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When I decided to post my diet plans to the Facebook, I knew it meant that one or two people might decide to care about my loosing weight. If for no other reason than to bet on the chances of my failure (as my wife is likely to do), the public announcement of the action provides a go bell that cannot be unrung. So, here we sit on day two of the diet and I have thought about sugar almost ceaselessly. I realize that sugars are a good part of the reason I’ve hovered around 216 lbs for the past few years. I also realize that 216 is at least 20 lbs from where I want to be.

I told the web 190, and I set the over-under at 198.

Getting near my ideal weight is going to require me to increase the amount of water and vegetables I consume while severely curtailing the sweets. Maybe I’ll grow to like it. Perhaps we really are what we eat (which would have made me junk food over the past decade) and the change in diet will fuel a shift in attitude which will allow me to be happier in my life and more productive in the many avenues upon which I am invested (however, the number of points of investment do point to a reason why productivity has dropped).

How do I do this? I bought a box of Grape Nuts. Call it a replacement for Wendy’s and a way to keep the sweet in my life. I am addicted to sweet taste, so I do need to find healthier ways to include that taste. Likewise, I need to find creative avenues of exercise. Though I have a gym membership, the gym is basically useless to me. I don’t want or effort to use it. Maybe if there comes a day where I am home alone for a week I will go three times. The life schedule I have does not allow for it as of yet.

The good news in all of this is that I started down this path publically. That means I am committed to taking it as far as I can.

36 hours is the sum total of work I have to do over the ‘break’. Maybe it is a break in a way, because I don’t have to wake up early and I can stay up as late as I please. On the other hand, the idea of having work during a supposedly restful spring beak is just amazing. I intend to be a person who takes real vacations and real breaks in the near future. I see some of my friends who have the opportunity to do that now and I want it for myself.

In a perfect world, each spring break is a chance to hit the road or to lounge peaceably in an incredible back yard (that I hope to have). For now it means a bunch of hard work and preparation for a career that is becoming more demanding by the week.

I can tell you that my blogs are up and down right now, following the metronome of my responsibilities. I ‘m thinking tonight will be down. The more on my mind, the less I am able to produce creatively in a mere 10 minutes. The cause of my distraction as of late is the end of life. Not mine, mind you, but so many around me are falling ill and threatening to die. The ages are inconsistent, as are the causes of sick. Still the lips of death touch so many I know.

Open-heart surgeries for children, grievous wounds to young women, car accidents, minor surgeries, strokes… These are meant to come in threes, but the flow is much more severe these days.

Sex sells. It sells incredibly well. What else could make us give a damn about Jodi Arias (I’m still unclear on what she did–murdered her husband, right?), Reeva Steenkamp, and, of course, Natalie Holloway. The killing makes the cases more salacious. Death is the red meat to sex’s fine wine. The meat sustains us, but the sex pleasures us immensely. That is why we find ourselves drawn to the plethora of cases on the news about beautiful dead women and murderers.

Crime creates the pretext for us to show beautiful people in tragic and cautionary situations. The news seems to exist for this stuff.

Some Thoughts:

1. Having a 70’s party and need to find clothing for the event. Double jeopardy, because I am tall. Finding clothes is hard already. Finding 70’s clothes is dang near impossible.

2. No Pope, no problem–though that volcano in Italy is leading some to point to the end of days. Even if that is the case, I have yet to hear conclusive evidence that the Papacy are the arbiters of the ‘proper’ faith. Heck, I’ve yet to hear conclusive evidence that there is a ‘proper’ faith.

While not quite a Bushido posting, this is a post about the value and cultivation of work ethic. As my long time readers know, I have struggled with work ethic ever since leaving NYC. Something about the suburbs of Phoenix (and even the state of Iowa) drains the work ethic right out of me. Still, work ethic is a large part of what divides successful people from the ones who barely scrape by.

I’ve come back around to wanting things. I want to take this 4000 sq ft home of ours and turn it into a palace. I want to upgrade everything to the point where the home is a work of art and I can feel like I live in a place where I am impossibly happy to walk around in at any point in time replete with a full electronics suite and an office area that would make ABC’s Castle go, “wow.”

Work ethic requires a motivation such as this. Some are motivated by stuff. Some are motivated to be the best, to prove something to someone, or even to create a new life. This creates the foundation for the work ethic. The rest is built with bricks of fortitude, responsibility, and stickwithitness. In other words, work ethic depends on how you were brought up to respect work and how badly you want to see yourself be seen as a successful person. Consuelo Kickbush said in her presentation that she knew her mother was only a maid, but her mother viewed herself as a world class maid. She put in the work to be at the top of her field–no matter what the external perceptions of that field may be.

Work ethic is what remains after all the motivational speeches and the glamour of the role is put aside. Work ethic in what sustains you during the hardest part of anything you do. I’ve struggled with this for so long that I feel I have a deep understanding of what doesn’t work–at least for me. Reward structures don’t work. Simple gamesmanship where you compete against yourself to do the work faster and better has not worked. I think what is going to work for me is accepting the fact that true success takes time. I need to have the patience for Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours to becoming an expert, and I need to make the daily time to pursue it.

Some Thoughts:

1. Madden Wall pt. 2: I hit that wall again where I am not really interested in playing Madden. Good. This time I was on for about a month and a half, but no I seem to have faded. It was the Superbowl (in game) that did it. I won, then went on to have a wonderful post season right up till the draft where I discovered I only had 5th round and later picks. I discovered this long after the picks I wanted were already gone. So, I restarted pre-Superbowl. I don’t want to play out that match again.

When I was a kid I wanted to be a Samurai. I wanted to be Batman in Samurai form. I wanted to have a code and a purpose and to rail against the wrongs of the world from behind the shield of a code that protected my sanity and elevated me to the level of romantic hero. This is the street equivilant of little girls dressing up as princesses and hoping for prince charming. I wanted a black motercycle, suit of armor, and a tech suite that would make the bat cry out with jealous rage. In my soul I would be Bushido.

Cheryl Matrasko writes that the core of the Bushido way is “To seek honor by first looking inside the soul and confront the intimate fears that we hide from ourselves, and that plague our psyche in everyday life. This is the purification of one’s soul.”

Over the next few months I want to explore that history and that idea of Bushido and connect it to today’s heroes, to myself, and the still nascent idea of who I want to be. It ought to be fun and maybe even a touch enlightening.

Some Thoughts:

1. A friend of mine suggested I have a paint party. I offer beer and wine to some friends who come over and help me paint my house. Brilliant. This is the essence of community support. Now all I need to do is come up with a painting schema for the house. I’m interested in doing something dramatic with the foyer and with the front and backyards. There should be some sort of connective tissue there, however I do not know what that will look like.

The weakest link in any access security mechanism is the human element. On the second day of the NADE conference I was able to manipulate that element in order to gain access to free internet service. Ironically, The Evernote databases were hacked the very next day, seemingly through the same port of entry that I used for my digital intrusion. I was forced to change my password, which apparently had been stolen. I went on to change other passwords that I used that were the same as I used for Evernote. I took it as a lesson in cybersecurity. Again, no matter how big and strong your Tower Defense is, there is always a way in.

My conference focused on Developmental Education, which is an entirely different kind of Tower Defense. As Hunter Boylan is fond of pointing out, we are all developmental in something. It is therefore inherent for us to see that developmental part of ourselves as a weakness and protect it as though it were the weak point into our Tower Defense. What this means to me as an instructor is that my students are protecting themselves against the idea that I might use their weakness in a subject as a way to exploit them. This is not what teachers do, but I suppose there are some who do, who make their students seem less than, because they can’t figure out the proper use of there (or their or they’re). So, my job becomes to make them comfortable revealing this almost intimate weakness and then helping them build up their skill so that this weak link, this human element, becomes a strength.

I spent several days learning how to do that better as well as recognizing that many of the strategies I use—purely on instinct—are being replicated and quantified by instructors across the country. I am not a good teacher yet—not by my standards. However, I do have a good mind. I’ve started to doubt that over the last ten years. When I moved to Phoenix I came to a point where I no longer believed in myself. I felt that I reached some apex of ability and had neither the capacity to improve nor the will to sustain the level I was at. Confidence ebbed and flowed until my first child came into the world, and that is when it took a nosedive. Each successive child brought a lower level of personal esteem, mostly because I don’t have that support system to remind me of my capacity for greatness. Positive comments are reserved for the children in my home. That is the family I married in to. So, staying positive about my worth, attractiveness, perseverance, charisma, skills as a professional teacher, and even a writing ability largely comes from the self (which could be dismissed as personal delusion) and the occasional friend who lets slip a tirade of positivity when the haters are not around.

It is a wonder I smile so dang much.

Today I listened to Conseulo Castillo Kickbush talk about her upbringing and living in a boxcar in a field in Illinois. It reminded me of my time in South Africa and the idea that we must be grateful but we must never be content.  Kickbush came from nothing and made herself into a success by her own standards and by national standards. She kept pushing and trying and striving to be more than her situation.

In academic circles you are not recognized for your physical beauty but for the beauty of your ideas, accomplishments, and struggles. It is with that in mind that NADE chose to honor Temple Grandin as the keynote speaker for this opening day of the 2013 conference. NADE is the National Association of Developmental Educators. Temple Grandin is a Ph.D in Animal Science and pioneered the humane destruction of animals. Her methods have been heralded throughout the planet and adopted by many meat producers. Still, she isn’t really here to talk about meat (though the Pork Board is meeting and she might be seeing them too). She is here because she was diagnosed with Autism at a young age and, despite this then misunderstood affliction, she excelled in academics and earned her Ph.d. She is the goal and the result of a good association of teachers and the reason why many of us continue to fight the battle of developmental Ed against increasingly overwhelming odds.

I watched a kidnapping drama unfold on Castle last night, so before I begin I feel compelled to remind my reader(s) that my heavily armed wife is not home alone, but is being checked in on by my ex military neighbor. Now, I wanted to share a few observations about air travel. To begin, there appear to be two distinct types of travelers: the relaxed veteran and the bring all. I suppose I fall into the latter category, but I mean to be in the former.

There is some crossover between the two, especially in styles of dress. I’ve noticed that women work especially hard at looking good during travel. This may be as a result of the female species being predominantly more relaxed at traveling. They might carry a purse or handbag and be cool. We guys tend to fall into that bring all category, lugging carry-ons, laptop bags, and knapsacks wherever we travel. The act of traveling itself seems to be a binary affair, with the travelers lined up into the categories I laid out partially according to mission. I am weighed down by bags, because I am going to a conference in the near-arctic land of Colorado. During this conference on Developmental Education I plan to scratch out multiple stories and have mad fun. Oh, I’ll learn something too I suppose.

But back to the travel conversation:

You can spot an experienced traveler at check in. You know them as the people who walk right by check in and zoom up to the security gate where there are often a set of express check-in kiosks mostly under-utilzed. They’re the one in the nice but comfortable bottoms and easy slip off shoes. They fly through the gates unnoticed and arrive at the best seats in the plane. You can see why i want to be down with that.

Some Thoughts:
1. My ipad was recently the victim of football violence. While showing my team a play on the ipad, a player decided to hurl a pretty spiral my way. It caught the bottom corner of the ipad and shattered the glass. The kid’s father offered to cover the cost or switch my ipad for the kid’s. I opted for the switch, but lo and behold Walmart may be riding in to the rescue. My insurance is not yet expired and they intend to try to fix the glass. Go Walmart.

2. Jordan kicked up a newstorm by claiming he would try to play basketball at 50. I’m trying to play flag football at 38 and that is a mess. The problem of it is my inability to work out at all. If I could just start with one gym day a week I’d be fine. Now, with the wife poised to take a job that has her working weekend overnights, I may really be in trouble. She’ll be in no shape to watch kids in the morning, causing me to lose the Sunday Football League. That will result in immediate weight gain and deep-seeded disappointment in self. A friend recently suggested I stop worrying about being athletic. Nope. You are asking me to come to terms with the fact that I can no longer live in the world of athletes. I am not ready for that at all.