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There are times when I feel like I am making incredible progress, great strides towards "becoming", and there are times when I fall flat on my face. As far as I can tell, that is pretty much the norm. Details vary, but watching other people move through the back of my ambulance, and through the ER and listening to teens as we talked about life and growing up, back in my youth ministry days, life is pretty much a mess for everyone.
Life is a mess for everyone. Cool, calm and collected exteriors hide an internal frenzy of fear, panic and a history filled with plenty of failures. Housewives with the perfect house, everything in order, get carted off to rehab and AA almost every day of the week. Leaders fail, and disappear. Children run away. Jobs are lost. Mistakes are made.
Progress is usually not made while reading leadership books in Starbucks, but while picking yourself up after a fall, dusting yourself off and trying again. That is what I tell my son whenever he falls, if he is not hurt I encourage him to get up and dust off. Really, I'm not so concerned about dirt as much as him getting back up each time he falls down.
I've been Catholic for nine years now, liturgically speaking. I was baptized on the vigil of Trinity Sunday in 2001. Realistically, I had my honeymoon with the faith during my conversion. I spent my twenties, after converting .... I spent my twenties poorly, made plenty of mistakes, failed as a leader and disappeared, running across states to do so, made mistakes and lost a job that I loved. It is only half of a joke that after being Catholic for almost a decade, the only thing that I am good at is mortal sin.
But what is the point of failing so often? Obviously there is a lesson (or many) to be learned. There is definitely a huge part of myself that I have yet to give up control over and acquiesce. Goal for my 10th year -- Acquiesce. That, and get back up, knuckle it out and make some progress.
The Blogalyser reveals...
Your blog/web page text has an overall readability index of 12.
This suggests that your writing style is conventional
(to communicate well you should aim for a figure between 10 and 20).Your blog has 15 sentences per entry, which suggests your general message is distinguished by verbosity
(writing for the web should be concise).
CHARACTER MATRIX
| male |   | female |
| self |    | world |
| past |    | future |
Your text shows characteristics which are 57% male and 43% female
(for more information see the Gender Genie).
Looking at pronoun indicators, you write mainly about yourself, then the world in general and finally your social circle. Also, your writing focuses primarily on the present, next the past and lastly the future.
Find out what your blogging style is like!
A few days ago I talked about Jack who would go to sleep using the palm of my hand as a pillow... so did this girl. My baby sister is off to become a Gamecock.
My geek status (action geek, mind you) has been a frequent topic of conversation lately, and to show my true colors I am sporting a very summer time geek wallpaper on the net book.
No one bring an orange near my screen.
It has been a crazy two years, from a 7 lbs kid that couldn't breathe on his own without a ventilator to a kid that runs circles around me almost daily. It has been amazing to watch him grow, change and develop from a kid that would rest his head in my hand and sleep between feeding times into a kid who talks to me all day about cars and motorcycle and airplanes. Becoming a father and now a dad is one of the greatest experiences of my life.
Happy Birthday, Jack Jack!
There are trips that I imagine taking, vacation, road-trips and time spent with family. Beach vacations fall under the "yeah, its going to be fun" category, while there are a few others, ones that I plan for a very specific "Someday" that have almost a mythic quality to them.
It is perfect that Jack was born at the end of May. It is perfect that he loves cars, and loves the movie Cars. It is perfect that my Grandparents, live just miles from old historic Route 66 in Oklahoma, a town where I lived as a child for a time.
I have spent a bit of time today looking at old classic cars, cars from the 40's restored to their prime and thought, "wouldn't it be amazing to take a trip down historic 66 in one of those". For a while now I had been playing with the idea of taking Jack down the length of 66. Flying to Chicago one morning in late May, just a few years from now, renting a car and taking a slow 45 mile an hour drive to Santa Monica. And I may do just that soon, without Jack as he is still far too young, but what if I were to buy an old Hudson or Buick and make that same drive with my son in one of the very cars that may have made that same drive back when Historic 66 was the only 66?
It would be one of those "trips of a lifetime" one of the few vacations that you recount to your friends decades after it happened. It would be another "Castle Peak", and hopefully for Jack it would be one of those memories that years after I am dead and gone, he will remember fondly. Maybe while taking his kids or grand-kids on that same trip, in that same car.
I've hit a wall. After losing the weight of a large toddler between Christmas and St. Patrick's day, I have stopped losing weight altogether. Diet alone isn't going to win this fight for me. I did well for a while and built up alot of good habits. And going from 262 lbs to 228 lbs is no small feat either. I'm very proud of the progress I've made on that front, but now I need to break out the big guns. I need to start exercising regularly.
It was easy to begin with. I realized that I was eating almost 3500 calories a day, far above the normal intake for an average person. Mostly, I was eating junk. The fact that it was Christmas made it even easier to eat junk constantly. After all, it was the holidays, you can find any type of food to fill your gullet, and all my favorite foods are holiday foods. But when I had a patient ask me if my son had the same chubby cheeks that I did, I knew it was time to act. So immediately I set a goal, following my "How to lose weight but not end up like Whitney Houston" plan.
Mostly, changing the way I look involved cutting my calories in half. Normally, something like that would be crazy, but I was eating almost twice the normal caloric intake. I also started getting more active, but that wasn't anything formal. It isn't hard to be moderately active with a small child in the house.
But now to progress, I need more. I need to stick to the good habits that I built with my diet, but I need to start hitting the second part of the weight loss plan with some fervor. It's time to start really exercising. I considered a few options for this. I could just run and lift weights on my own, but that is pretty boring and I hate to admit it, but I lack that kind of discipline (a flaw that I need to work on) and I hate running. I also considered a gym with classes, but I am not willing to pay as much as that would cost without knowing that I am going to tick with it. How many unused gym memberships are there? Probably more than the well used ones.
Being a geek in my heart of hearts, an action geek mind you, but still a geek, I decided that video games would save me. I was given a Wii for Christmas, and have logged a few good hours on it shooting Commies, Nazis and saving the triforce as well as the odd princess or two. But it also has some other uses, and one of them is as a home gym.
So I am going to be picking up a bundle of workout equipment, wireless controllers and software and starting the EA Sports Active game. It has a 30 day challenge as well as an upgrade with a 6 week challenge. I've heard good things about the intensity of the workouts involved. I don't want something that is a walk in the park, I want to break a sweat and feel it. Also, for the full set up including balance board, I'll be paying less than the initiation fee and two months of a membership at the local meat market gym.
For a long time, I ran out of things to say, or things worth saying publicly. Studying, work and class took up a huge amount of time, but then again so did Facebook. A few weeks ago, I hit a wall and deactivated my account. Last night, I accidentally re-activated it. (It turns out all you need to reactivate it is to put in an email and password, a simple task if it is stored on the computer and you hit the wrong link) Now I did try and re-deactivate it, without success, so I ended up locking the thing down. Pretty much you can see my picture right now. I indiscriminately closed off every setting I could, and deleted the applications that tie my Facebook to both this site and my twitter account.
In other words, Facebook has been ejected for a game misconduct penalty.
Now, when I get some free time, I will probably put the basic information back up on FB. There is nothing wrong with people being able to see that I went to Reinhardt College, Kennesaw State and Atlanta Tech. It doesn't cost me a moments attention to have my birthday or any other information up there that people can't interact with.
Of course that isn't permanent either, I may open back up wall postings and such again later, but for right now I want to focus on finishing school, getting started on the next phase of development and getting my life back together over all.
Deleting Facebook for a couple of weeks has had a great effect on the way that I use my time, and keeping my attention available for other things. I have been able to get ready for a few test much more efficiently than I would have if I was constantly distracted by scrolling through status updates on my blackberry. I started blogging again, and I feel like I have something to say that isn't condensed down to status updates. When I get home, I feel more like I have things to talk about with my wife other than what I read on peoples wall posts.
And best of all, my world has gotten alot quieter. There is not the constant buzz of news and outside sources of information that pull me away from what I should be focusing on. I want to use these blogs as a way to communicate outward more than a place to observe the lives of a million distant others from and a platform to comment on their lives. Does it impact my life and the lives of my great grandchildren that the government has entered a suicide pact with their pocket book? Should I be concerned that our local congressman is a shameless bigot unconcerned with his district's best interest? Is it important that a group of militant Muslims is building a Mosque feet from the fallen WTC site? Yes. Do I need to focus on it? No. My life is pretty focused right now. Family Building + Education + Personal Development are what consumes my attention. And when I do focus on protesting those ills, this site isn't really the place for me to do that from. Internet screeds rarely change the world.
So I am going to try to organize my online life. I have two blogs which I enjoy: Mo1, and Yellow Blog. Mo1 is obviously well suited to being a more technical Emergency Medicine blog. I can get the blood, guts and "You ain't gonna believe this" stories off my chest as well as talk about my industry. I know that most of my friends and family don'e want to hear about an interesting multi-system trauma that was complicated by a couple cardiac problems,a respiratory and a seizure disorder. Mo1 has a permanent warning at the top because it will be more graphic than many are comfortable with. It already is.
YBJ is my Family, Faith and Personal development blog. I am going to try to keep it PG-13 or better. No blood and gore. It is far better suited to guitars, road trips, expressions of Catholicity and talking about the last crazy thing my kid did than it is to talking about shooting victims getting tazed by PD because they got violent while I was working on them (true story).
Expect a bit of cross posting as well, as appropriate.
Twitter is going to stay as it is... random. It kind of bridges the gap for several loosely connected part of my life. It is a good quick updater without requiring too much attention and maintenance. Sometimes I post websites, or songs or links to new blog posts. I vent frustration there and then quickly delete it. It has its own place.
So things are going to change a bit. Some of the more YBJ appropriate content of Mo1 is going to be moved there and there will be a reciprocal links posted in the nav bar at the top of both blogs. The designs are going to continue to be photo negatives of each other for easy identification. If you don't care for tales of blood and woe, at least not related to being married and raising a 2 yearold, focus on the light colored blog. If you like the "crazy call" stories, welcome to the dark side.
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