I am no longer Discordian, so this summary will not be in the form of interpretive dance. I’m sure you are all very disappointed.

In brief: January was a frustrating month for my budding spirituality—I don’t think I’m cut out to be a Discordian.

A religion based on disorder ought to be easy; any random thing you do can be correct. There are few rules, and even those are broken with encouragement. Eat hot dogs once a week, do silly things in public? Piece of cake.

Except when I’ve just spent several hours entering transactions into new accounting software, so I’ll have all my finances in—oops—order. Or when I plan out bus routes so I can get all my errands done in the most efficient manner. A month supposedly spent worshiping a Goddess of Chao is probably a bad time to start learning effective time management, financial planning, and home storage solutions.

Or perhaps not. As Michael said in his Discordian overview, the philosophy is about the freedom to do what you want, and not being constrained by other people’s opinions. As I was a pretty free spirit to start with, it makes sense that my habits wouldn’t need to change much. It still feels like I was missing out on the spirit of Discordia by not being more random, but really, how chaotic can you be when you have to plan it?

Another limiting factor was the fact that my life goes on after I’m done fomenting discord. I considered it a bad idea to rock the boat in terms of my job, my bills, my apartment. The financial organizing may not have been particularly discordant, but it is going to affect my life for much longer than a month. That seems to be the major pitfall to our religion-a-month club: some changes are easier to make because you know you won’t have to stick with them (veganism and celibacy come to mind), but others are hard to justify without a sincere leap of faith.

For now, I will be leaping to the next faith, and seeing if a surfeit of rules suits me better than none.