The Monthly Challenge is a social tool to help people venture out and try new things. Each month, a goal is set - whether it be a daily goal (ie., complete a Sudoku puzzle every day) or a weekly goal (ie., read a book every week) a monthly goal (ie., cycle 1000 miles in a month) or something completely different. The beauty is that you make the rules about your challenge. Or, if you see someone else's challenge and would like to participate, that's another option.
For day two, I'm supposed to shine my shoes.
So your task today is to shine your shoes. Get out every pair of dress shoes that you own and get them all into ship shape condition. You never know when you’re going to need to don a pair, and the last thing you want to do is be ready to run at the door to an important meeting and realize that your shoes are in no condition to meet the public. Having a closet full of shined shoes ensures that you are ready for any occasion, at the drop of a hat. Plus, shining your shoes is the kind of quiet, repetitive activity that will calm your mind and soothe your stress.
Belive it or not, I don't own any shoe polish. I was going to pick some up after work today, but I realized that the only pair of leather dress shoes that I own (and occasionally wear) is a weird deep brown color. Now I think I did shine my shoes once or twice as a kid (they were probably Air Jordan's) and as I recall, the shoe polish needs to match the shoe. Well, I didn't have the shoes with me, so I never bought any polish. So, before I head out for the night, I've given all of my shoes a nice once over with a wet rag, and I must say that it did get rid of most of the dust.
Today is day one of my 31 Days to Becoming a Better Man. And by "my 31 days," I mean "TAoM's 30 days + 1 Jesse bonus day."
Your task for Day 1 of our 30 Days to a Better Man Project is to discover, clearly define, and write down your core values. Before we begin, let’s be clear that we’re not trying to define goals here. Goals are specific actions, like “becoming financially independent by age 30″ or “asking my girlfriend to marry me this June.” What we are looking for are values: the ideas that you esteem to be of great worth and that give structure to your life.
So I've been thinking about these for a while (well, the better part of a day) and here's what I've come up with. It was really tough cutting it down to five core values, but I'm happy with the results:
A true man is completely selfless. At the end of Terminator 2 (SPOILER ALERT!), Arnold Schwarzenegger's character burns himself in order to save John Conor and all of human-kind. He wasn't thinking about himself, he was thinking about everybody else just like a true man... ermmm...cyborgggg... would.
No, I'm not talking about sex you perverts. I'm talking about passion as an intense emotion that drives action and motivates people. Can that emotion be related to love and/or sex? Sure, but that would still mean you're a pervert.
So I guess this is kind of two values combined into one, but I think the sum of the parts is greater than the whole in this case: humility is a great quality to have, but just because you're humble does not necessarily mean you believe in yourself; every strong male figure is self-confident, but some men who are self-confident are just dicks. A man who is humbly self-confident has the best of both worlds - he knows he's bad-ass, but just lets everybody else figure that out on their own.
Here comes another two-fer. I don't really know what to say except that there are few that things I dislike more than a liar*. (*Not applicable during a poker hand.)
A real man takes chances. Sometimes they may be stupid chances, but most of the time, it is a calculated risk. One of the things I've always prided myself on, is that I'm willing to make mistakes. I'd rather try something and get burned by it and know that it was a bad idea, rather than never try it and wonder "what if?" for the rest of my life. If you can't learn from your mistakes, you'll never learn at all. Oh, and real men sky dive - that is adventurous.
I think the interesting thing is that my list consists completely of qualities. There are no tangible objects on my list. When I came up with the list, I wrote down a few tangible things like "friends," "family," and "really bitching, red sports cars" but those aren't really my values. I don't like my friends because they're my friends - I chose them because the display a lot of the qualities which I value most. I chose my family members for the same reason (that's right, some people do get to choose their family members - I consider myself very lucky.)
Über Jüne is just about over, but how did I do?
Well, not great, but also not terrible. I started off with a bang, but then began to dwindle as the month went on.
I did sign up and begin training for the Disneyland half marathon. However, I stopped training shortly after the third run. Nobody ever said anything about continuing the training!
I never ended up screenprinting anything. I do have materials though, and I actually bought some acetate today to make one-off stencils. So if anybody wants to cut up some terrible stencils and make some crappy screenprints sometime soon, just let me know!
Rob, Will and I had a few tastings (ie., got together on Sunday afternoons and got drunk) and also bought all of the ingredients to get started on a nice brown ale. However, we're still waiting for our burner to arrive so we can cook everything... As soon as that shows up, it's full steam ahead.
Check. Learned about brewing beer and a few new tips for bicycle maintenance
LSDJ is still on backorder...
Got a late start, but here are a few crappy doodles from this month:
So people know it's my notebook
Triangles and squares
Piano
Randomness
I'm not really sure what's going on here...although I have to admit that I do like the sleeping stick figure dude dreaming about the stick figure lady.
Musik? Music? Musick.
Robots!
Random Terribleness
Ummm...mouths/expressions andddd a terribly drawn gun?
Been there, done that.
Nobody wanted to buy any of my crap! If you know somebody looking for a decent arcade cabinet (sorry, Arcadalicious April!) send them my way.
I was going strong with the talking to strangers. Unfortunately most of them were pretty normal people. I kind of dropped the ball on the hugging though - it was very sporadic...
I'm going to try to do some work on the site tonight, but it's nowhere near where it should be... After working on websites all day, the last thing I really want to do is work on more websites... On the positive side of things though, I did manage to set up an SVN instance for all of my sites and I finally have a semi-legit local development environment set up.
Dominated it (kind of.)
Completed the AIDS LifeCycle - but still need the tattoo to prove it.
just a basic ponytail, with A LOT of hairspray slicking it back. nice
About two-thirds of the way through June and here's my status:
Possibly the best $2.50 I've ever spent:
To be fair...only about three other people had played the game before me. But I still got all of the high scores!
So here is a better description of what I will be doing this month:
I've already completed ALC 8, and have started learning about brewing beer (thanks to Stump) and bicycle maintenance. On the ALC ride, I also got to meet tons of awesome people, and there was definitely a lot of hugging going on. I will make sure to continue that trend for this month.
Those are the only updates I have so far since last week was spent eating, sleeping, and cycling... I'll be sure to upload pictures, stories, mp3s, etc. of all of the above challenges as the month goes on.
The past two days have been rest days for me as I've been getting ready to ship my bike up to San Francisco for the ALC ride. Granted, I didn't hit my goal for this week or the week before, but I've ridden farther than I ever would've imagined I could in 25 days.
my mom, aunt, and cousin came to visit this past week... and it was exhausting. lots of driving and running around. now that they're gone i'm spending all of my time packing, moving, and cleaning. my back hurts, but i love the new place. lovely. anywho, here's the update.
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