Day Two - Project 1

  I want you to know things.  I guess because I'm a teacher and I guess because I'm as self-absorbed as the rest of the species.

  If you read the first post you get what this is about.  If you didn't, I can summarize (though apparently I could not yesterday).  I am a lazy person.  This bjournal allows me to document and by needing to document reinforce my 100 attempts at 10-day personal betterment projects.

  I want you to know that I chose the name Vitruvian Manifesto as a word play on the Leonardo Da Vinci sketch "Vitruvian Man".  I think the project is a way to embrace the "Renaissance Man" ideal in a 21st century way, and the use of Vitruvian Man-ifesto is a rather clever descriptor for this mental/physical/personal quest.

  I wanted you to know that because it is the nonsense I thought I wanted people to believe about me.  The name "Vitruvian Manifesto" stemmed from a particularly difficult time a couple years back.  I am old for a new teacher, and with three of us in my family, a substitute's wages don't really pay all the bills.  I actually became a security guard again before my daughter was born because I was taking a long time to get all my teaching license ducks in a row.  I kept the security job even once I found a school that liked me as much as I liked it, and was subbing (that's SUBstitute teachING for those of you who hate inference)  five days a week.

  Five days a week.  Five nights a week.  Oh, and then I got a tutoring job, two afternoons a week.  Add my daily cardio to stave off my evil blood sugar, and some things in my life started to fall by the wayside.

  Friends.

  Reading.

  Date night.

  Seeing my little girl.

  Sleep.

  Memory.

  Sanity.

  One night, where events conspired (no, that implies events had some intent - they didn't care) to give me a Friday night off, I rediscovered the joys of ironic insomnia.  And I started...not Drunk Dialing.....I guess Awake Typing my friends on Facebook.  I was witty.  I was absurd.  I was creative.  I was probably none of these things.

  And I signed them "Vitruvian Manwich".  Some of the more ridiculous, sleep-deprived thoughts were collected and called.....yep.

  So I had the name, and nothing to attach it to, like my vetoed wish to name a potential future male-child "Finn Swinemer" (my partner is smarter than me by like, an order of magnitude).

  Until the One Thousand Days thought.  It felt like my "Eureka!" moment, but running naked from my driver's seat on the highway seemed counterproductive at the time.  I resolved to be naked later.

  So.  Here it is.  I have divided my thousand days into, as I've said, one hundred ten-day projects.  Each project will be designated as part of one of the following three categories:

•     Academic Pursuits - reading, writing, math, languages, etc.  An example would be "Read the Complete works of - Someone Dead who Wrote an Imposing Body of Work", or "Learn a New Language Well Enough to Have a Passable Conversation".

•   Physical Challenges - sports, speed/flexibility/strength improvements, and such.  Examples here would be "Learn Cheerleading for the Amusement of my Eight Graders", or "Bench Press My Own Body Weight" (yes, for most of you, this one isn't a big deal, but again, you don't stay lazy for this long without having a whole lot of no upper body strength).

• Human Skills - artwork, crafts and repair, and so forth.  The things that make our species so weird/scary to the other animals.  Examples would be "Knit Clothing", or "Repair a Small Engine".

  For the record, I know that many Physical Challenges and Human Skills take real ability and education, so don't bother calling me an elitist.  I created Academic Pursuits because I know that after some of the Physical Challenges I'm probably going to need to sit or lie down a lot due to soreness, exhaustion, or injury.  Calling it Academic Pursuits lets me attempt something while I'm potentially laid out and lets me justify it as learning.

  I need to spend at least 2 hours a day on each project, and I will mention it when I scrape the minimum.  And to be clear, the next ninety-nine projects will not be so self-indulgently self-referential.  Self.

  An "About Me" page, and a post.  2 hours, 15 minutes.

Tomorrow's Post:  Vitruvian Manifesto - Across the Second Dimension.  Okay, I'm just adding pictures.

-Mike

First Project - Start a Blog - Day One

  One Thousand Days.

  Every other time I have seen a thousand of something, the six per cent of my DNA that I got from Neanderthalensis* says to the rest of me, "Wow, that's a lot of something."  The first time I saw my bank account had a thousand dollars in it was really exciting.  And really short lived.

  A certain statistic about Wilt Chamberlain was also mind-boggling. **

  A week and a half ago was the first time I thought about 1000 and the thought was "That's not much."

  A little history.  I was born on October 28th, 1975 c.e.  There, history done.  I'm a social studies teacher, and while History class shouldn't just be memorizing dates, some dates are fun to learn.  This one was very easy for me because there was annual positive reinforcement with cake during some very formative years.

  For those of you who use math practically, you can see I am 37 years old.

  Which is sort of the impetus of my....man, I hate the word. Blog.  "Weblog" shortened....really?

  Anyway, the subject of my blog Bjournal is I am 37 and a bit.

  One Thousand Days.  As of today (there's probably a time stamp somewhere), that is how long I have until I am forty.

  I want to state for the record (which is my record, so there was really no point in stating it thusly) that I don't think my life is over at forty or some nonsense.  Barring tragedy, I don't believe there will be an appreciable difference between my physical form and my worldview when I am 39 years, 364 days, and those qualities a day or two later.  This is not a comment on my forties.

 This is a comment on my twenties.

 Here're some of the highlights of Ninety-Five to Aught-Five (I reckon):

•   I went to China to attend university language courses and experience another culture, which I largely blew off to stay in my air-conditioned dorm room and make notes for a role-playing game I never ran for my friends.
•   I started collecting comic books - oh, not in pristine mylar bags for some pie-eyed dream of retiring on my mint condition NOT ACTION COMICS #1, just in compilation trade paperback format.  This was expensive.
• I took 4 years to get my 3 year Bachelor of Arts in...no, no major.  I want to clarify that I took 4 YEARS OF MY TWENTIES.  I also took 3 years of my teens.  You guys demonstrated your math skills earlier.  I won't insult you by doing the adding for you.
• I got fired from a number of jobs for....let's call it unbridled laziness.  I like it.  Wild herds of laziness (it's the same in singular and plural), galloping as slowly as possible, till they get tired and want to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer (or you know, whatever lazy people watch now).
• I watched a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
• I got a night job as a security guard, with a clip-on tie (for the possibility of avoiding being strangled, not just because of the assumption "hey, walking a hallway at 4:00 am is complicated enough.")
• I spent my 30th birthday skipping out on the chance to get made up as a shambling corpse on a midnight shoot for an indie Zombie film to play a game of Dungeons and Dragons.  It was a great game, by the way (my barbarian accountant is better than any character you tell me about).

  I want to thank that clip-on tie, in retrospect. I stared at it around my 30th birthday, and I realized, I'm gonna be wearing this thing in my fifties.  I started to make a few changes.  When I turned thirty-two, I was living in dorm and taking my Bachelor of Education.  A couple more years and the woman I love and I were raising our baby girl.  I run my school's chess club.  My thirties are all right.  But there's always something slowing me down.  

  Inertia seems to be central to my identity.  It makes it hard for me to get up and go/do/be.  I should have spent my twenties learning more things, learning how to do things, how to do things better.

  And now my partner has started reading all of Shakespeare's plays, and is planning on reading them all in a year.  And she is documenting it.

  I have One Thousand Days.  It's not much, but I have a thousand days to improve myself, study things, dismantle and assemble and try to understand things.  A lot of people would learn a thousand new things in that time, but I've been pretty honest with the 2 or maybe (fingers crossed) 3 of you that have read this so far.  I'll probably need 10 days per project.  This is day one of Project Number One.  This is the only thing on the Bjournal (oh yes, I'm making that a thing), but I have 9 days to learn how to do this so you 3 (confidence!) will keep coming back for more.

  Day 2:  The Manifesto made Manifest, or something.

-Mike

* (I read that somewhere, and I'm not fact-checking it, cuz I like it)

** (Can anyone find the origin of the term "Boggle" for me?  I know I'm sitting at an internet capable computer, but I don't wanna.)