I’m Guilty, your Honor.

All of that busy-ness due to business and school and marital harmony has my feeling slightly guilty about all of you out there who never see an update from me here. For that, I’m sorry, and I hope you understand. These pages would be full of overflowing ideas, rants, information, photos, musings, and resources if I could capture what my mind thinks and what my eyes see in a given day or week – just doing my work.

What You Can Do About That

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What I May Do About That

I’m kicking around the idea of writing about my living with cystic fibrosis. I do not like the idea of being thought of a “CF person” or a posterboy or being debilitated or handicapped… you get the idea. I HATE what that brings. I am a firm believer that there is a time and a place for people to find out something like that, and it’s not during first impressions. I have that ability and I have that right, so long as I’m not on oxygen at some point or in the middle of a coughing spasm in a store. If that’s the case, well, my cover is blown. As an alternative to writing that here, I may do it for my up-and-coming friend, Ronnie Sharpe in Arizona. You can find him at Run Sickboy, Run. We’ll be talking soon about me doing some guest posts there.

I am also considering changing my theme to reflect my updates on those social sites as well as my posts – and anything else I write – all in one place. That’d be cool, and I just might be able to make some time for that. Someday.

“I would like to request that if any shipping is happening for Xxxx programs that you are not aware of that I know is happening, please cc: me on it.”

Huh?! I just wish I had my old company e-mails to dig out more grammatical wonders.

Bounce!

I had failed. Failed as an employee (I guess), failed as a husband, and failed as a member of society. I was down in the dumps and later learned that I met more than enough criteria to be diagnosed with “major depression.” The eternal optimist, I started working on projects I had been dabbling on late into the night for friends and clients the very next day. I listened to the book every day, and with each shower, my business confidence grew and seemingly washed away old concerns.

There are so many good “take-aways” from Bounce! that this would be an article rather than a review to go over everything that impacted our life through the experiences and wisdom Barry poured into these pages. Here are the best bits that directly affected my day-to-day life after failure and my increasing confidence:

• Failure is not always your fault. Sometimes things just happen out of your control and there is nothing you could do to prevent, prepare for, or postpone every failure. People move, die, cheat. Companies fold, merge, and take you out. Failure will happen to everyone at some point.
• Humility is the first step to recover from these guaranteed failures. If you think you are in control of everything and failure hits because you did or did not do something, you will not learn or grow from the experience, and your business confidence will not grow.
• Failure provides you with choices and humility allows you to see failures for the successes that they can be. Reflecting upon this principle reminded, “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” So what if I lost my “guaranteed” paycheck? Now I determine what kind of return I receive on my work and efforts now, so long as the market fulfills those demands for that return. Try that with your boss–I fantasized about that for over 6 years!
• You determine what is a success and what is a failure. We have a calendar system set up for my paychecks that I’m paying myself. I have a goal every month to earn a certain amount to avoid dipping into savings. I also have a goal that is twice that amount to push myself toward long-term business savings. Am I failing if I don’t meet the double salary goal? Maybe I am, but that decision is mine to make. After 9 weeks of being my own boss, I am a success in my mind.

Business confidence is the biggest factor for bouncing back from failure from what I learned. Maybe for some humility is going to be a much bigger issue to tackle, but that will still drive back around to increase one’s business confidence. This week I formed an LLC and we are going to open a business bank account as soon as I receive the EIN paper. Our lemonade is tasting mighty fine, and we have Barry to thank for helping me bounce so quickly.

Without fail, people still check the door to see if it’s locked… as if I’d be sitting on the floor in front of the door with a book if it was open. Yesterday was no exception. What made this visit more special was that it must have been a coupon week for patients over the age of 70. Not a one could have possibly have been in their 60s. One little old lady shouted out to her caretaker that she was born in March of 1915. Yeah, really old.

The humor arose when the deaf people all started to try to talk to each other. Normally not funny, I know, but read on to see how it happened.

I normally sit all the way through the waiting room next to the door to the doctors’ area so I can just slip in the door when I’m called. From there I can see 8 chairs on the far opposite wall about 25 feet away. There was a little yellow and white-haired woman sitting there with good clothes on and perfect red lipstick. She had a matching sweater to her pants, so I was pretty sure she was well-off, but she had a odd expression, like she was lost in space. She had her purse sitting on the chair to her immediate right.

After what seemed like an interminable amount of time, the next patient finally finished checking into the electronic check-in system and sat down with a clipboard next to the other woman’s purse. As she sat, she (now referred to as Lady B) placed her purse in front of the other’s (now referred to as Lady A) on the chair and said politely, “I’m just placing this here next to yours.”

What followed should be on Saturday Night Live:

Lady A: Stooped and craned her head to Lady B and croaked, “Eeehhh?”

Lady B: “I said I’m just putting this here.” Lady A still didn’t comprehend what Lady B said, so she just tilted her head back to where it was a bit and slanted her mouth in a stupid face that I almost laughed at. Until that, she looked pretty normal. About 20 seconds passed and then,

Lady A: “What doctor are you here to see?” she asked Lady B, who was busy writing on her clipboard and didn’t respond. Not being one to give up that easily, Lady A repeated her question and moved her hand to the chair to get Lady B’s attention.

Lady B: “Dr. Seper. It’s been so long, I have to fill out new paperwork.” They both resumed what they were doing for another 20 seconds when it got hysterical from my end of the waiting room.

Lady B: “I haven’t been here for 5 years and I need new hearing aids,” she quipped to Lady A, who once again did not hear her, but this time was unware she was being addressed. Since Lady B never looked up, she didn’t realize Lady A didn’t hear her. Ten seconds later:

Lady A: “I’m here for hearing aids. I can’t hear a thing nowadays.” You guessed it, Lady B had no idea that Lady A was chatting away again.

About this time, Lady C two seats over on the other side of Lady A got tired of talking to Mrs. 1915 and told Lady A:

Lady C: “I’m here for hearing aids. What are you here for?” Normally, this is not something you want to ask someone in a doctor’s office, so I don’t know why you would want to know. You may end up finding out too much without warning. Again, Lady A was lost in her world without sound. Lady C apparently figured that it wasn’t worth repeating and gave up.

Right then and there, Mrs. 1915 pointed her finger at me with her palm turned upward and chirped in an ancient voice, “That young man is much to young to be here for hearing aids,” and started shaking her head in pity.

Lady C: “It’s probably all that loud music young folks listen to today.”

I’d been looking at them all the while. I wasn’t even pretending to read my magazine. I was looking right at them when they said this of me! I wondered if it would be more funny or more rude of me to say from my spot to the whole waiting room, “I can hear every word the four of you have said, even though you haven’t heard each other. I am here for snot therapy, not my ears!”

The nurses had a good laugh when they called me back, because I couldn’t help but tell them.

Anyone else have a good waiting room story?

One of the benefits of so many literature and writing courses is producing writing material. I’m checking to see if there is any interest in checking out my work and using it as bonus content on the blog to defer some content to other days. That said, here is a sample of my last paper for Expository Writing, which earned a 96%, and I know there are two typos in it to take care of before posting the entire thing. Here goes nothing:

Boob Tube or YouTube?
Technology has a way of shaking things up from time to time. The staple of the music industry for decades was the vinyl record, which gave way to CDs, which have been left on dusty shelves since the advent of online music sales. No one wants to buy an entire CD of second-rate songs when they only want the one smash hit to listen to until they can sing it backwards. The next big revolution is targeting television and the way we watch programming. Why would anyone want to sit in front of the TV with all of its commercials and drawn-out programming?

Find Your Brand, Theme, or Niche

A vitally important part about blogging is what to blog about. Naturally. There are business blogs, helpful blogs, blogging blogs, gadget blogs, mommy blogs, and portfolio blogs. My personal favorites are gaming blogs, particularly those about World of Warcraft. Within each topic and niche comes the full spectrum of fantastic design, content, and passion. The ability to do your blog well has a lot to do with finding yourself within your blog and showing that to others. Even the most professional, anonymous business blog can convey enough passion and insight to make a following.

One of the reasons the term “blogger” brings negative reactions from friends and relatives who are up with technology is that there are so many bad blogs out there. MySpace has single-handedly ruined millions of people’s idea of what bloggin is, and with good reason. It has the feel of a blog in that you update it regularly and people leave you messages, but that is where the similarities end. I’ve personally never seen a decent MySpace page, and that’s a lot of ground to make up if that’s all your friend knows of “blogging,” too. Here are the major blogging sins to avoid:

• Poor design - No one wants to try to find your text in all those banners or all the way down at the bottom of the page when the sidebars push things out of whack. Above all else, choose your font and color scheme like a normal person. There is no forgiveness to be found for a hot pink MSComic font on a black background. If your grandma can’t read it, do it over.
• Boring content - If you’ve ever seen a blog that was day after day of posts about their day to day activities, sucky boss, or what their cat ate and barfed back up, then you know what I’m talking about. If your blog is pretty well settled into a niche that focuses on said specific topic then the reader knows what they are getting into. Otherwise, to have a blog about “nothing” or “everything” and have such mundane content is unacceptable to a discerning reader. Ask yourself “would I read this on my lunch break?”
• Schizophrenic content - Related to boring content, if you have a niche, stick to it. It’s okay to blend some stuff, but don’t combine your passion of the Denver Broncos with your dental practice with a sprinkling of Fred for ’08. Chances are pretty good that you will turn off people with 2 out of those 3 topics if they came to your blog using a search engine for one of those topics.
• Infrequent updates - Blogs are driven by constant updates. People want to know what they want to know often. If you have subscibers to your RSS feed (another topic for another day) and you only update once per week or less, you are going to lose subscribers unless they know that is your schedule. Some blogs update 4 times per day, but a good average is once every day to three days. Even if there aren’t any new posts, there might be some comments to read.

Certainly the list is longer than this, but you can’t go wrong by avoiding these huge mistakes in the content you deliver. Remember: your blog is a body of work when it’s all said and done. Make it reflect who you are in the best possible way, even if you aren’t the main attraction.

If you have any other suggestions I’d be happy to incorporate them into the post and give you credit… if your content makes you look good, of course.

Not too long after (if any time is acceptable), people began to forget what  happened that day and how many lives were lost. Wars sprung up, people fought over the wars, and political offices were won and lost over “moving on” or staying fast.

At the height of the divide, the ruler decided he would like to visit the spot of the opening blow. At the same time, educators extended an invitation to have the ruler come speak to an assembly. The distant land grew more and more angry over such a blazen act of treason.

Appropriately, the ruler’s escorts within the country refused to take him to the site. The ruler, being a pompous ignoramous,  decided to go there with only his personal security detail. Local authorities look on from perches and cameras, waiting to see what the ruler was going to do.

At the site of the tradgedy six years earlier, the ruler placed a wreath, knelt down, and said a prayer to those who died. Not the thousands of innocent people going about their work on a busy Tuesday morning, but to the few who perpetrated one of the single most violent unprovoked mass killings in history.

The cameras caught what was going on and within moments, hundreds of angry citizens descended upon those few foreigners defiling the sacred ground, and restored balance and brought justice to those who wished them harm.

The world reeled at the news of a slain leader visiting and praying. The division between sides grew more and more every week, until — a leader emerged.

To be continued…

Tech Writing is going as smoothly as one can imagine. After getting some sense from the others after week 2 that they would rather participate in the discussion on the work than hear what I have to say about it (well, they were being too quiet and saying dumb things), I decided that I would be quiet this week.

That plan lasted all of about 5 minutes before the instructor began calling on me to get my “expert working student” opinion on some things he was going over for life-application stuff involving the techniques learned in tech writing. “Great, so much for that plan.”

After doing an in-class exercise to optimize two paragraphs that were poorly constructed in 1/8 of the required time and surfing the Internet for 40 minutes, I discovered that my product was still 22 words longer than the next longest revision. I decided to keep my trap shut since I didn’t think it was up to snuff, but he called on me anyway. I declared it to be the longest revision in the class and read it. He paused, asked me to read it again, paused, called it “excellent” and declared me the winner for keeping the flavor, tone, and fully precise meaning of the original, but still decreasing it by over 150 words. Man… what an evening.

The rest of class, we went over people’s cover letters from the assignment. Every time I was quiet for a while, he’d ask me what I was thinking because I was being quiet. To top things off, he saved my cover letter for last. After reading it and declaring it good, someone took objection to my first sentence:

“I would like to thank you for the opportunity to present my work experience and skills for your recent opening for Lead Designer.”

After attempting to change it around for 10 minutes, they gave up. Then for the next sentence; same problem. I eventually offered a slightly better rendition of the first sentence, but I don’t like it as much, despite the overusage of the word “for” in the original. The instuctor then made matters worse for me by saying, “The problem we are having here is that Jesse is so good at what he does, it seems wrong to change his work just for the sake of changing it, because it can’t really be improved upon.” — Where is the nearest rock to hide under? I’ll be the first to admit that I like to get praise like that — look what I’m doing now by posting this story for all to see — but I don’t like to get it when others are there to look at me and see my reaction to such praise. I’m getting bashful just typing that last sentence. Go figure.

On to my lit class. The text is garbage. Week 2′s assignment was to do a Reader Response critique to two terrible works. This is the highlight of my scathing comments, that thankfully did contain some actual insight in the end:

“At this point, my first thought was that this story is total garbage with no redeeming value. I was confused why I must be subjected to this abhorrent material just in order to get a piece of paper to present to my employer to claim that I am now educated. If this is what being educated is all about, I want nothing to do with it.”

It is fair to note, that I did remove that block already, but it sure would feel good to turn that in.

Thankfully, Tech Writing is shaping up to be the easiest course I’ve taken, not by its content, but by the nature of my strengths. Combine that with the first two assignments being the same as my assignments for Professional Writing, it’s making the beginning quite smooth.

Not so much for Modern Short Novel. My wife had this professor when she was finishing up her degree… and I was wary of the situation. There were several occasions of cancelled classes and unneccessary reading because of that. I don’t have time to waste on reading stuff that doesn’t count, so I looked for alternatives. I’m in it now, so you can guess how the search went.

Our first novelette is “Daisy Miller” by Henry James. It was agonizingly slow because of it being a period piece of 19th century language and 8pt font with long paragraphs. Sometimes I had to re-read a 5-line paragraph 4 times to get what was actually being said. After page 5, I started writing down words I didn’t know for sure, and ended up with a list of 21 new words to add to my vocabulary. How embarrassing. I’m almost 30! I’m supposed to know everything by now and start forgetting it by the time I’m retired. At this pace, I’m not going to have time to forget everything I know by the time I’m supposed to.

We have to read 14 novelettes and 14 3/4-page critiques of them plus a 10-13 page paper on an outside book selected from her reading list. I haven’t quite decided between Steinbeck or Hemingway, but time is drawing near on getting started… like this weekend.

Being this busy is literally not leaving me much time to come up with original thoughts, advice, complaints, or much of anything at all. As a treat, I may post my critiques for you to see what kind of crap I put out there for the prof.