still journaling mostly over  here.

it shore has been a busy weekend so far. a lot of that busy has been on my bankcard i guess. but not all.
yesterday i got up dreadfully early on a saturday to go to a career development workshop being paid for by my current employer. it was an interesting day, although the biggest part of it that was interesting was watching the other people in the room learn so much about themselves. i learned some, i will have to admit but i am so much more in tune with who i am both inner and outer than these folks that it was very intriguing.

at one point we were given this thingimy to help us achieve a personal mission statement to help us as we move on in our careers. the first thing on this sheet was to name the person who had most influenced your life. this gave me a problem to ponder....

there were two ways of looking at this. i could either take and choose the person in my life who has influenced it over all, and if i was going to produce an over-all life personal mission statement i would have done that and the choice i would have to have made was really clear. There is beyond doubt one person that has helped me experience more personal growth and learn more about myself and my way in the world around it than any other.
however, i wasn't thinking about digging into that facet here. rather, as this is a career development day, i was going to try and focus stuff on my career. so now i had to pick the person who has influenced me the most...i guess the difference here is that the person mentioned above has influenced my inner self the most. who i want to be. now i needed a person who has influenced my outer life the most. not really the way i act, but what i do, where i want to do it, how i want to do it. this gave me a quandary. this might have been the most difficult thing for me to do all day.
it wasn't that i was having trouble picking out of this large list of people who have influenced me, but rather there just weren't many that had had that much of an impact. i don't really swing to idols, mentors, people i look up to, advisors, really anything of the sort. i do as much as i can on my own, learning from everyone and anything around me. but i had to make a choice to do the assignment correctly. so i chose one person. then i had to indicate the qualities that i most admire in this person and then choose which of those i would want to be part of my life.
so now i am going to list these qualities. i'm not going to tell you who this person is because it might be you. a lot of people have brought me facets of these things to my life but this one person has done it more fully, with more impact than any other i think. but i think it would be really nice that if you believe i am talking about you, that you should just go on believing it. because it is likely true. oh. i will mention though that the other person i talked about, up above, is sharolyn. she can go ahead and feel good about it.

Qualities I Most Admire In The Person Who Has Influenced Me The Most
-Willingness to pursue passion at any amount or level necessary for any cost.
- Willingness to care about others and everyone around her without limitation.
- A firm notion that everything, every single little thing, that a person does must be creative.
- Still, with said levels of caring to manage to still be cynical and sarcastic about life. </i>

So the really cool bit about all of this is that by knowing and watching this person and others like this person, i have grown to the point where i was a person with no direction, no dreams, nothing i wanted to do with/in my life to a person who knows what his passions are and knows that he wants to pursue them without failing. i thank you from the depths of my soul.

of course, most of those passions don't pay very well. so there is still work to be done. will i pursue them to the exclusion of the things that will keep me fed and my bills paid? this is some of the stuff i wanted help in this course from. it's given me some tools. We'll see where i get from them.

in case you are interested, the Personal Mission Statement i came up with:
(remembering it is a Personal Mission Statement as relates to career and what i will do with my life)

I, Spad, believe that my personal mission is: To let myself create, in every role of my life, something that is beautiful, true and meaningful. And to bring my life around to where this is core to my personal, professional and social lives.

so, umm, yeah.

the one other fun thing about the workshop? they gave us what they figure would be 14 hours of homework. i foolishly signed up for the second workshop, monday, after work. thankfully, it doesn't all have to be done for monday. but the two 30 second commercials i have to write for myself do. sigh...

back to the my days


after the course i went and spent money, bought some DVD's and a new DVD player.
came home, left to cross town again to pick up my Office CD so i could reinstall it. (have i mentioned lately how annoyed i am that i have had to rebuild my PC this week?). got home and 20 seconds later was invited to dinner by a friend. dinner was great.

this morning, i got up, left the house early, went shopping for food stuffs. came home. set some beef for jerky to marinade, went shopping for green food stuffs. came home, went shopping for socks and underwear (sensing a pattern yet?). on this trip, diverted and shopped and bought another couple of DVD's.

i'm tired.
soon i'm going to leave the house to go to a friend's and watch the first ep of Survivor 8. the biggest