Got some news this morning.

Don't you dare tell me God doesn't give us trials we can't bear. If we could shoulder everything life throws us all on our own, why in the hell would we need him in the first place?

When Shaky Becomes Twitchy

Okay, that title is a little misleading. And I have no idea what it means, so have fun with that.

I've changed my relationship with food. I've changed our relationship with food. I used to get up every morning just in time to take care of my hygiene, put a few bites of something starchy in my body and clothes on my back, and head out to do whatever it is I had to do that day. Now, I'm waking up about half an hour before the Sun, making myself a pot o'beans, putting on some reggae music, and cooking breakfast.

And I mean cooking.

When the Wife got back from her summer vacation to California, we spent a pretty penny overhauling our entire culinary situation. We got all kinds of fresh greens, lean meats, herbs and spices I didn't know existed, and a plethora of raw ingredients I'd never cooked with. So we're not talkin' eggs and bacon here. Pan searing ground meats while dicing up some bok choy stems and onions really puts me in the right mood.

For a moment, I watch the sun rise through the window and pretend that all these fresh greens were grown in my own personal garden. I'm the head chef in my own kitchen, so it's okay that I'm dancing in my underwear. While my legs and feet pay tribute to the Marley legacy, my hands cook up a sizzling breakfast that's as meaty as it is juicy. I plate. I garnish with fresh parsley and squeeze lime over the dish to add the I-taste-something-different-but-I-can't-put-my-finger-on-what-it-is factor. I deliver it to my honored patron, my sleeping beauty.

I'm telling ya, it's the best way to start the day.

So I've been cooking breakfasts every morning. I won't wake up early to work out, I won't wake up early to work from home, and I won't wake up early for anything else. Except for cooking breakfast, I've discovered. We go on walks every night and we're planning on buying bikes. We just feel more healthy as human beings. We spend our time more wisely without trying. We spend money more frugally without realizing it. It's crazy how being responsible with your food ripples into every part of who you are. It's not about the food you eat - it's about your attitude toward food.

So we'll see where this goes, but it's the first time in a long time I've embarked on a journey with no definite finish line in my sights. And it is hella exciting.

This is all for now,
-R.

The Unnamed Masked Man

I'm making a super hero costume. Sometimes I feel like the world is watching me, waiting for me to do all the things they can't or won't do. But then I realize that my wife is really the only person doing that.

But as far as I'm concerned, those are the same thing.

Every now and then, though, I'll get an idea in my head, and I'll take it seriously. I'll send messages to everyone who I think would want to know, just to say "this is what I'm doing." It's always surprising to me how much of a positive response I get. I routinely get people telling me "we're in your corner" and "we can't wait to see this happen."

Sometimes it's an entrepreneurial venture, other times it's a creative project or some kind of mission I send myself on. Well, I've still got my plate of things, but I'm getting used to juggling it all - I've found my groove. My "thing of the moment," if you will, is a super hero.

He doesn't have a name yet, or a logo, but I am his alter ego. I'm only 4 pieces away from completing my costume. Everything that's free, I've done. I just need to buy a discontinued set of eyewear from eBay, a Kevlar vest made for motorcyclists, a pair of riot gloves, and some light tape just for looks.

It started as a realization that there are a lot of stupid people on campus at UTA, who think it's okay to walk up behind a woman and slap her ass, steal her backpack, or even threaten her life if she doesn't perform certain acts.

I am not okay with this.

The victims always report them to the cops, usually the next day, and the campus police put out warnings and waned posters. And y'know what else? The assailants always get away. I've put together a map in Google Maps that pinpoints the locations of each reported crime. I'm going to start training in kickboxing, Muay Thai and Vale Tudo. I'm going to do everything I can to see that these people can't keep doing what they're doing. I'm going to have to hurt some people, and I'm probably going to get hurt in the process. But the wife backs up this project, and so does everyone I've told so far.

Maybe nothing will happen. Maybe I'll patrol all semester and never see anything happen. If nothing else, I'll have a cool superhero costume for halloween and possibly Comic Con. I just need a name for this hero. And a logo.

A Thought.

I think that if evolution was in the bible, academia would write Darwin off as a religious fanatic and avidly advocate for the teaching of creationism in schools. I might make a web comic about that.

Why didn't I think of that?

I want to build one of these.

New Motivation, New Website, New Blog Post.

If I had been born a dwarf, I would make a living designing custom Wordpress widgets and call myself the Widget Midget.

Just had to get that off my chest.

Well I read Joel Watson's Experiment a few days ago, and it really lit a fire under me to get going on building the life I want. It's not going to happen on its own through some stroke of luck.

So I've been diligently working in my home time to get things up and going, and it's starting to show. I'm moving my own needles, and literally everyone I'm doing life with are also getting motivated and moving their own needles too. It's a pretty incredible thing to be a part of.

I've set up a local server on my iMac and built the framework of a website that will serve as a hub for all of my things I'm involved in, and all still need to do is actually design the look & layout, CSS the crap out of it and stock it up with content. And it needs a name. And I gotta buy the domain. And I need a logo...

I think ... I should probably be designing instead of blogging right now.

Confessions

This might be a bad idea. These are all true, whether or not I'm proud of them or wish for them to continue being true.

• I pee in the shower.
• I have road rage, but only against BMW drivers.
• I swallow watermelon seeds because I'm too lazy to find something to spit them into.
• I love being naked.
• I hate getting wet.
• I still can't tell if I like showers.
• The only things I hate about other people are the things I hate about myself.
• I'm not as good at anything as you think I am.
• I would almost always rather be alone than around people.
• I like a couple Nickelback songs.
• I don't hold my dick when I pee.
• I often think I'm more influential than I actually am.
• When I'm alone, I try to lick my own elbow.
• I assume everyone likes me.
• I fear that no one does.
• I cross boundaries. On purpose.
• Sometimes, I refuse to acknowledge that time moves at the same rate for everyone.
• I'm still growing out of putting things off that I don't want to do.
• This list is longer than I thought it would be.
• I love peeing.

My Plate at the Moment.

Wow. Sometimes, when you grab life by the horns, it kicks you in the nut sack and says "don't you touch my freaking horns."

There is so much on my mental plate right now. I recently wrote about how you can tell what's important to you by what you actually physically do with the 24 hours you're given each day. There are so many things that I either want to do, or am about to do, but I haven't done any of them yet. It's like that point on a roller coaster right at the top of that first giant hill, when you begin to feel gravity's pull, but you haven't actually started to plummet downhill yet.

• I'm currently co-writing the pilot to a mini-series that I think will make an impression on many people. I plan to actually put pen to paper for the first time tonight.
   
• I've been commissioned to create an infographic as a freelance job. I plan to begin moving the needle on that tonight as well.
   
• I've also been commissioned to design a logo for a newly opened online store for baby things.
   
• Yet another entrepreneur friend has asked me to be his go-to guy for all creative projects taken on by his up-and-coming marketing agency. We're still talking numbers.
   
• I've been speaking with a friend about adding illustrations to the posts on his hilariously clever tumblr page.
   
• I have received a wealth of confirmation that my daily drawings could turn into something big. They've made it to the front page of Reddit on more than one occasion. I'm currently working on figuring out how to make them make me money.
   
• I'm helping more than a few of my friends and family figure out how to see their own entrepreneurial dreams come to fruition.
   
• I'm still planning on painting a series of paintings for my nephew. Just because.

I think that's it. There's probably more. But I think that's it.

In order to handle doing all of these things, though, I've had to narrow my focus. I've made some changes in how I spend my time and where I pour my interest, so make room time-wise and brain-wise for the things I want to include in my life.

I'm taking a break from social media right now, and I won't be doing any more daily drawings until I can cater them towards whatever plan I come up with to monetize them. As I continue to make progress in each of these ventures, I'll likely post them here.

I find that I normally only blog when I learn something, and I expect to learn a lot once all of these things jump from my head to my hands and start happening.

This is all for now,

-R.

TIL...

It's 7:12 and I've been working from home for about an hour.

I woke up at 6 this morning to work, because I told a co-worker yesterday that I had hit a landmark on a project, that I actually hadn't hit. But it needs to be presentable by 10 today for a meeting, so I got up early to finish it up.

I've been able to force myself to wake up at the butt crack of dawn in the past, if what I was waking up for was extremely important - like a mission trip out of the country, or my high school girlfriend's mom's legendary Saturday morning garage sale of 2005.

...or, y'know, something like finishing up a project that I said was already finished.

What I'm getting at is that I thought I had trouble waking up early in the mornings, but I guess the root of the problem is that I don't put enough importance on the things I would wake up for.

I've been saying I need to cram a meditation, workout, or creative endeavor into my pre-work day, which means waking up butt early to do it. But I guess those three things just aren't as important to me as doing overdue design work.




But seeing how easy it is for me to wake up early for a specific task gives me hope that if I can figure out a way to convince myself that meditation is more important, I might actually be able to wake up early every morning to do it.

I'm batman

Yep, I made a batman costume out of long underwear and wore it to work.

 

Ben Franklin Was Smart

This story from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin illustrates the counterintuitive concept that asking people for help brings them closer to you.

A new member of the General Assembly opposed Franklin's appointment to the prestigious and lucrative clerk position. Franklin explains how he win this person over:

I did not, however, aim at gaining his favor by paying any servile respect to him, but, after some time, took this other method. Having heard that he had in his library a certain very scarce and curious book, I wrote a note to him, expressing my desire of pursuing that book, and requesting he would do me the favor of lending it to me for a few days.

He sent it immediately, and I'd return'd it in about a week with another note, expressing strongly my sense of the favor. When we next met in the House, he spoke to me (which he had never done before), and with great civility; and he ever after manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends, and our friendship continued to his death.

According to Franklin, this illustrated an old maxim: "He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged." There are two reasons for this:

First, once a person has helped you, he's more likely to help you again because refusing would mean he made a mistake in the first place. Assuming there were no bad consequences the first time, not continuing to help is to admit bad judgment.

Second, the prior interaction may have led to a better relationship. Therefore, doing something for you again has become natural. You, of course, should reciprocate, and an upward-spiraling, mutually enchanting bond can ensue.

So the thinking that people resent those who ask for favors may be wrong. Who are we to argue with Benjamin Franklin, anyway?

An excerpt from Guy Kawasaki's Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions

Why I'm Not Rayron

Today I was talking to a friend of mine about how I went from being Rayron to the man I am today.

As I went over everything that happened to bring me from then to now, I came across a realization:

I owe all of my personal improvements in the last six years to the existence of Glennda Bayon in my life.

This isn't a mushy "she makes me better and that's why I love her" thing, because that idea really is kind of selfish, I think.

It's more about stakes.

As a director, one of the most powerful tools we use to evoke genuinely meaningful performances from our actors is to raise the stakes. We take the situation that the characters presently face, and increase either their reward for success or their penalty for failure. Or both.

For example, I had an actress play the character of a lonely woman who spends 5 minutes pleading with her ex-husband to come back to her. She didn't seem desperate enough, so I told her that her character was pregnant. Out of the blue, she hit the degree of emotion that I was looking for. None of the lines hinted at a pregnancy, and she didn't reference it with her body language - it was just a seed that I planted in her head, and it stayed there - but it changed everything she did.

That's what happened when I met Glennda. Sure, I was growing up slowly and aimlessly, but I had no real reason to improve, other than the fact that I hated who I was. No one would suffer if I didn't mature, and there was no real reward waiting for me on the other side of adulthood.

But then, I met her. And we connected.
And we knew that we would spend our lives together.

All of a sudden, the stakes were raised. If I didn't grow and figure out my life, her future would suffer. But if I took the reins and learned how to be the man I needed to be, her life would improve too.

So again, the mere existence of Glennda in my life made me try that much harder to get from there to here, because she raised the stakes. I suddenly had something to lose. I had a lot to gain.

I had a reason to grow up.

And to this day, that's still the only reason I do anything to improve who I am. In that conversation with my friend, I made the comment:

"If I had never met my wife, the person standing in front of you would be an empty relic of who Rayron once was, hollow and only slightly less clueless."

This is all for now
-R.

The Idiot's Guide to Liking Your Life

The secret to liking your life, I've discovered, is to change it.

Alot.

It's not about getting rid of bad habits or finding new hobbies. It's not about reinventing yourself or creating the "new you." I find that those ideologies tend to focus on becoming who you wish you were instead of cultivating who you were born to be.

No, this is more about realizing that new things are exciting. That's because discovery is exciting. Creating things is exciting. Inventing things is exciting. Pondering awesome ideas is exciting, and it spurs you to action, which is exciting. Heck, research can be exciting if it's something you're super interested in.

And the things that they all have in common is change.

Growth is life, and growth is change. Therefore change is life, and thus stagnancy is lack of life.

...so if you're not living a life-filled life, what on earth are you doing?

...I think that's a fairly safe line of reasoning. Simply put, if you want to be excited about your life, change something in it. It really doesn't matter what. Start a diet. Keep track of your diet. Did it work? Did you like it? If not, try something else. Switch from a PC to a Mac or vice versa. Rearrange your living room. Buy a betta fish and see how long you can keep it alive. Plant a venus fly trap. Force yourself to wake up at 5:30 AM every day for a week.

The list goes on ad infinitum. Just change something, and you'll find that you'll become excited about that something. You'll come home from work or school or whatever you do during the day, thinking about that something. You might even obsess with your something.

And then, one day, it will either become a part of your life and you'll be glad you made that change, or you'll go back to the way things were.

Either way, when that day comes, change something else.

This is, I find, the best way to stay excited about life and be proactive in your growth as a human being. And let's face it: who doesn't want those two things?

This is all for now.
-R.

A New Take On An Old Tradition

So it's Day 1 of February, 2012. That means I've been trying (unsuccessfully) to write this for the past 31 days. But thanks to my February resolution, I have time. I've made time.

I've always followed the tradition of pledging to do something different with my life every New Years, even if it's a small change. I've never been able to keep New Years resolutions past a couple weeks, so I've spent the past few years trying to figure out ways around that.

My challenge to myself this year was to read every single day before I went to bed. I've got way too many books on my "to-read" list to not do this. But I've also been wanting to get to a point where I'm okay with waking up early, to avoid the all-too-common scenario of rushing through my morning routine and arriving late to wherever I'm scheduled to be, simply because I just had to have that extra 5 (read: 25) minutes of sleep.

A buddy of mine said:

"I have no problem waking up early; it's the getting-out-of-bed part that kills me."

This affected me in a profound way. He was right - I can wake up easy peasy. But it's resisting the temptation to go back to sleep that gets me every time. So my train of thought went something like this:

"I should resolve to get out of bed as soon as I wake up every morning. I'll set my alarm for the last possible second I could wake up, but if I wake up at 5:30, I get up at 5:30."

"But I already have a resolution: read every night before I go to bed."

"What if I did both? No, because then every time I heard something cool, I'd add it to the list, and before I knew it, I'd have 12 resolutions to keep up with."

...And then it hit me. It's much easier to keep something going for 30 days than it is for 365 days. So I decided to have a new resolution each month this year. The idea is that if I can read every day for all of January, then by February it will have become part of my routine (and it has).

So when February rolls around (and it has), I will already be in the habit of fulfilling my January resolution, so I can start to focus solely on my February resolution (and I have).

But the trick, as I've said before, is not to plan everything out beforehand. This is where I would normally continue by saying "...and here is a list of all of my resolutions for the year of 2012."

...But I didn't make a list. I don't plan to. In January, I knew what my February resolution would be. Now, I know what my March and April resolutions are: to learn how to utilize my "inner nag" to get things done, and to act on it when I say "I need to ______." (e.g. sending that email NOW instead of LATER, or setting a solid date to hang out instead of saying "we need to hang out soon")

I'm not sure which will come first, but by May 1, I will have done each of them for at least a month.

The reason I'm not planning this out is because I am constantly changing and my world is always evolving. Come August, I may not be where I thought I would be. I may have different needs in the monthly resolutions department.

So there you have it. Instead of a new resolution every 365 days, I'm living by a code of new resolutions every 30 (or 31...or 28...or 29) days. And this month's resolution is going to annoy the hell out of me. In a good way.

This is all for now,
-R.