A Worthy Goal from a Petty Reason

The impetus for change can come from many sources. Some people wake up one day, look in the mirror, and decide they are tired of the person looking back at them. Others see a friend make a life altering change and wish to follow in those footsteps. Others still may be inspired by the story of the stranger that has made a great change in their life. My reason for getting back into shape was not so noble.

My wife's college friends picked this summer to have a reunion of sorts. I've met a couple of them intermittently throughout my association with my wife, but I've never gotten to know any of them. Essentially they are strangers. The important part isn't the friend's I've met that will be there it is the one that I haven't. When my wife was in college she had a boyfriend as many college females do and this boyfriend and her were friends with the same people. The big point out of all this rambling is that her ex-boyfriend, the only other male she had a long term relationship with, will be there.

Sprinting to a Finish Line that is Miles Away

When working out I've always had one problem. I have a tendency to push myself too hard. I have the constant feeling that I am not pushing myself hard enough because my body fails at certain things and it is when the body is tired and at the point where you feel the lactic acid burn that the real work is done. Because of my anger at those failings I push myself whenever I get the chance. My weakness in working out has always been core stability. It is because of this that I attack that weakness with plank jacks and mountain climbers. I find them difficult and need to push myself to get through it, and once I get into the mindset of pushing myself I don't stop.

That first paragraph is a lot of rambling to get to the point of this post and that is that the week before last I pushed myself to three workouts a day. It was a very hard week. I ended each day more tired than I'd been in a long time, but I made it through. The next week wasn't that difficult and I decided to continue doing three workouts a day, but I would make the second workout more intense. This could have been a mistake or the other mistake could have been to ignore what had been until this week a minor pain.

Getting Into the Fourth Best Shape of my Life

Let's start this story with an old advertising slogan. One that was popular when I was a youth and used to describe a product I enjoyed then and still do, and that slogan is, "Bigger is better." Where I heard it most was to describe professional wrestlers like Earthquake and Typhoon. It didn't matter that they were fat, they were bigger and that was better. My real idols at the time were Macho Man and Brett Hart. I enjoyed putting my four year old nephew in the Sharpshooter and running around the house in my underwear doing elbow drops off the back of the couch.

At that time I am going to say I was eight years old, and I wanted to be big. I made my mother buy me some dumbbells and I started lifting them as best I knew how. The next time I went to the doctor I asked him how best I should lift the weights. I figured if anyone was going to know about how to get big and strong it was the doctor, but instead of telling me to just work on running and body weight exercises while my body grew he told me to not lift weights until I was sixteen. With weightlifting suddenly taken off the table there was only one path left to me getting big, and that was cramming lots of food down my throat. This could have been done in a healthy manner as well but no one told me that one either.

Driving in Snow: The Most Important Thing I Learned in College

The only real explanation for why am one of the dozens of people in Northern Virginia that knows how to drive in the snow is because I spent four years of my life going to college in Rockingham County. During the winter down there snow was a regular occurrence and everyone knew how to deal with it. There was none of the Northern Virginia escapades of drives either making themselves an obstacle by over reacting or being a hazard by pretending nothing was going on. The normal flow of traffic dropped by about ten miles an hour and everyone went along with it, and when there was an incident the emergency responders knew how to deal with it.

That was my main issue this morning. I knew there would be plenty of idiots on the road and I knew there would be incidents, but I had to be where I had to be and venturing out in this mess wasn't an option. In Rockingham County an army of sand trucks would have been out through the night and plows would have been working overtime to keep the roads clear and nothing would be shutdown for 4-6 inches of snow. It would've been life as normal, but Fairfax County isn't Rockingham County and my only home was that most people would stay in their homes.

Why I Quit on the Job Search

I went to have dinner with a friend last night and during that dinner the talk turned to jobs. My friends and family for the past year and a half have been trying to help me find a better job. I am one of the millions of American that is currently under employed. I have a four year college degree with a major in English and a minor in Political Science and I spent the first five years of my life in the job market enhancing various computer skills. I can program a CNC router using Alpha-Cam or MicroVellum and I am also certified in AutoCadd. These skills as well as my ability to read, understand, and translate construction plans are valuable skills, but I never want to work in the construction industry again.

As the talk turned to jobs and what I could do or where I could find jobs I shied away from it. I, like most people, don't like talking about my failings, and I've found the current job market impossible to navigate. Eventually my friend told me that if he had my writing skills he would put them to better use. That a first person account of what it is like to be under employed in post-recession America would be something people would be interested in reading. For lack of a better term it would be real.

Finished

I didn't sit there staring at the final poem or call a friend and tell them i was done. I didn't even post a message on social media. My 100 days of writing project became a private affair and when I finished I kept it to myself, but it was more than that. I had no feeling of relief or accomplishment. I was finished with this large project that I had poured myself into, and yet when I finished I had no feelings about it. I was done and that was it.

I had planned out the final poem for about a month. I had figured out what it would be about and was only waiting for day 100 so that I could write it. Which brings up the question of when is something written. Was this poem really the work of day 100 or was it from day 70? Is a poem written when it is put on paper or when the idea is conceived? I cannot give the answer to that, but if I had to I would say it is the latter. I do most of my writing in my head. Often times the act of putting fingers to keyboard is a final motion. The draft, first revision, and sometimes the second or third revision have already happened in my mind before my index finger makes that first keystroke.

The Best Game I Don't Want to Play

One of the first computer games I ever played was Sid Meier's Pirates, but I never beat the game. I've owned this game on no less than four separate occasions. It was given to me on a floppy disk and then when we owned a computer without a floppy drive I bought it on CD. After that I ended up buying a downloadable version on one of my laptops and finally I bought the iOS version for my iPAD. I've never stopped enjoying the game, but to me the game wasn't about finding the lost sister. It was about being a pirate and taking over the Caribbean for whatever country I was representing.

Now, 26 years after Pirates was first released there is a new pirate game and my feelings about it are much the same. I am talking about Assassin's Creed IV. I've played the game for a bit now and I should be deeper into it than the fifth chapter, but I don't want to play the actual game. I want to roam the Caribbean causing mischief and mayhem. I want to take down ships, improve my ship, and then take down bigger ships. I find the game extremely fun, but the main quest feels like a side adventure in the life of a pirate, and as of right now I've left it far behind me and have spent much more time pillaging and raiding the Spanish Main.

The hallmark of a truly great open world game is that it gives you the freedom to create your own game. All the times I've played Pirate my game was to take over the world. I turned it into a game of Risk with pirates and as of right now I am playing Assassin's Creed IV in much the same way. I don't know what will happen when I have the ship fully upgraded. I am sure I will finish the main quest. It hasn't gotten that intriguing but I am generally curious to see where it goes, and you have to play the main quest to unlock some of the better equipment in the game.

Some of my feeling about the main quest line might be that I enjoyed Assassin's Creed III immensely and the best innovation in that game was the combat. That is gone in IV and Edward Kenway plays much weaker than Conner. Conner flowed through combat and taking down large groups of enemies wasn't much of a challenge. There were more than a few times that my entire play session involved me running through the wilderness reenacting scenes from The Patriot.

I found the combat to be the best part of that game, and that is what I find lacking in IV. With all that being said I think I am going to enjoy IV more as a game. The navel battles and the joy of being a pirate are what make it fun. The Assassin's Creed part of the game feels like it is almost an afterthought, and I am ok with that, because like Sid Meier's Pirates years ago I don't need to even play the game to have fun playing the game.