As you may or may not have noticed, I’ve been slowly rolling out new functionality to the site. What I’ve added so far:

Some posts have a little black box truck icon to the right of the title, which means that I was writing the post from inside the box. Since the blog is called “From Inside the Box”, it’d be disingenuous of me not to say whether or not I was actually in there while I was writing. This post, for example, was not written from within the box, but rather a quaint little cafe in downtown Mountain View.

My parking situation is very much analogous to my housing situation: I don’t quite fit in. One of the most difficult parts of my situation, one that I underestimated during the planning process, is trying to fit the silly thing in parking lots.

Imagine this. It’s Saturday morning, and you’d like to run some errands. No big deal right, just hop in the car and go do them. Think again. There are two ways your scenario can play out.

I’ve mentioned in the past that I believe getting enough sleep is a key component to happiness and success. I also believe that the quality of sleep contributes to these factors. Because of this, I’ve been using an application on my phone that tracks my sleep, for the past year. Basically, you tell the application what time you’d like to wake up, and then tell it how much earlier you’re willing to be woken up. Then, you put it next to you on your mattress while you sleep, and based on your movements, it can estimate what stage of sleep you’re in and wake you up at the best time.

As I’ve talked with more and more people about my living situation, I’ve noticed a few questions that come up all the time. I’m going to answer them here in full, gory detail.

How do you go to the bathroom at night? Do you just pee in the woods?

As cool as it would be, my life is not an episode of Man vs Wild. I do have 24 hour key card access to any building on the campus that I work at, so I could use the facilities in there if I really needed to, but thus far it’s just been about planning. I try not to eat or drink anything after about 7:30 PM, and I wash up and go to the bathroom right before I head out to the truck at night. When I wake up in the morning, I ride my bike to the gym and go to the bathroom there.

This is another post on philosophy, take that as you will.

I went out with a couple of co-workers last Friday, and naturally the conversation eventually ended up on my living situation. I’ve been continually surprised at how receptive people are to the whole concept of living in a car, normally once I explain all of my motivating factors. Mainly, I get a lot of “That’s really great! I personally could never do something like that, but power to you for going through with it!”, and that’s vaguely encouraging for me. Coupling these conversations with all of the time I have for reflection, I’ve come to realize a few things about happiness.