Ran out of floss last night and forgot to buy more today.  I ended up using one of these plastic throwaway flossers that my 8-year-old uses.  I was on the second tooth and--pop!--off fell the crown.  11:30 PM.

I have to figure out how to get to my dentist tomorrow.

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I've written four new articles on my business blog:

• Make Your Tasks Modular
• Fire Yourself
• Is It Worth It?
• Your Life Process

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Imagine a person who is living his dream life.  For him, living the dream means waking up early and exercising, eating a leisurely breakfast with his family, working on his home business for six hours, having dinner with a friend or a client, practicing the piano, and then having several hours of family time.

He also saves money and goes on mini vacations every quarter, and a long overseas trip once per year.
   
He’s done this successfully for two years now and he’s loving it.

One day he wakes up with a terrible flu.  His body aches and he’s dizzy with a fever.  He spends the entire day in bed, unable to move.

...continued on my success blog, WAKEshine...

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Hurricane Hetta has tagged me to write eight random things about myself.  I will go as fast as I can...

1. I have been to many schools since I graduated from High School, including DeVry, Musician's Institute, multiple community colleges, and the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where I finally got a degree.
2. I went through a phase where I loved epic poems.  I read everything I could get my hands on, including the Iliad, Beowulf, Icelandic literature, the Kalevala, Nibelungenlied, The Song of Roland, and many, many more.  They gave me a great sense of what it means to be human, and to struggle.
3. Current favorite video game: Dance Dance Revolution, Mario Mix.  Favorite dance in that game: Always Smiling.
4. I am on the Atkins diet.  The first three days of no sugar and no caffeine had me weak and shaking and convinced me that I had an addiction, not a habit.  The snack I spoil myself with now is apples with peanut butter.
5. As soon as I know I want to watch a movie or read a particular book (for example, if somebody I trust recommends it), I don't want to know a single bit about what it's about--not even if it's a comedy or a drama.  I like to come in completely blind and let the storyteller bring me into the world.
6. I have lived in 10 different states in the U.S. and even more cities.
   
7. I wrote a computer program in Java that generates moves on a Rubik's Cube and checks to see if they did anything interesting (for example, swap only two corners).  I used the output of that program to create a solution where you only have to learn four moves to solve the cube.
8. I have a HAM radio license.
   

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Lakshmi has tagged me.  The challenge is to define my life in 6 words, and then to tag 6 others.

Unaccustomed as I am to following directions as given, I will describe my life in 4 words (reserving two for future use) and tag two others.

OK...I pass this meme on to The Educated Fool and Hurricane Hetta.

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From the foreword to The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
"Douglas Adams did not enjoy writing, and he enjoyed it less as time went on.  He was a bestselling, acclaimed, and much-loved novelist who had not set out to be a novelist, and who took little joy in the process of crafting novels."

From Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, regarding Robert Towne (who wrote classics such as Chinatown):
"Towne had two weaknesses.  He was poor at structure, a serious problem for a writer who would become notorious for his windy, 250-page scripts.  And for all his facility with words, he was not a born storyteller.  He had difficulty imagining the simplest plots, the most rudimentary sequence of events.  He was anguished over what he felt was his poverty of imagination."

You know, one of the ways I stop myself on some of my side projects is by thinking I don't have a grip on what I'm doing yet.  I imagine other successful people as knowing exactly what they're doing, not as people who are struggling. 

However, as artists, as creators, we must all be on the edge of human experience, right?  Working in the unknown.  Creating something nobody has seen.  It's going to be a struggle.  Only later might others look and go, yeah, that makes sense.

As always, it takes a ton of persistence, which is another word for being stubborn.

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I just signed up for an account on eLance.

I have tons of projects in my head.  I'm going to get some of them going.  Anything I can't do right now, either because of talent, or time, or both, or whatever...I'm going to outsource.

This will be fun.  I will choose my first project tomorrow.  How cool, to spec out a project and let somebody else build it.  I used to feel I had to do everything...now I'm very excited about finding talented, passionate people who enjoy working on projects.

It also makes me focus on how much I believe in a particular project.  Is it worth spending some money on?

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Imagine yourself in the following scenarios....what's your first step?

1. Just as you're starting to get on top of your financial situation, both your cars need repairs and your home's heater  breaks, for a multi-thousand-dollar tab.

2. You build a website and you are having trouble getting traffic.  Just as it is starting to get any kind of visitors at all, a hacker from Turkey takes it down.

3. Your boss tells you that your recent work is terrible and she wonders (in a staff meeting, in front of the whole team) how you ever got this job in the first place.

What's your first step?

I believe the first step is that, like it or not, your brain (or heart) assigns a meaning to the event.  One of the first things we learn in this world is cause and effect, and it's natural for our brains to try to determine causes for the effects that are happening to us.

I believe you can exercise your ability to assign successful meanings to anything that happens to you.  You get the option: you can choose meanings that wear you down, or choose ones that build you up.  If it's not natural the first time you do it, it will become more natural with practice.  And whenever you would normally feel the sting of what went wrong, you can replace it with the power of how you see it.

It's not denial--it's a matter of a valid opinion that you are successful!

So--multiple choice time.  Two options for each scenario.  Which meaning do you assign to the event?  (Of course you will have your own, but you get the idea...)

1A: Nothing I do will ever change my situation.  I'm doomed to financial disaster.
1B. I've overcome challenges to get this far.  I'm going to get over this, too.

2A: Yeah, I knew it.  I can't get these kinds of things to work.  I shouldn't have tried.
2B: Hey, I'm in the big leagues now.  I'm gonna get this thing up again, make it safer, back it up more frequently, and get more traffic.

3A: I am falling behind in this field and my career is basically over.
3B: I evaluate my own work and I am a success.

3B (alternate):

The Big Lebowski - Your opinion, man

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ERNEST RANGIN - SURFING LIVE

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April 25, 2007

My Dad went into surgery for "benign" (as determined by needle core biopsy) tumors in his pancreas.

I went down to be with him and my family that day.  It was a Wednesday and my plan was that I would talk to him that night when he woke up from the surgery, I'd be back at work on Thursday and Friday, and go back down again for the weekend.  In that way, I could save my leave time for the recovery.

My family and I waited all day in the waiting room while he went through the Whipple Procedure, a risky operation that removes a lot of the digestive system along with damaged parts of the pancreas.

Around 3:00 we got a call that the pancreas was not in good condition at all.  In fact, it was riddled with cancer.  They couldn't complete the procedure as planned because they were getting too close to arteries in their attempt to clean it up, so they would just finish up as it was.

I think it was around 5:00 that we sat in the small discussion room with the doctor, as he explained over and over that we just need to take it one day at a time from here on out and we kept asking the same questions, which basically came down to "what??"

"How much time does he have?"
"Well, we can't answer that question"

I didn't get to talk to my Dad that night, or the next day.

On the day before, my Dad sent out an email and said "I will probably be in ICU for a day or two and then in the regular hospital for another week to 10 days."  Actually, he didn't even wake up from the surgery for 11 days, and he only left ICU when all medical hope was lost and he came home to be in hospice care.

The answer to the big question was: about two and a half months.

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