Postcards from the Funny Farm

I asked myself a question today as I was preparing to go out into my Truman Show here at the Funny Farm here I call my life. The question was based half on Eckhart Tolle’s book, A New Earth and half on my own outlook on life. Blogs can be a great way to journal what is going on in your life while getting feedback as well.   Since I am turning 39 June 9th, I am tending towards the philosophical side. I know you may find it hard to believe that I love it but I do. Happiness is found there as well I am finding.

We are all in a proverbial “funny farm” I think and so there are two sides of life we need to address to succeed, get out, and to be happy: 1) The side of neurophilosophy, or our physical brains, and 2) the cognitive side. This “present” idea is a cognitive idea. (and what’s cool about it is you don’t even get charged a copay here, though you may want to subscribe via -or- .

Anyway, Eckhart’s book is all about being “conscious.” (See here for another post I wrote about him) If I could count the number of times he uses that word, I would say it’s probably more than any other word apart from “the.”

It’s an awesome word to keep in your head all day “conscious, conscious, conscious.” If you have ever been unconscious (as I many times am) in a room you know how much you can miss just pretending to be there. I strive to be conscious always but today that is not my word. Today I am present.

Present is the word on the way to consciousness. Like water spilling over from a river into the sea, consciousness usually merges with present. Remember the annoying, idiotic boy in grade school who after every person’s name was called for attendance with a resounding “here” had to shout “present!” You know, the one the teachers always ranted about. Well I am/was that kid and the only difference is now I am shouting “present” on my blog.  Here’s my simple goal today for being present.

Today I will be present by looking people in the eye

I will also say this mantra today every time I start to think I am becoming “absent:”

(YOUR NAME HERE), Present!!!

Here’s a question for you: maybe down the road we can get more deep, but for now: In what simple way can I move toward being present today? Here’s a picture of me a couple years ago fully present.  Can every moment be that way?  That is my goal.

Today I will be present by looking people in the eye.

In what way will you be present today?

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If you’re like me, you love the mall and its food court. There are 10-15 choices on what to eat every time you go there. “What the heck do I get?” is the question I always ask myself: Kun Pao Chicken? Pizza at SBarro? McDonalds? A sub? With the shining neon signs and the wonderful aromas all mixed around me, I have really hard time making a choice.

Blogging is often the same way for me.

With so many items begging for my attention, what should I write on? I have literally sat for 20-30 minutes before in front of my laptop screen before unable to decide what was worth writing about. So how do I handle this? Simple … I limit my choices. I have gone through after 400 posts and analyzed the tags and categories I assigned the most. Then, I’ve made those into my categories and resolved to blog within those most popular, and obviously the ones I like to write the most, posts. Then, for myself not for my readers, I developed and wrote down 4 kinds of posts that I write on this blog. They are:

1. Journal entries,
2. PayPerPost (or blogging for hire),
3. Howto and Reviews, and
4. short “Tumblelog” styled posts or “asides.

Now, I don’t get as overwhelmed. I ask myself if I have done too much of one or the other and it makes it easy for me to limit my choices in what to write on. This frees me up to focus completely on blogging quality posts. If you watch kids learning and playing you will see the same thing in both instances: they are focused on one thing at a time. Note the picture of my daughter learning and playing below. But we aren’t kids anymore. We can’t blog it all. As bloggers we must be disciplined and choose to have only one item in front of us at a time. All other things are a distraction to good blogging.

How do you discipline yourself to write good blog posts?

No, I won’t be needing more than one slice since I have no teeth. I just gum it.

Our family is a democracy when it comes to most decisions: especially where to eat. I won’t list them, but each one in my family (5) has her/his preference and they seldom mesh. Tonight I got what dad wants: a strip mall pizza place called Straw Hat. My wife thinks its a greasy dive so we don’t usually go there. I on the other hand see it as a place of Zen. It reminds me of JP’s pizza by my house when I was a kid. I’ll never forget it was the place I first played “PONG” in a table game format. It was probably the first video game I ever played in fact. My, how much more advanced are the games my son now plays are. The place tonight had booths with paper napkins and refillable sodas (root beer was my choice, I went back 4 times) and an old Sears TV with sports playing. I don’t watch sports, but the sound of it has that Zen quality. The “salad bar” is a bowl of lettuce and 5 choices of “things” to put on it. Not much to write home about at $6. But the overpricing is all part of the ethereal quality for me. Dad got what he wanted and it rocked! To the moms: Every once in a while, go to the greasy strip mall pizza joint: your husband will love it. Who knows, you might dig it too. My family seemed to. Here’s the pics, judge for yourself. Isn’t that was marriage is all about? A little compromise here and there?

When boats aim at a destination, they need a rudder to correct their course again and again to reach the goal. This starts at the departure and continues to the end of the journey. Since I started writing articles in this blog, my goal has always been to reach people with my writing. Connecting with people has been a passion of mine through writing, music, teaching, and relationships as long as I can remember. I study people like Walt Disney and M. Scott Peck who are experts at doing this and I try to get better each day. Through teaching I make my living and believe me, that job is 100% about connecting with people. I’ve made a minimal amount of money with my music and of course relationships don’t need to earn you monetary rewards. Writing has made me some money but not as much as the music. I am determined in 2008 to merge my passion for connection with making money online.

So what does this mean Damien? Are we going to see a bunch of ads and pay per posts on this blog now?

Some, but I’m writing them all to this blog audience. I promise that any pay per posts will be directed at the stuff that affects my demographic of readers: intelligent, entertainment lovers, family people, cyberculture folks … just to name a few attributes. For example, right now I am hosting an ad for “Fandango” in my sidebar. If you are going to movies and you buy your tickets through clicking that ad, I get a few cents of the purchase. And Fandango is a cool way to pre-buy you tickets. Sarah and I always use it.

There is another benefit to my mmol (making money online) course with this blog: I’m very transparent about what is going on with earnings. This will enable YOU to learn what works out there and what is a scam so you can monetize your online writing. I’m a 38 year old with a Master’s Degree in Writing and certainly not new to the online writing scene. What is new is my course correction toward making money online. Up to now, that has never been a priority. Remember that a blog is only one way to make money at writing online. Helium, for example, is writing website that gives you topics to write on and they can make $20-$200 per assignment. And then of course there are online magazines which I intend to explore this year as well. I’ve been practicing by publishing on BlogCritics since last July.

Not all my posts will be pay for hire. In fact, expect to see only about 3/10 posts that way. The rest will be anecdotes about my teaching, family, music, and life as I see it. There will be the occasionally heavily researched article with sources linked and then there will be the intermittent “quote” or “link” with nothing more than a few words in the spirit of a true tumblelog. If you’re new to my blog, check out my sitemap and read some posts of the past year in the various categories. I hope you will subscribe so we can make a connection in the coming year. I am very loyal to my frequent commenters and I pay back any way I can. The fact is, the more readers I have and the more people link to this site, the better I look to prospective clients and that helps me make more money. This in turn encourages me to take more time developing powerful posts with great links that will impact my readers even more.

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I took my youngest to the pediatrician this afternoon and stepped onto this bouquet when I got out of the car.

It seemed oddly out of place. Below are 13 hypothetical case scenarios for how it got there:

Any other case scenarios? Happy TT.

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