Pilgrim’s Progress

Just the name of this movie evokes feelings of loneliness and emptiness, for me at least. It’s a story about a Japanese fisherman who is estranged from his adult son. Finding out that his son has terminal cancer, he decides to take a very uncharacteristic chance and go on a trip to China. His son is a huge fan of Chinese Masked Opera, and after viewing a documentary that he made, his father decides to go to China to film the famous opera Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles.

Once in China, he encounters many obstacles which eventually lead him to a remote village in the mountains, where he befriends a young boy, Yang Yang. Through Yang Yang he finally begins to address some of his issues with his own son.

This movie was very atmospheric, with a broad sweep of locations that helped set the tone. Everything from a snow-covered Japanese fishing village to the barren mountains of China gave feelings of emptiness and silence. Worth seeing.

Sometimes when I’m out working with my laptop, I come across something that  really needs to be dealt with when I return to my desk at home. Maybe it’s something I’ll want to file, maybe I need to delegate it, or maybe it’s just something that I’ll want to put into my inbox and process later. A really handy way to do this is to print to your home printer in offline mode. Then, whenever you go home and plug back into your docking station/printer out will pop anything you chose to print while you were out. No thought required, which fits neatly into my philosophy of making systems as completely fool-proof as possible.

So I haven’t been to Sin City in more than a decade (and my oldest child is 12, cooincidence? I think not!), but next week I’m going out there with some friends to a gaming show. I’m pretty stoked! I haven’t had anything resembling an actual vacation for myself in a loooong time. If you don’t hear from me by next Saturday, assume I’ve ditched everything, changed my name to Vince, and become a blackjack dealer.

I finally did it. I did a quick count, and as far as I can tell I’ve started training in seven different martial arts styles in my life (not counting just auditing a teacher or trying something out for a month or two). In all that time, the closest I got to a black belt was a brown belt I received in Isshin Ryu just before my teacher relocated to Pennsylvania. Every time I’ve gotten close before either I moved, my teacher moved, or something truly bizarre happened (one of my teachers had been having an affair, left his wife, and absconded while owing back rent and tuition to several of his students).

Thursday night I finally managed to earn a black belt, and I’m still tripping about it three days later. My test was delayed three hours, so I didn’t finish testing until 11:15 PM. I couldn’t sleep afterward until 2:00 AM and spontaneously woke up two hours later.

I know that my knowledge today isn’t any better than it was last Sunday, and I know that the belt doesn’t really make any difference in what I do every day, but now when I’m talking to a non-martial artist I can tell them that I have a black belt instead of having to explain exactly where I am in my training. And now I can start teaching what I know to others and really start understanding what it is I’ve been doing for the last four years.

 Gaman!

I’m mainly focused on the ones in my stomach. I’m testing for my blackbelt tonight, even though my teacher’s teacher has basically told me that I’m wasting my time. But even though I’ve been given no hope, I’m oddly optimistic. I guess freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.
Wish me luck…

Yesterday I spent four hours with my friend Allison helping her get her office (and a portion of her life) more organized. I’ve been using a lot of the principles from the book Getting Things Done by David Allen for about eight years now, and it’s really turned my life around in a lot of ways. When I was younger, I depended on my memory and pure mental horsepower to make sure that my projects got completed, my bills got paid, and so forth. But as my life got more complicated, this approach started to break down. One summer when I was working on two full-time consulting jobs and trying to finish writing my first book with two young children in the house, I realized that something had to give.

 So now I’ve got a pretty good grasp on my work, and I’m not often “surprised” by things that used to slip through the cracks. And I got a real feeling of accomplishment helping Allison start doing the same thing for herself. Time is the one commodity they’re not making more of for any of us, so anything I can do to help people use it better seems like a worthwhile way to spend mine.

Somehow I wound up seeing this video today. I’ve always had my reservations about Walt Disney and his influence on the world, but seeing these cute little Japanese girls dressed like pirates and singing It’s a Small World After All caused me some serious psychic trauma. Watch at your own risk.

My latest creation is ready for late-night TV. Hopefully it’ll be ready for prime time soon, but one step at a time. For your enjoyment, go play my Internet rock, paper, scissors game. It’s designed for the iPhone, but you can play it on IE or Safari. Right now you need to have an opponent to play, but maybe I’ll be adding an AI in the near future. Stay tuned!

because when the beating stops you feel so damn good. I’m not happy about being divorced, and I certainly never planned for it to happen. My parents divorced when I was 12 and it made an indelible impression on me. Their divorce shaped my life (for good or ill) and I never wanted my own children to have to deal with the sheer terror of seeing their parents split apart.

But now that it’s done, and I’ve had a couple of years to start rebuilding from the train-wreck of the divorce itself, life is so much sweeter than it ever was before. It’s weird, but the absence of pain feels like pleasure, if it went on for long enough. So no matter what else happens from now on, at least the daily beatings have stopped. Huzzah!