Who would read a book from a college dropout whose life is not in order as it is? I absolutely LOVE Carnegie’s How to win friends and Influence people, I think that book really got me going on this betterment process. Looking at myself today versus 1.5 years ago, I think I have turned dark into light, water into wine, lead into gold. The person sitting here typing away at this is a much better person than the person that had his wife leave him.

I still have a shit ton more work to do as life is ever evolving, ever changing, but now I am back in I want to write a book mode and if you know me and what has been going on as of late, it is not what I would normally do. I would typically romanticize this strange long distance relationship that I find myself in right now to a point of it being the greatest love story ever told. Yet I find myself being more introspective, looking at the mistakes that Jocelyn and I made, being able to look back on our marriage and see specific points where if I had done something or worded something better, then possibly it would not have fallen into ruin. That point though, of going back, is long gone, the only thing I can do is while moving forward, making sure that I do not allow things to happen to me, nor make it easy for the one that I am in a relationship with to do things.

The weird thing is that I sit back and I will start writing and I have years worth of material to reference, I am just having problems sorting it out into a manner that would make sense. The more and more I read, the more information that I digest either online or in printed form, the more and more I see that the failure of my marriage is typical, nothing out of the ordinary and I want to express that but am having issues on how to do that.

I care deeply for the person that I am sort of with right now, she makes me laugh, she drives me up the wall and ties me in knots with happiness, she also makes me feel like a real man. She makes me feel incredible! Similar feelings occurred with Jocelyn when we first started talking and it dawned on me, what happened? That was really the question that started me on this road, 12 pages into this thing it is all over the place, but at least content is being written and can be moved around and polished up a bit, but I am having problems situating chapters or sections. I am going to need to outline this thing a little better. I want to keep it away from a compare and contrast style and I want to make it about the failure on both of our parts, not just my perspective on this as it took both of us to totally screw this relationship up.

Maybe that is my calling now, I am not sure, but I am going to walk this path till it ends and see what turns up.

When I was in San Diego as a youth (well 21-22) I liked hanging out at the indian reservations from time to time, one of my friends from SDSU grew up on one of them and was a good guy, Tim Long is what he called himself, I learned later that his last name was Long Feather, but he liked the Long so that people would not constantly ask him if he was Indian. We would hang out at his fathers house and enjoy some mind altering substances, one day we went out into the desert during the summer, hot as holy hell and we stayed out in a shack at the base of these huge hills.

I had my notebook and Tim had his as well, we would always try and write while we were, not of this world, and one day I wrote a story about being naked in the forest, when an otter talked to me. It was a compelling discussion about life. I did not think anything of it but when his father read through some of the stuff I had written he said that I found and I do not remember the word, but basically it was my spirit. I was playful and really just let the world around me dictate what was happening, I really just adjusted to life as it came to me. I just enjoyed life. Honestly as these days and months have gone by, I have seen the highest of highs, I have felt the lowest of lows, it has been a roller coaster of emotions and feelings that i have not been able to really understand. So how is my spirit animal, or whatever it is called helping me right now? I am not adjusting to things well, if anything I have done a horrible job at it.

Maybe it is the move spirit in me, where I need a change of scenery again. I know some people will say that the pressure is there and you want to run away, that may be part of it, but maybe a change of scenery will do me good. Maybe that is what I need to really look at. I have many options available to me. Maybe the timing is perfect. I do not know. Life has really started to not make sense now. Maybe it is Jocelyn and the way she is acting, maybe it is this whole new relationship that is causing angst and issues within my head, maybe it is just women in general that are causing me issues. In any regard, I must trudge forward until I cannot any longer. Life does funny things and my head is all over the place right now. It is starting to affect my work and my relationships with people at work, so now it is at yellow alert, I need to focus, I need to focus.

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1. Be inclusive – Instead of sticking around a core group of people the next 7 years of school, get to know everyone. Even if you know they don’t like you, or you don’t like them. It is middle/high school, these people will change and may possibly become your friends later on in life. But make an effort to socialize with everyone, be it the guy that nobody speaks with, to the popular girl. Be nice to everyone, listen to what they say and take an interest in them. That is the easiest way to sway a person’s opinion of you.
   
2. I will not “kill” you for anything that you do – If you do something that will make me mad. Yes, I will be angry, but that is what a parent is supposed to do. Grandpa was angry at me for a lot of things, I got punished, but I never felt like I needed to hide anything from him. There were times that he looked at me in shame and I felt it. I learned not to put myself into those positions again and to this day I have generally kept my nose clean.
   
3. Respect Everyone – They say youth is wasted on the young and now at the tender age of 40 I can understand that. I disrespected many people in my day. I had the group mentality, if a group of people picked on someone, I joined in. It was hurtful and you should be better than that. If you see it happening, step up for them. You can show people that tolerance is needed in life. You may get some flack for it, but you know what? The people that give you flack for it will eventually see that you were in the right (Though it may take a couple of decades).
   
4. Life is only as difficult as you make it – If you do what you are supposed to do, then life is pretty easy. If you start bringing drama into your life, it slows down and becomes difficult. Avoid drama and the people who cause it. Be respectful of them and be nice to them, but do what you feel is right. I hope that I have taught you the difference between right and wrong in the last 11 years, but if not. Just understand that if you are doing something that causes anyone to feel bad, chances are really good that you are doing something bad yourself.
   
5. Smile – Always be positive. Life, especially in middle/high school can be filled with negatives and they are easier to focus on than the positives. In every negative there are hundreds of positives, you just need to search a little bit to find them. Hang on to those positives. Smile, be outgoing, understand that you have a whole life ahead of you and teenage angst will eventually disappear.
   
6. Try your best – As in everything in life, give it 100%. Falling short sometimes is not bad, especially if you look back and say that you gave it your best. Think about it like this, if you gave your best and you did not succeed at something, you at least gave it your best shot. Maybe you will need more practice in the future and at least will know what to do if you have to.
   
7. Don’t be afraid to ask for help – Your teachers are not there to see you fail. They will actually respect you if you are having problems and reach out to them. If not your teachers, reach out to me or your mother. Reach out and talk to anyone that can help. Nobody will know if you need help unless you ask for it. There is no shame in saying you need help, for anything.
   

Look, I am not perfect, there are reasons that a divorce happens, and every divorce is different as to why things happen and the like. It is part of life, but this is a grey area debate that needs to be addressed. It may not even need to have a judge and divorce attorney’s running around making blood money off of the wreckage of two (possibly more) people’s lives.

A simple arbiter should be able to sit down and hear how the marriage went, then everything that occurred after the decision to divorce was made and all information up to the day the couple go in for a divorce. Ones actions should dictate the outcome. If you pulled some seriously fucked up shit, then you should not get certain benefits. Should one have to pay alimony to support a person that was morally bankrupt during the marriage? Or at the very least the alimony should at the very least be reduced to an amount that reflects that the person getting it did in fact do something that changed the nature of the marriage leading one down the road to divorce.

Child Support is ano brainer. There is already a scale on what child support should be and I fully support that. The child, a huge part of the marriage, should in no way be affected by outcomes. Child support is set up specifically for the child. If one parent feels the other is not using the child support solely for the child, then there are other options available.

After we get our tax system overhauled, our healthcare, and various other little things, we should really look into this as it is up front in my face, but I understand that it is less important than the grander scheme of things.

I was not honest in my relationship, neither was my spouse, it was years and years of both of us hurting each other. No matter how I want to justify certain actions and say that some actions weigh less than others, the fact remains that actions hurt people, no matter how small or large they are. One may think a little white lie carries less weight than someone cheating on you (not saying this is what occurred, it is an analogy), the fact is that the little white lie may not carry a whole lot of weight for the person telling it, it carries much more weight with the person it is being told to.

In the future, my relationships will have to be more truthful, they need to be. That means not pulling shady crap, that means just doing what is right and honestly, I hope to find a relationship like that one day.

This time around I know how to train for this thing and have the time to really do this right. The last time I just went to go for as much distance as I could without worrying about time nor how I got to my goal. This time around I am going strictly for time. I am basically starting from scratch again. Which means I am going to have to start building up the endurance in the right manner. This means starting off with time exercises. Starting with half hour training sessions. Walking 5 minutes, running 3 minutes, walking 2 minutes, running 3 minutes until the 30 minutes are up. This will in theory mean that I will have run 15 minutes over 30 minutes. Once I feel comfortable with that regiment I will increase it from 3 minutes to 5 minutes with 2 minute walks until finally I can go for 25 minutes. Then I go to 1 hour and then 2 hours. I feel by month 4 I will be in pretty good shape and honestly, if I can find a half marathon at that juncture, maybe it will be a good goal to shoot for.

While I am doing this for a half hour at a time, the rest of my time can be spent on doing work on core stuff, specifically mid back/abdomen which will help me sustain longer runs without that incessant back pain which has basically caused me to fail in longer run/walks.

I have to also look at my diet again. I think I am pretty damned hooked on the yogurt and bananas, but it is the other things that I eat that I really need to start identifying as being good, or bad. No cheat days, get into a pattern of sleep and that will allow me to best press forward. This next marathon is going ot be a snap, it is just a matter of getting back into the mindset of it.

I decided back in December that I would train for the LA Marathon and it finally came to fruition yesterday. 4.5 months of going to the gym, walking long distances, doing short bursts of running, eating properly, making sure that I was able to do it.

The weather was supposed to be rainy and cold, out of any day for the Marathon to run I would not have expected cold and rain in Los Angeles. I drove up Saturday in possibly the worst rain I had seen in Southern California in months. I fully expected Sunday to be as bad as it was on Saturday, and if that would have been the case, I would have not ran.

The morning of the race was cold, painfully cold. I fully expected it rain. I arrived at Dodger stadium at around 430am, probably about an hour before I should have. I found some warmth in Dodger stadium along with other runners and just waited for time to pass. The energy level was high and really amazing.

Race time came and we all got situated and walked forward towards the start and slowly but surely took off down the track. The only thing i remember is that they announced that Frank McCourt was part of the celebration and everyone booed him, which I found kind of funny.

The next 14 miles were a blur. Though I do recall stopping off at my hotel to make sure that I had checked out properly and the lovely lady behind the counter I think was a little shocked that a runner had stopped off to ask a question like that. I got back into the race and got to the half way mark before I was spent. I walked the rest.

The walk down San Vicente to Ocean was possibly the worst, wind gusts of upwards of 40 MPH were hitting us all and it was really difficult to keep going. When I crossed that finish line and got the medal. I was ecstatic, i had finished my goal and that was what I was there for. Next year, sub 5 hours!

#2 Impending divorce – The papers need to be worked on and signed and then the 6 month process of sitting around to get it approved will happen. But by 2012, I should be a legally single man and I hope to dear god that my current wife and I are on good terms when it does. It would not help Molly in the short, nor long term, if we are at each others throats.

#3 Professionally grasping the reigns of other marketing channels and making sure that I understand them to round out my entire marketing knowledge. I think my biggest issue is broadcast, the online world I understand, but it is the offline piece that I have to get a better grasp on. So there will be times that I need to pop my head in there and muck around a little bit.

#4 Financially – I have been able to get things to a point where they are manageable, by the fist quarter of the year I should in theory have it at a point where everything is situated and taken care of. So I am excited about that. This of course will change with the impending divorce as I have no clue what is going to be dictated to me in regards to the divorce. But with everything, I will have to adapt to things and work through them.

#5 40 – yes, the big 4-0 is on the horizon and I am looking forward to it.