I admire guinea pigs.

I am intrigued by "All-or-nothing" social experiments, where people do (or refrain from doing) a certain thing for a specified amount of time, and then report.
"Super Size Me" is probably the most well-known of these social experiments. Morgan Spurlock ate only McDonald's food for 30 days, gained weight, and made a film about it.
I thumbed through A Year Without "Made in China" - I tried to read it, but it was a boring book about an interesting idea- one family's year of buying nothing made in China. They found it difficult. I am not sure whether or not they found it rewarding.
That lead me to Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping, which I checked out from the library, in the spirit of the book. I am glad I did, because I found the book unreadable. But the idea... the idea is fascinating.
The "no-shopping" idea may have been inspired by "The Compact", a group that started in San Francisco, with the intent of reducing consumerism by refusing to buy any new products. Mercifully, there is an exception for some "personal" goods.
There was an article in O, the Oprah magazine. The author promised she was going to "live the perfect life" for 30 days. Turns out, she just exercised and ate healthy food everyday. Big deal.
The most interesting account of one of these social experiments was The Year of Living Biblically. It's a great book about an agnostic Jew's attempt to live as the bible instructs- literally- for a year. Funny, educational, thought-provoking. A.J. Jacobs, the author, had an advantage over the others as he was a writer before he became an experimenter. He had previously conducted a social experiment in which he read the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica in an attempt to know everything there is to know.

I guess I am thinking about these experiments now because I have made my own commitment to write every day for a year. The idea was sort of hatched when Megan, my cousin, told me that she had thought about doing her own 365 project, where she takes one photograph every day and posts it. It turned into an "I willl if you will" situation... and here we are, nearly one week in. I'm not certain I can be interesting every day for a year. If I only had some sort of "thing" I could blog about....

I've considered: No sugar (too difficult), No profanity (not interesting), Give one thing away per day (logistically challenging, but not impossible- however, what's the point?), no TV (too easy)... I read once that if you study any one thing for 30 minutes a day, you'll be an expert in a year. Maybe I'll test that theory. Now, what to study?