The inability to count

People I know...  I'm not naming names...

They don't seem to be able to count.  Simple math kind of count.  The electricity or water gets cut off every other month.  Some sort of crisis is always happening in that household.  And the funny thing... several years ago, I thought they were doing awesome. 

I know it's strange.  But 6 years ago, I knew several families like that.  All of them seemed to be going somewhere.  Everything was just awesome, and the world was rocking along great.  It was 2010, and the world was wonderful. 

Now, we're entering 2017 and I wonder what happened to those families.  I know what I did.  I started making a budget and following the thing.  It doesn't help if you make a budget and don't follow it.  I got my wife on board, and we look at the budget regularly.  We adjust as needed.  She tells me she needs things and I try to fit it into the budget.  We discuss everything.  The budget makes that possible. 

The other families?  They lurch from chaos to chaos, barely surviving what are normal and expected rocks of the ship.  See, emergencies happen.  So they aren't really emergencies.  Those "catastrophes" are normal occurrences.  You just have to plan for them.  And a stack of cash helps.  It's not a lot of cash.  Just $1000.  But that's a life changer.  It's just enough cushion to keep the big bad from beating down the from door.

But the people I know... they get payday loans. 

Six months ago, they said "payday loans are the devil". 

I guess that's the biggest trick of the devil.  He convinced the world he doesn't exist.

But then there is another side of the coin.  The part I don't understand.  I don't have to.  I just have to believe.  And I do.

See, I started going to church six years ago.  And it was a church that preached the new testament, and told me what the Bible said.  It wasn't about what someone thought.  You had to argue against the Bible.  Not against some random person.  Not against the thoughts of the world.  Against the word of God.  And there's a lot of parts in there that don't make a bit of sense to me.  But those parts are the ones that are the most important. 

As I heard someone say once... If you hear someone say "It doesn't make any sense" then that person has an invalid perspective of the world.  The world always makes sense.  It's not the world that doesn't make sense.  It's our view of the world. 

Now, the average person would tell me that the budget made all the difference.  But I know going to church and doing what the Bible said had an effect.  "Have faith and believe" it said.  I did.  That's all that was asked for. 

See, you really need to read the new testament.  It's a hard book to read.  Not for the words.  The words.  The words are easy.  They concepts are hard.  It's filled with a lot of differing and complicated stuff.  I don't pretend to be the greatest scholar of the Bible in the world.  What I do know is the main portion is so stupidly simple it's hard.  "Have faith in the living God and his son Jesus.".  That's the main thing.  

Because a lot of what people teach is flat out wrong.  Or at least contradicted by other parts of the new testament.  And if we're getting into a Paul vs Jesus interpretation, I'm taking Jesus any day of the week.  I think Paul is the problem with a lot of Christianity.  But that's an argument for another time.

I guess the biggest thing I want to leave with is this: Jesus is knowable.  I'm not saying you are going to understand it all.  But he is knowable.  And it's worth knowing him.

The hilarity of it all

Life is really, really funny.  I don't know if that is a good thing or a bad thing. 

Eight years ago, Barrack Obama was elected president of the United States, and the right decried the death of the free world and the end of everything they saw as important.

One month ago, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, the left decried the death of the free world and everything they saw as important.

8 years ago, Texas started talking about secession.

1 month ago, California started talking about secession.

It's ridiculously humorous the parallels between what happened eight years ago and what happened a month ago.

Everything the right was saying eight years ago, the left is saying now.

History is doing a bit of repeating, and it is hilarious.

Schedule, Week 1

Week 1:

Think and Grow Rich, chapter 1.

The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth, chapter 1

Heaven's Wealth Food, disc 1

Listen to these at least 3 times.

During the first week, it can be complicated to listen to the same thing over and over again.  Think of this as training mental discipline.  Discipline is doing the right thing when no one is watching.  It's easy to not do what you should be doing.  Growth is hard.  But it is worth every minute.  Continue listening, despite the mental fatigue.  

Work book: From John Maxwell

1) Which gap is the one that keeps you from growing the way you should have.

2) Rework your calendar to fit growth into the schedule 5 days a week, fifty weeks a year.  

Discuss what you did to make this fit.

Book sale!

Tomorrow is the 2nd library book sale of the year.   I like the book sale.  What's better, it's a brown bag of books for about $5.  Sure, they are used books.  But books are books.  I've gotten entire collections of books for practically nothing. 

So...  support your local library.  Go check out their books and visit their book sales. 

They are awesome.

Loss of Routine

I just realized why I hate on call.  I am not currently on call, so that is not the issue.  I will be in a couple of weeks.  But that's a future problem.  Who's going to solve that one?  Future Matt. 

Right now, I know why I dislike on call. 

It breaks my routines.

That's about it. 

I have several routines that I go through Monday through Friday.  They are simple actions that result in a controlled beginning to a day.  Occasionally, the day crashes and burns.  Other days, it goes fine.  But my routine stays with me.

 When I lose the ability to perform that routine, things go haywire.  It's not something I inherently like or am happy with.  It's just a gigantic failing.  It's unpleasant.

And my entire week goes to hell.

I can tell it's been a bad week when the last time I shaved was Monday.  Shaving is a boring ritual.  Along with brushing and flossing.  Shaving happens three times a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.   This week, I only shaved Monday.  Tuesday was the last day I performed my routine. 

And I'm headed to the end the week, dragging this controlled crash into the best possibility. 

I want my routine back. 

something started, something finished

I've heard it said that writers end up writing the book they need to hear, not necessarily the book they live by.  I think that was true of the post yesterday.  I'm fully convinced that is what happened.  I've been writing a story about what would happen if dimension hopping became a thing, and the guy going dimension hopping was a self-centered asshole out of to save his own skin from his own stupidity.  I've been writing that story for a while, off and on.  It's currently sitting about 19 pages worth of material, but the story isn't finished and it's going to take a few more pages before I even start to finalize.

The problem is that I haven't been adding to the story very frequently.  I'm a proponent of tracking most things you do during the day.   I don't do it near enough, but I'm a proponent.  I can give you a rough estimate when I will finish the book I'm currently reading, and I can tell you the average days between when I write.  And right now that average days number is sitting at 26.

The simple answer is you are never going to finish anything if you don't pick it up but once a month.  It doesn't matter how many words you write during those single sessions.  And I can almost guarantee when you do write for that one session, it's going to be way shorter than you thought.  On Average, I write about 360 words per period.  The max I've ever tracked in a day was 757.   So that tells me is I'm not going to finish this thing any time soon if one of those numbers doesn't change.

Given that collection of numbers: 26 days between writing, 360 words per session, a maximum of 757 words in a day.  The easiest of those numbers to change is the 26.  See, it's all about math.   360 words seems to be where my brain starts to falter.  Or my limited time runs out.  But...  If I got to the point of writing at least 5 days a week, that would cover about 94,000 words in a year, skipping weekends.


I started this post...  sometime back in 2015.  I finished the story back in August.  It took well longer than it probably should have.  I added 9 pages until I finally came to a conclusion I wanted.  Or at least that's where the story seemed to want to go.  It's interesting that stories have a tendency to take on a life of their own after a while.  Sometimes you have ideas.  Other times, the ideas just flow from the characters you create.

It's interesting forcing those characters to life.  It sometimes feels like a birth.  Maybe, maybe not.  Maybe that's where the real interesting stuff happens.  It's between the point where the idea ran out and the execution is all there is left.  That's where the most complicated bits lie.  It's also where you end up having the most fun and force the best of life out of the story.  Or the worst.  It's also at that point that the characters start taking on a life of their own. 

There was a point in the story I was talking about where I thought about adding a secondary character.  But that didn't fit with the character I had created.  It just wasn't that person.  So I moved forward and changed the idea.  All based on the character that I created.  It was...  the way things needed to be. 

I can't say I'm really an impressive writer.  What I can say is that I try to show up.  And that's where I'm at with that.

I should probably go back to working on the story I'm currently working on.  It's the nightmare I had turned into a story.  Not sure whether it's a horror or something else.  It sounds like it.  But we'll see.

Belief vs Belief

This post is about belief versus belief.

I run into many people who believe things.  But it doesn't change what they do. They say they believe in something, but they choose to do nothing that proves that belief. 

Perfect example.  A person goes to the doctor and the doctor tells them they are at risk for a heart attack.  You then get two scenarios. 

Scenario 1: the person comes back the next year looking considerably better.  They have changed their diet and dropped a few pounds.  They believed the doctor and took action.

Scenario 2: the person has a heart attack. 

Belief existed in both scenarios.  Scenario 1 combined belief with action.  Scenario 2 believed but didn't do a thing. 

I find believers in global warming fit in the second category.  They believe in global warming, but its hashtag activism.  It's a pathetic belief that causes zero action. 

So...  going back to the scenario I proposed earlier: which one actually believed?  

I'm going to guess only scenario 1 truly believed.  Because that person changed their actions in accordance with their beliefs.

So if you believe in global warming...  which category do you fit into?