It’s been over a week now since my last post, so I felt compelled to come out of the shadows for a moment and say a few things.

For starters, I wanted to make sure everyone knew I was still here.

Though I haven’t been posting often this last week, I’ve been busy.

I’ve got my game face on, and I’m plowing away on several high priority projects.

1. I’ve been very focused on finding a job. I’ve enjoyed my little break, but I still need an income, preferably full time until the end of the year. Ideally, I’m looking for one on my campus (because they are obviously lenient about working around class schedules and it will help with the scheduling of my life in general–children, etc.), but I will take any I can find in the meantime. I had a really promising interview on Wednesday: the pay isn’t great but I liked the CFO and attorney I would be working for (even though the job is still accounting-related), but it could also be slightly part-time (which would mean I might be able to keep it while attending classes and so, I wouldn’t have to worry about finding another job later).

2. I’ve been pumping out a scholarship almost every 3-4 days. This has been fun, and I hope I win some of them. I’ve never applied for scholarships before, so it’s been good practice, even if I don’t win any (at least I’ll know that I’m not being competitive enough). This has occupied most of my time. I’ve produced some great essays so far, and am starting to run out of good ones I can apply for. I’ve got a budget set so we can make it without needing them, but it will be tight, so if I win some, it will be bonus.

3. I’ve resurrected my ambition to learn ancient Greek. This has been very fun because my wife is doing it with me. It’s been great to have someone to say the words to, if for no other reason, for the validation–not to mention (for the guys) that if you’re someone who loves Homer and Plato, as I do, there’s nothing quite as sexy as having your wife speak to you in Greek. Believe it or not, learning Greek isn’t as hard as it might sound. The hard part is the unique alphabet. Most of it, as with any language, is the vocabulary. At some point, you just have to memorize several thousand words to get good. I’ve found so many resources on learning Greek that I may even write a post just about it.

4. I’ve been imagining some ways I can reinvent this entire blog. As I find myself shifting gears, I find that my perspective toward most of what I’ve written about is changing too. I’ll have a lot more to say about this soon, and I’d like as much feedback from you as possible when I post about it later. The basic premise on the possible change is this:

I’ve always been writing from the view of an unaccomplished person with a great passion to do what for me, has been impossible. It has been the view of someone unwilling to give up on his dream.

Now that some doors have opened up, and I’m moving again (now that I don’t have to give up on my long-term dream of teaching), I suddenly feel detached from that view.

I was the trooper fighting his way like a die-hard up a hill, and now I’m standing at the top of that hill.

5. Still lots of articles in the chute. I’ve got several articles begun (and several very nearly finished) that I’ve been sitting on so I can make sure they’re just right. I’ve got a hefty post about a friend, a short story, and a growing multi-part series about my horrid experiences with my last company. The greater distance I am gaining from it is offering me a clearer view as to just how damned bad it really was.

A teaser: for over a year of my life I sat, daily, just like some unfortunate lab rat, under a wall board that beeped hundreds of times a day.

(I dedicate this post to Bruce from The Thinker’s Podium–who doesn’t know me in the least for I have never yet, until this very sentence, spoken up to him. I have followed his blog for a very long time and sometimes lament that I haven’t summoned the guts to write with my full intellect, as he writes with his, but instead, I often succumb to the subtle fear of marginalizing my audience by saying things that I know aren’t popularly read enough to support my own blogging ambitions, and so, at this moment, on the doorstep of my return to the familiar and sorely missed activities of an intellectual in my private life, I have him close in my mind)

Because this is such a special occasion for me, I’ve added a special touch to this post. Below, I’ve embedded Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major/Prélude, performed by Yo-Yo-Ma. I have listened to this song almost endlessly while I have written this post. The song so closely follows my personal feelings that I couldn’t abandon the song by publishing the post without it, so decided to bring the song with the post so you can enjoy them both together, as I have.

If you’re reading this from a feed reader, you’ll need to come here to this post to listen (the flash player does not work in a feed).

A very special thanks to Walls for reminding me of this magical song.

[See post to listen to audio]

“This is the Greatest Week of My Life”

When I say that, in fact, when most men say that in reference to events outside of the births of their children or their wedding days, they run the austere risk of drawing the justified ire of the children they’re raising and the wives who support them.

Even so, I have the authority (we all do) to offer a separation of our private and public lives. And if I’ve just left any doubt at all, the greatest private day of my life was the day my young bride walked, smiling (shy as she was), dressed in flowers, through the beautiful rays of the sun on the great outdoor garden on her way down toward me so that I could declare to her and the world that she would be mine, forever.

It was that very kiss, to that very woman that offered me the final and honest understanding of human love. I love you, Love.

A close second was the day my son first looked up to me, moments after he was born. I swore an oath to myself never to repeat the bad parenting I received from a father who I could, using hindsight, name Wrath, and instead, just to settle the score and heal strange wounds that still sometimes wept, I sealed that promise by naming my son after my father, Michael. I will be a better man for you, Son.

A close third (and only third because the second witness of a live human birth contains significantly less shock factor) was the birth of my daughter, who, even just today, shows me human courage by refusing to give up even when gravity demands otherwise. She started walking just the other day and now she is becoming quite bold. The daredevil thinks she can practically run and knows not at all quite fully how to barely stand, but that handicap doesn’t seem to slow her down. To you my Dear, I extend the deepest imaginable apologies for any poor man who thinks he will one day take you away from me. Phrases like “Epic Scrutiny” will someday seem quite mild when compared to what I will do to him.

These are all private triumphs. And they are the best things of my life.

Even so, there is, as there is with many men, a second me. There is a me who wants to run off and conquer lands and pretend I’m king, even if for just a day or two. In other words, I want to make something of myself. I want be somebody. For a long time now, I have been a nobody.

This week though, I am somebody again.

Slowly, I am sinking away from a few years worth of animosity and sliding into the more comfortable seat of deeper thoughtfulness that left me the day I boxed up my ambitions and stowed them away, while I whispered to the box the insincere promise that I would return to collect them again all just moments before I tromped on off to full-time and low-wage work that had nothing to do with my skills and everything to do with necessity.

I hate for anyone to think of history too tragically, and then to connect that with a nimble attempt of mine to gain something from that history, but either way, that’s life, and these are just facts. Many of you know them.

Five years ago my mother died, and it was during those days when life felt most like the decaying Roman empire for me. I watched as armies all around laid waste to everything that once was grand in all respects. I quit my job on October 31st, 2008. My mother passed (or we found her) on October 31st, 2003. The date I selected was no coincidence, but rather, I selected it because of its symbolism.

Five years. Five years?

It was such a short time before that fifth year ago when, after an excruciating life, I found good ground and gave just one good blossom. I discovered something that I loved. So dearly did I love it that I stamped my identity with it. I became intrinsically intertwined with what I fell in love with.

And for many people (and no, not you), when they hear of who I love, they laugh and call me folly. In the capitol of capitalism, in America of all places, telling people you don’t aspire to gain wealth, build riches, and buy stuff, but rather, your ambition is the relentless pursuit of wisdom (whatever that means), comes out a bit like the very folly they accuse me of.

They think I like the ugly girl.

They just don’t know her like I know her

After all, she’s not metaphysics, she’s not new-age anything. She is, for me, the only persistent companion to humanity. She’s the historical context that no one pays enough attention to. She’s political, man. She’s the subjective and more tolerable version of the objective world we’ve all grown up in, and she’s so deep to fathom that I could spend every night until my death asking her questions because it’s not the answers to the questions themselves I’m after, but rather, the implications of the answers she gives me. In other words, she looks forward too.

But all that aside, I had so carefully tied her to my identity, I had so heavily assigned her as a value to my life ambition, that any other ambition was a major step down. The only way for me to feel satisfied in any other role would have been for me to deconstruct my identity. Do you know how difficult that is? It’s pretty much a division by zero.

That would have been a tragic chapter at the end of a tragic book.

I don’t like books like that. Frankly.

Back to normalcy: five years ago. After having found a paternal subject that was so challenging to participate in, months later I was getting food thrown at me by a drunk who didn’t like how I made his sandwich at 2 o’clock in the morning. That was crushing. It wouldn’t have been so bad had it been just a night or two, but the nightmare extended itself for almost half the distance between then and now. The second half has been spent in the bowels of a corporate world so mindless that the dead of sleep would seem more engaging at every passing second.

And at least during one point of each and every of these days, my devotion to my loved ones begged the question from me, “what if you have to give it up?”

What if a return to school was an impossibility? What if my path was inevitable? Could I deal with it?

And the answer was always one that gripped me with fear, and I invariably refused to answer it.

I’ve always insisted that the title I Will Not Die was a metaphor but only because it was the clearest way I knew to make it remotely intelligible to the patrons who might end up gracing these pages with their eyes. In truth though, for me, it’s the unique class of metaphor where the “like” so closely approximates reality that the difference between fact and fiction becomes reduced to nearly truth. For me, were I to have succumbed to the fate of the American worker bee I had actually become, it would have spelled my very death. And after five years of looking so closely at the coffin every single day I could feel my life escaping me. Whole days would pass where I scarcely thought I had breathed, so close was I to my end.

And suddenly, some doors just swung open, I found just the sliver of financing I need to pay off the last fateful semester I attended and for at least some of the upcoming semesters I will need to complete my degree. It turns out that all these many months of slaving away did some wonders for me and my wife’s credit ratings. After five years of getting nowhere, it was clearly foreseeable that another five could yield the same. Extend that a few more times and poof! Done. Life over.

I still haven’t found a job yet, but just need to float until the end of the year, and after that I should be able to manage everything with one full-time job or two part-time jobs, but on January the 10th, I’ll be back in school after all. I know right where I’ll go first. I can’t wait to share it with you. I will give you a guided tour. Also, I’ve got a multi-part series about my experiences in the corporate world coming up soon.

I did not die.

There was cold rain coming down all around the man as he walked briskly down the street. He had only a few blocks more to walk.

It wasn’t a heavy rain, but in the darkness of the night the sound of the rain came to his ears in better ways than the sight of it came to his eyes. The constant pitter-patter on the pavement around him and the recognizable drips that fell on his shoulders set him in a world of only rain.

The rain that fell did not take him by surprise. When he had left his home around ten minutes ago, it was raining then too. He had even left his umbrella.

You see, he enjoyed walking in the rain.

The pavement in front of him stretched out before him like a long black mirror.

He arrived at the cafe he was going to, ordered, then received his coffee, and sat down in a sofa next to a window so he could stare out at the rain.

Next to him a man a few years older looked over the top of the newspaper and glanced at him as he stared out into the night.

After a few seconds the man behind the newspaper said softly, “I can see that you enjoy the rain.”

“Yes, I do enjoy the rain–very much.”

The two men sat there staring into the night, into the rain.

After a few minutes, the man behind the newspaper said, “Say, my name is Jeff. Yours?”

“Mark. Nice to meet you Jeff.”

“You know,” said Jeff, “I like the rain too Mark.”

Soft and deliberate piano notes were playing in the background and mingled with the chitter-chatter of the voices from the small groups of people huddled around them. The sound of rain drops hitting the window they both looked through was barely noticeable while long streaks of water ran down the pane, driven by determined droplets who charged along with the consent of gravity while they spilled their contents behind them.

“Mark?” Jeff asked.

“Yeah?” asked Mark underneath the soft orange glow coming from the lamp above his head.

“You know, I once lived in Montana.”

“Oh really? How was it?”

“I loved it. I was almost sixty miles from a major city. I lived on an old ranch. Literally, I was in the middle of nowhere. Just me and the dirt, and the sky.”

“So why did you move to the city?” asked Mark.

“I had to find more work, so I moved here.”

The blurry white headlights from cars passing by on the street danced across their view while blurry figures of people dashed across the street.

“Do you know what I liked best about Montana?” asked Jeff.

“What’s that?” asked Mark.

“The rain.”

“You see,” continued Jeff, “We’re in the midst of this enormous world, and over the course of this human progress, all this technology, all these city lights, all these skyscrapers and computers and cell phones, beyond all these electronics, and international conglomerates, between space travel, political strife at every corner of the world, between energy concerns and social strife…” he took a breath, “…at the very root of it all, we still just have Man and the rain. Always have. Always will. And in the end, there’s nothing quite as nice as just a man in the rain.”

Step right up ladies and gents!

[Blah, blah]: I was wrapping up two different posts; one for tonight, one for tomorrow when suddenly, I learned that a dear friend of mine had shoved (hard) her blog while it was standing on smooth, wet tile causing it to slam onto the floor, dead in a growing pool of its own blood.

Sad, truly.

‘Tis life, I suppose.

I don’t know what made me feel worse, reading about the events, or reading her remarkable cheerfulness about the whole thing.

It reminds me of the time when I was nineteen a few days after Christmas. I was in a very rural area with thick snow, miles from any nearby houses. I saw a small object in the road ahead of me as my car crept along the icy vein between unending snow-heaped farm fields.

It was a very young puppy. Weeks old, at the most.

I stopped my car and got out. I approached it and saw the blood pool. Its back legs were kicking, the front legs and head were not moving. What I saw next was quite grisly.

It was breathing, trying to get up. One eye was hanging out and blood was seeping out of the socket (no joke). When it saw me, it whimpered and got excited, trying to wag its tail. Obviously it was not going to make it.

It still had a red Christmas bow around its neck.

Two choices: walk away or… yeah.

So I broke its neck. I then dug a grave for it on the side of the road and buried it, climbed back into the car, drove off and cried.

And I remember how cheerful I tried sounding the rest of the day.

Truth was, there was nothing to be all that cheerful about.

So she killed her blog, all in an effort to improve her blog. Damn. We can fix this up in a jiffy.

Go read this.

You can help me fix this by:

Subscribing to her new feed by clicking here

Throwing her a link: http://throughtheillusion.com/ (for you bloggers), and

Adding her to your Technorati favorites by clicking here

Tell some friends. With a few backlinks, a few subscribers, and a bunch of “hellos”, we can revive this sucker.

In the coming days, I’ll go through my whole site and redirect the links I made to Hayden’s old blog url to her new one.

Added bonus:

You link to her blog, I link to your blog. If you do, let me know in the comments.

Gracias friends.

Hang in there Hayden

Here is who has helped so far:

• TheAndySan

I often find things worth sharing with you that I don’t necessarily have the time to share with the kind of depth that they deserve. What I’ve decided to do is this: Periodically, I’m going to write a post summarizing them. This will be the first installment.

Another thing I’m going to start doing is dedicating posts to bloggers who I follow who I do not often have enough time to talk about (or even talk to) either here or on their own blogs.

As such, I dedicate this post to Robert at flimjo.com, whose frequent inclusions of me into his “Flimjo Recaps” always gave me a boost and never required anything in return. Thank you Robert, I hope all is well. The collage I’m doing right now reminded me of you and your generous link love.

(These are in no particular order, most likely they are in the order I discovered them)

The First Good Find:

For those of you who have not met Jeremy from Insight Writer, he’s been an active recent contributor here. I have no idea from where he met me but it could have from the guest post I wrote on the Positivity Blog. (Speaking of that guest post, if any of you who use StumbleUpon haven’t gone over there to rate it, please do).

When I first met Jeremy, I went off to read “just another blog.” Instead, what I found was a blog that held the promise of its title, specifically, I found a blog with lots of written insight. The first article I read was Your Capacity is Low Because Your Devotion is Thin. Before you go on to read that, listen to the gravity in that title. Now that’s insight. That article resonated with me in a very profound way because of how closely it matches my beliefs, namely, that in order to maximize what it is you want to do, you have to crank up the heat.

I’ve taken the metaphor of that all the way to labeling that lack of devotion as being like a death.

I Will Not Die, not because I literally won’t cease to be alive, but rather, because I refuse to allow myself to cave to the pressures from around me that tell me I can’t do what I love. In other words, my devotion is very high.

Nice work Jeremy.

The Second Good Find:

I met this blogger through Entrecard which I recently installed as a means to both find new blogs on the Internet and to gain exposure on other blogs. Of course, it turns out that the only people who go to the blogs on the Entrecard widgets are other Entrecard users earning credits, so gaining exposure on other blogs is actually kind of futile, but, and a big but, I’ve found (and am still finding) bloggers I enjoy that I wouldn’t have found otherwise.

I have in mind Jennifer from Writing to Survive. What caught me right off was the tagline: “transcending the painful past and the mundane present, one post at a time.”

It immediately occurred to me that she uses writing to define and augment her life, much of the past of which doesn’t sound like all shit and giggles. What it does mean though is that much of the writing is of the highest order, namely, passionate writing that conveys meaning because of its grittiness and source. What I mean is that if you write for laughs, that’s one thing, if you write for passing information, that’s another thing, but if you are writing to survive, then that’s a very different thing.

It’s written from the gut, fueled by a human fire. A good place to start is the Excerpts page.

Some Funnies:

• Wombats in Australia are really like this. You’ve been warned.
• Priceless and imaginative fiction. Do you hate your wife? Beware.
• Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze. We have to start somewhere.

About two months ago this site was listed as a PR (Page Rank) 4 site and since then I have had many dozens of new incoming links, several of which came from blogs with very large profiles. I would normally have expected to be a PR 5 (or even 6) site by now but instead my PR actually took a penalty and fell to 2. Some of the individual articles I wrote that were extremely popular fell from a PR 3 and 4 all the way to 0.

Unfortunately Google doesn’t tell us exactly what causes the penalty, instead, as webmasters, we just see the end result. What’s worse is that I’m still a bit of a noob so I don’t know everything about what causes these things. For me, content and message come first, all the technical stuff comes second.

A couple of things are likely the culprit:

1) A CPM ad that was running through Adbrite was labeled as possibly being malicious when it was scanned by the Google bot (I did see a warning about this in Google’s Webmaster tools). Apparently an ad I was running tried to install malware on Google’s computer. Nice. Those ads are automatically approved through Adbrite so I didn’t have a lot of choice, but I was able to use the information from Google and after working with Adbrite we were able to eliminate the ad. They told me that it sometimes happens, even though they have safeguards. After running thousands of impression ads, I’d say having the occasional fluke is perfectly possible. Google will penalize sites that may contain malicious software.

2) The other possible culprit however is likely the vast amount of things I’ve added to the site over the last few months, the biggest possibility being the massive (and quite happy) blogroll where I can link to and show off the many friends I’ve made in the blogosphere. It might have gotten too big though. Because the blogroll was in a sidebar, it was being loaded with every single page, which apparently can have the effect of diluting a site’s Page Rank. In other words, between the blogroll and other links from the sidebars, I’ve had about 60-70 outgoing links from every page that Google crawls.

Ahem, apparently that’s a bit much.

Why is this even important?

For starters, the percentage of traffic I receive from the search engines is only about 2-3% (which is really low, generally). The rest is from feed readers where you guys come here directly to comment (or to read comments), from people coming here directly from bookmarks, and the lion’s share comes from social media sites like the God we call StumbleUpon.

Ultimately, in order to find new readers and to continue to help grow this blog, I’ll need to continue to increase my PR so people who will want to read what I write can find me. Now while I don’t watch it like crazy, it’s been a couple of months since I took the penalty so I decided to get around to fixing it.

What I’ve decided to do:

I decreased the number of outbound links from my sidebars to a dozen or so from 60-70 by changing the blogroll and making other links (like the "friend me" tool) set to use the "no follow" rule that tells Google not to dilute my rank.

I didn’t want to remove the links to my friends’ blogs entirely, so I’ve done a couple of things:

1) I’ve made a separate Blogroll page that will contain a complete list of all the blogs I follow. I would like to add a sentence or two under each link so readers will know what they’re going to. If you are on my blogroll now, you can leave a comment below (or e-mail me) what you’d like me to write under your link. If I don’t hear from you, then I’ll either add your tagline (if you use one) or make something up eventually. If you aren’t on my blogroll and would like to be, send me a link to your site so I can check it out.

2) I installed Jon Dyer’s Better Blogroll Widget in place of the old blogroll. That way, there will still be some links from my main page. What it allows me to do is to show a random sample of the blogs from the full blogroll. Right now it’s set to 10. Every time any page is reloaded a different set of 10 will show up.

Hopefully, all of this will reduce the number of outbound links being loaded on every page that Google sees while still giving me an opportunity to express my gratitude to the bloggers I have met over these last months.

No doubt we always think of springtime as the time for gardening. The birds chirp and all that stuff, the days slowly get warmer and our sleeves shorter. After being pent up indoors hiding behind frosted windows all winter we like to stretch our legs, venture outdoors and play in the dirt while we tell our children that we’re not really playing in the dirt.

But before we know it, the summer is over, the plants we grew are all dead and it’s time to forget about gardening until next year.

To hell with that.

I really enjoy gardening. The irony is that for the last couple of years, I haven’t had all that much time to garden. My wife has tended to our gardens far more than I have been able to. Momentarily free from the burdens of a job, I was disappointed looking at the garden bed I was turning over because I never really got to play in its dirt.

To hell with that too.

You see, if I wasn’t so determined to become a teacher, my second choice would actually probably be a gardener. I love plants. I can kill them and not feel bad. You just can’t do that with people. As much as I disliked my bosses at my job, I would still feel bad if I killed them.

I swear.

Besides the lack of guilt that might come from poor behavior though, there are lots of other reasons I love gardening. It’s a great way to nurture life. I can plant things and see what happens. I can make things blossom. I can grow nice green things. I can smell nice smells.

I can watch my daughter put handfuls of dirt in her mouth and gulp. Then I can watch her smile and wonder if she really enjoyed the ball of mud she just ate as much as her big grin tells me she did.

I can look carefully around me for any potential onlookers moments before I kneel down in an apparent act of picking weeds so I can steal a bite or two of mud for myself.

Kidding.

I swear.

So when winter is coming, all the joys of gardening fade. Unless you do what me and my wife did when we went looking for bargains. Sure enough, we found houseplants of all things on clearance prices that no doubt left retailers losing money. Gigantic Boston Ferns for $0.50, Ardisia, Pilea, Philodendron and Croton plants for less than a dollar, and Schefflera and Rubber plants for eager chump change.

I’ve now got a small tropical forest in my home and we only spent about ten bucks (which included dirt–for planting, not eating–and even several pots). All I need now is a CD with jungle music that I can play in the background and an industrial humidifier. Something tribal would be great if anyone has any suggestions.

If you enjoy gardening as much as I do, I suggest just moving it indoors. Pretty much every store is clearing space for Christmas merchandise. You’ll probably find some real bargains. Most of the plants we found were originally between $6.95 and $19.95.

Is getting many houseplants a little hippie? You bet. It’s that whole return to nature thing, only I can’t do that so well in the ‘burbs of Indianapolis so I just brought the outdoors in. Forget that constant electronic hum emitted from a television that creeps into the center of your brain. Try calcium oxalate from a Dieffenbachia rubbed casually in your eye. It’s way more fun.

I swear. 

Now that is the best kind of war.

Not only is it the best because it’s the sort that makes the best films and the best novels, but it’s also the best because it’s the most winnable kind of war to wage.

The Best Kind of War

It makes for the best of entertainment because it’s the brutal kind of total war that brings to mind the epic, almost endless feud. We’re talking about Greece versus Troy. We’re talking about the free world against the Nazi clenched fist.

It’s the most winnable kind of war because if knowing your enemy fully is the primary requisite to a successful campaign, then you are guaranteed access to the best spy available. You have an ear to anything and everything that’s said, planned, devised. That information will become the decisive betrayal that turns the course of the war into your direction.

But before we get too far, we have to make sure that he or she who you declare to be your mortal enemy is in fact just you and you alone.

Make Your Enemy the Right One

So who is your enemy? Or, if you’re particularly lucky, who are your enemies?

If you’re a younger version of me, they are your father, your jealous bosses, your angry spouse, your coworker. They are your government, your birthright, your poor luck. Your lack of rich friends, rich family, your lack of opportunity. Fight them if you want. Fight them all bloody hell. At the end of the day, bloody knuckles and all, you will still find more of them.

You won’t win that way.

If you choose to fight external enemies, you will squander your precious few days faced off against a horde whose ranks will gladly replenish themselves right in front of your flailing arms and courageous yells of valor. They will mock you.

You must square off in the mirror.

Total War Against Yourself

The less futile route is to envision some future life whose sandy beaches and blue skies above taunt your mind behind the closed lids of your eyes. Imagine who you want to become. He or she must be your new hero; the uncanny villain could be your present self.

At this stage your enemy is just one.

Now this is familiar turf. But far from being a villain of villains, this antagonistic couple is composed of mere antagonists. Like a carefully guarded agreement the future you can gain the epic upper hand and guide with a kind of grace found mostly in full friendship, the present you off on a journey to meet the future you.

Enemies Fewer Than You Think

If it’s your boss who prevents your ascent, you can fight your boss or you can leave. If it’s your father who strangles your growth, you can battle him or walk away. If your friends are holding you back, you can try to change them or you can go off and look for new ones. In each case, the only versions whose outcomes you can guarantee are the ones where you face off against yourself.

You have within you the possibility to make the greatest gains.

You should just remember that those gains will come from your encounter with yourself. Everything else is just a waste of good war.

Henrik at the Positivity blog gave me an opportunity to speak to his audience. For the occasion, I wrote an inspirational piece called Your Beacon in the Night. I’d like to encourage you to go and check it out. I’m interested to know what you think of it.

If any of you use Stumbleupon or other social bookmarking sites and enjoyed the article, you can help me return Henrik’s generosity by giving it the nod. You can review the article on StumbleUpon by going here.

For any of my readers who are not familiar with the Positivity Blog, I recommend that you take some time to read through some of the articles there. It’s some of the best on the Internet. You can browse articles in his Archives by going here.

Henrik’s success as a blogger is well deserved. You can sign up for his RSS feed by clicking here. It should be a staple of your reading diet. It’s been mine for some time now, and I’m quite healthy as a result.

Finally, if you’ve come here from the Positivity Blog and are looking for the article Love that I mentioned in the article there, you can read it here.

Thank you Henrik for letting me write for you.

So long as they do one thing consistently throughout their failings:

Keep on trucking along.

And that’s what I’m going to keep doing. Ultimately, that’s the primary theme of this whole site.

Friends, I’m not going to be able to raise enough money to go on the bike trip before it gets too cold. While I received more generous help than I ever could have imagined early on, I’ve struggled to reach an audience that is large enough, and I’ve failed to communicate my efforts in a compelling enough way. While my efforts have certainly resonated very well with some people, they have not resonated with a very wide range of the people who have heard about it.

So I’m going to keep what I’ve raised so far, and continue to communicate my efforts to people over the winter. I’m also going to try to reform the way I tell people what I’m doing to make it more meaningful for people who come here, but who do not have the benefit of knowing me fully.

I’m also going to initiate some other ways of raising funds through more tangible means, in case they will appeal to another subset of visitors. One example will be using wee-books as several people have suggested I try. I’ve got a couple of high-profile guest posts that I’ve written for other blogs in the chute and I will be writing more over the next few months.

In the meantime, I’m going to refocus my writing away from the bike trip a little because quite frankly, I don’t want to become a bore. I don’t want to alienate too many readers because I’ve spoken so much over the last month about a topic which may not interest them.

At the same time though, this blog has had its best month ever. In fact, during October, it has had almost 70,000 page views. In all of the months before October combined the total was just over 50,000. So October alone has had nearly 50% more traffic than all other months before it together. I’d like to continue that trend by writing more about my core topics.

In other news:

I haven’t been looking forward to the prospect of staying at the job I’m at, confined to the cubicle from which I was hoping to escape by going on the bike trip, so…..

I put my notice in a few weeks ago.

Today is my last day. Three more hours, exactly. While I do not have a new job lined up, I hope to find something (even if it’s temp work or several part-time jobs) early next week. It’s senseless to stay here anymore, considering the degree to which I dislike it. Why do I dislike it so much? The answer to that should be coming this weekend. It’s complex and deserves some serious space all to its own. I’m writing a whole article about my experiences here.

Finally, after I put in my notice, some fortuitous opportunities have surfaced.

I might be returning to school in January. After all these years of working tirelessly and without benefit or advancement toward my main goal, I might be sitting right on its doorstep.