allow me to get into some more organized music situations.

French and Spanish
I might as well add German to this. Maintaining and learning foreign languages while in grad school is trying. I don't have the resources to study anymore, what with the grad school homework brain leech.

Think more about cross-training your brain
And now we come to the whole purpose of this post. How do I cross-train my brain? I think about this occasionally and it arose yesterday when I found myself writing a journal entry for my Sustainability class and chose to write about a French Symposium that took with a colloquium on Sustainability. It gave me the opportunity to transcribe a bit of the published program from French to English. It got me thinking, how do I combine my obligatory work with the personal stuff listed above?

It seems logical to start treating my various activities as a web of objectives and outcomes. Let's try some Omnigraffle charting:


Hmm. Is this useful? Probably not, but it gives you idea of what I mean by cross-training. I think it's good to be aware of opportunities to combine objectives into one activity.