The body composition challenge doesn’t factor Super Bowl Sundays into the lifestyle plan.

There are few things worse than eating well for more than a few days and then being thrust into a world of rich, high-calorie, great-tasting, completely and totally bad for you food that you can’t help but sample repeatedly. Oh sure, that buffalo chicken with bleu cheddar cheese dip was pretty tasty after one bite, but after that, more seven-layer dip than I’ve ever seen at a store and far too much time to eat it all, your body is going to punish the shit out of you. Literally.

While I let you read that again and grimace, I have a confession: my calorie counting went to shit yesterday. While I did start the day with my normal turkey ham, turkey pastrami, egg white, mushroom and spinach omelette AND got a good half hour of some full-speed tennis drills (I hit Katie twice. In my defense, she was totally standing at the net), everything after that was a blur of melted cheese, chips and napkins to stop the drips.

But I did do something I’ve NEVER done before. For the first time, instead of loading up my plate and going back for seconds and thirds, I ate slower, with smaller portions. I had a bite of this and a bite of that. I avoided the cupcakes. I DIDN’T chow down like a fat man.

Then we went home and made pizza almost from scratch with ingredients from Whole Foods. Good thing I was under my caloric intake for the week (1852 a day and I was 828 under as of Sunday morning), making yesterday’s binge a little less bad than it could have been.

I do continue to believe that diets don’t work, but a combination of food awareness and healthy meal options does. And even though my gut has punished me for yesterday’s transgressions, I can’t say I’d take it back.

Seven-layer dip is too delicious.

My pants are still a bit too big. That’s good. Anyone want to bet how much I’ll weigh in at on Friday?

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“My mentor taught me that destiny whispers softly. It does not shout. It is not a bully, pushing us where we don’t want to go. It quietly nods to the choices we make. Over time, the consequences of these choices shape our destiny.” Mollie Marti, page 163, Walking With Justice

I’ve never had a mentor.

The closest I’ve come was my Highline Community College professor, Dr. T.M. Sell. He was and is a political science and journalism professor, and I was a reporter and editor on his staff for over a year. He taught me a framework for writing that I still use, he showed me the importance of integrity (journalistic or not) and also encouraged me to keep trying even when I most certainly did suck.

Walking Justice author Dr. Mollie Marti’s experience with Judge Max Rosenn sounds like it was ripped from an idealized world we all dream about. Her tribute book to such a great man gives a glimpse into the life of a person almost too perfect to be real. Like the crazy old Supreme Court Justice in Sorkin’s West Wing that wouldn’t step down until Glenn Close’s character was ready to step up – despite poor health, crazy guy knew he was better than most other judges on his WORST day – Rosenn was born to be a judge. He was meant to be both a leader and a servant, a man who loved his wife and his life.

Marti mentions, more than once, Judge Rosenn’s relentless desire to publish opinions and to see the law in context every time, something that is far too rare today. Too many of those in public power seem to shy away from taking a side and when they do, they make unfair comparisons with blanket generalities. Not Judge Rosenn. Here is a PDF link to Judge’s Uncommon Lessons.

Marti provided me an early release PDF copy of this book for free, but was not compensated for this review. Walking with Justice: Uncommon Lessons from One of Life’s Greatest Mentors is available through Amazon or other fine booksellers.

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It’s like Fight Club; but no one is building bombs or preparing for war. Tyler Durden had his army preparing their bodies. This leaderless movement is preparing their minds. When I first asked for a representative, I was rebuffed. This didn’t make any sense to me. How could a group looking for legitimacy not have someone to represent them?

After a lengthy Twitter argument involving multiple accounts (one random guy I’ve never heard of or spoken to before blocked me–yes,this happened), I read Francine Hardwaway’s excellent article about her time spent on Wall Street this past week. In her attempt to explain why the mainstream media would never understand the Occupy movement, she made it obvious to me.

This movement isn’t about answers. It’s not about reacting to a problem and putting a bandage on it. It’s about finding the right questions for a world that I don’t think most of us understand. The 99% is not only shut out for most of our country’s decisions, but far too many of us aren’t even aware that it’s happening. It’s laziness on our part, but not out of spite or pure selfishness, but rather because it’s easier to love what you have instead of always yearning for more.

Who can blame them? Whether right or wrong, the Occupy movement has already served its purpose: it’s made people think about things a little differently. Not all people agree or understand, but that’s okay. We’ll all learn at our own pace, in our own way.

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Facebook is an average service built for average people. Microsoft makes products for mass consumption. Apple tries to get consumers to conform to their visions rather than the other way around. Milk company promoters have somehow made us believe that milk is necessary our entire lives.

Get this guy a medal for that beard.

This tactic worked for years. Lack of choice, limited marketing mediums and fear of change (few TV channels, no easily found and trusted ‘weird’ internet sites and the desire to be like our friends and colleagues) kept normal people in line. We bought groceries from Wal-Mart, electronics from Best Buy and everything else from Amazon.

Don’t think normal people are somehow bad. They’re not. They choose to be that way and often live extremely happy lives. But what about those who choose different? What about people who choose to be weird?

Seth Godin’s We Are All Weird delves into this new world of weird. He states that the mass markets aren’t going to get any more massive and the years of changing consumer behavior to fit the mean are over.

“The factory came first. It led to the mass market. Not the other way around.” -page 9, We Are All Weird

This guy chooses to be weird.

But weird comes with its own problems. Weird products and services, because they can’t always be made or offered efficiently on scale, cost more. And because the market of the weird isn’t quite as efficient or consistent as the typical mass market, anything produced will be in short supply. Limited edition, formerly a marketing buzzword to get us to BUY IT NOW, will soon become the default.

There are 7400 hardcover copies left of Seth Godin’s We Are All Weird and he has no plans to print any more, ever. Buy it and see how being ourselves, how being individuals, how being weird is how it almost always was and how it always will be.

Seth is offering a webinar on October 3 for anyone who buys six or more books.

(Disclaimer- I received a copy for free as part of my work with the Domino Project Street Team, but also bought a copy for my dad.)

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I’ve never traveled outside of North America. I’ve only lived in Washington state and Arizona. I’ve never been an activist, never been personally affected by a terrorist attack and I’ve never participated in a protest or demonstration.

And this is what I think it means to be American:

Everyone deserves a chance. Maybe only one, but they deserve one regardless of anything but prior actions.

We help those that need it, regardless. We live in a civilized society, basic needs can always be met.

Manners (how we act toward others) are more important than laws. If we all we’re decent to each other, we wouldn’t need laws.

Ideas and innovation are the backbone of any leader. We need to embrace change.

We have the freedom to almost anything we want, and the maturity to embrace the consequences.

We can, if we so choose, be a greater version of ourself on every new day.

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(I’m sure that blog posts like this are the reason my dad thinks I don’t have more clients and am not more successful in business. That being said, I don’t know of any other way to get this stuff out and I feel an obligation to share. Granted, this isn’t as inspiring as most of the other real writers I constantly compare myself to, but this is what you get when you have no actual education in how to write correctly. Okay, I’m done apologizing for myself.)

Never satisfied. Always looking to get better. Constantly obsessed with busting the status quo. Disagreeing with authority on principle.

None of these things matter without an end goal. They end up making a person bitter, angry, upset, frustrated and a shell of who they should be.

I have no idea what a meaningful life is. Love? Have that and that is AWESOME. Financial success? Eh, but I don’t need much. Recognition? A fair amount–I mean, there are tshirts out there with my face on them. A sense of a job done well? Never.

I suppose part of being “creative” is never being satisfied, but that creates an endless cycle of disappointment.

And all the above creates stress. Stress that will slowly kill you. Stress that makes your body function at high alert for hours on end, exhausting our ability to think, fight off disease and even process food correctly.

Image courtesy the FANTASTIC Gaping Void

In the new movie People vs The State Of Illusion, writer/producer Austin Vickers discusses, among other things, the amount of stimuli that we’re exposed to every single day. It’s something in the billions range, but we can only process about .0001% of that. No matter how much we read, how much we produce and how many places we travel, our minds cannot use most of what we’re exposed to.

But dammit, I sure as hell try. Writing, visiting, reading, giving an opinion, volunteering where I can…it’s become a race against time. How much can I do today? How much can I do for others today?

It’s really, really hard. So hard that I cried during the first 15-20 minutes of this movie. Right in the middle of the movie theater with my Donald Duck “This is my happy face” cap pulled low, I cried tears of frustration and maybe a little catharsis. After the movie, I couldn’t wait to tell Austin that it had saved my life.

I see it now, I told him. People can change, but only if we accept that our reality can be shaped by us. Only if we accept that some of what we do is bad for us and instead of running from those bad things (overeating, depression, addiction, etc.) we should run straight toward to see what GOOD it’s doing for us.

Why did I used to drink until I blacked out? I loved living in the moment.

Why do I eat an entire pizza and many bags of popcorn? It reminds me of home and being safe.

Why am I addicted to Twitter/Facebook/anywhere people will read my thoughts? It gives me a sense that I’m doing something.

But nothing has really changed. A long, relaxing trip to Flagstaff wasn’t enough. A five-day trip to LA and Disneyland wasn’t enough. The support of the lovely Katie (who puts up with my almost daily Gangplank criticism and does her best not to take it personally) sure helps, but she can’t fix me either.

This feeling of helplessness hits me every August. I really, really don’t like this heat. Call me a pussy if you want, but if people can get sad because of too much rain, it certainly stands to reason that the same damn thing could happen when I wake up sweaty, spend my day sweaty and go to bed hoping I won’t wake up with a soaked pillow and sheets. But I digress.

I wish I could say that I was able to act on what I recognized in The State Of Illusion. I wish I could say that I feel better and that I know what it is I’m supposed to be doing and how to ensure that my life and those of who I love will be great.

But I can’t. I’m stuck feeling dissatisfied, upset with myself and frustrated that I’m not doing enough.

Either way, I’m going to see the movie again. Perhaps the second showing will allow me some kind of respite from the spinning in my head. It sure as hell worked the first time, but I know something needs to change. This time, I’m taking notes.

And this time I’m not going to run away.

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The announcement of and the invite to Google’s latest attempt at social networking brought with it hopes of an internet utopia: users sharing specific, relevant content to groups divided either by relationship to or shared interest. Finally, I could share tech news with those I consider business associates, pet pics with my family and x-rated comments and images with my friends.

Sorta like web-based email groups, right?

This excited me. I was tired of the constant stream of crap updates on Facebook and pointless retweets on Twitter. Call me difficult, but I’m here to learn, be inspired or socialize; baby pics from people I don’t know and parroted opinions don’t do that very well.

I dove into Google+ like the rest of the geeks did. I followed everyone I recognized and branched out a bit by following people already popular on other social networks. I figured Google+’s new way of arranging contacts would help me rid my stream of the noise I’ve grown tired of.

I was an idiot. It took three days before the first pet pics where posted, baby pics followed soon thereafter. The A-Listers all wrote blog posts about how Google+ could help people, but one stood out.

Louis Gray, popular tech writer (I’m not certain as to what exactly he does) wrote a post admonishing a reader who dared attempt to tell him exactly how he should be using Google+.

I completely get the guy’s point. He follows Gray because he wants to know about tech, not because he cares about pictures of Gray’s kids. This makes sense, as I often follow people because of specific interests, while tolerating all the other updates that don’t pertain to me.

Google+ was supposed to change all that. Finally, people would curate their updates and only post to specific audiences, so the public at large could–as long as the person uses their Circles “correctly”–cut down on noise and only get the meat they desire.

That didn’t happen. No matter how much any of us would like to connect with people that my teach us, it just isn’t possible by adding “friends” the social networking way (adding by interest or friends of friends). Gray is right, social networking is about people, but most of those people don’t care much about the people that listen to them.

And they shouldn’t. Gray publishes what makes sense to him, I tweet what I think is funny and you hopefully post whatever you think is great. This means we often won’t give a crap about what the other posts, and there isn’t anything, nor should there be, we can do about it.

Why? Because we have loose ties. We don’t really “know” each other. So how in the hell do you solve this problem? Bill Binder seems to have the answer:

Choose your friends better. The onus is on each of us to make technology, not people, work the way we want it to.

Let’s save the “you’re not doing it right” conversations as joke fodder during geek conferences. We can’t change people, but we can choose to ignore them.

It’s not personal. Most of us aren’t really friends in the first place.

(To all my friends: you rock. You know who you are. Thanks for making this fun.)

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Fun time-lapse video I made as part of the DPJ’s All-Star Week coverage. First time I’ve done a walkthrough with a video camera and first time I used the time-lapse functionality on the GoPro.

Background music is 0805 from Idiotape. South Korean band that played at SXSW 2011.

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It feels wrong realizing how easy it is to make things harder on myself. Putting things off, starting new projects and avoiding tough tasks all make for a guilty feeling whenever I go to bed not having finished what I’d hoped to that day.

I sit here today with less than 7k words to write in a book I’ve been working on since February, a new client that’s sure to cause trouble but will hopefully allow me to rampage Twitter with a real purpose and lesser paying but still important projects that I’m slowly becoming over-involved with. It’s weird how my business, and by business I mean writing, interests are seldom about money, they’re always about doing cool things.

Not finishing necessarily, but doing cool things.

Finishing is tough. It requires of me constant dedication for a few days to emphatically paint my last stroke, but for some reason I fight it every time.

Business-minded people will likely tell me to shut up, finish the job and get paid. And that’s what I should do. And it’s what I will do. Eventually.

But this kind of procrastination is a double-edge sword. It shows that I really do like and am proud of what I create, but it also shows I’m more addicted to the process than the result. I just really like to write, but I’m not sure I’m totally in love with producing things by writing.

It’s a weird feeling.

In his upcoming book The Accidental Creative, Todd Henry writes about the need to establish an environment and a ritual, creative or not, to constantly be able to produce anything cool.

I can hear those in the creative industry sighing a collective “duh”.

So how do you balance physical health, client responsibilities and creative rhythms all at once? I surely can only do two of those things, albeit not at 100%.

I suppose I should have known this already, but sometimes it takes a bit of a push and maybe a cool acronym (F.R.E.S.H. is in the book) to get you going.

I guess this was never supposed to be easy, right?

(Disclosure–I’m a member of the Accidental Creative Street Team and received the book for free. Well, I guess I traded my time to receive a copy of the book, but it’s not like he offered free books for everyone who signed up. I very likely would have bought it anyway, and I thought I had pre-ordered the Kindle version when the book was first announced but I did not.

Also, I have a podcast coming out which was inspired by the Accidental Creative podcast. Man, I miss writing silly stuff like this.)

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Starting a business is hard. Running a business is even harder. Starting a business in one weekend is damn near impossible.

But I just watched 13 teams develop ideas into real-world, viable models in right around 54 hours. Local food, NFC-enabled business cards, writing lessons for kids and a new way to bring back that old birthday excitement highlighted the presentations last night, proving that difficult doesn’t mean impossible.

While my idea didn’t work out, the entire weekend was an amazing learning experience. Failure, when thought of as an experiment, is a fantastic experience.

But enough about my failure as a learning experience. Let’s talk about a local startup success that’s already making a profit, has made it through one pivot, and looks to be a sustainable business model.

Say hello to BusyBeeHouseCleaners.com.

Led by Ransley Carpio, BusyBee HouseCleaners started as a fun side project to raise cash for a vacation and has turned into an actually business that has quite a potential market. By keeping costs low, they’re able to undercut a lot of bigger companies who already handle housecleaning services.

As a guy who really doesn’t enjoy the business side of running a business, I’m impressed with Ransley’s ability to break down what they are doing in terms that even I can understand. In a world where most large companies hide their secret sauce and never reveal their true aspirations, it’s refreshing to see Ransley and team so up front with their approach.

Their rising success also proves that startups need not be software based. Too often we fall into the trap of thinking that every startup MUST be digital, it MUST be scalable and it MUST expand or it will fail. As Derek Sivers mentioned in his upcoming Domino Project book Anything You Want, not all businesses need to grow in order to be successful. It’s okay to want to be the best at what you do for a small target audience. As long as your values align, things will work out.

(Disclosure – I’m friends with Ransley and his team cleaned my apartment for free.)

Props to Drew Manusharow for helping me and Donor Assure out this weekend. If you need a designer, he’s available.

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