Hi everyone!    Pardon the silence as of late, but I’ve been toying with the idea of writing on here about the character traits and well the “personal code” that I have. My “Eight Virtues” if you will.  Well the first post is turning into a pretty personal one and wasn’t quite sure if I should post it.  Now I should say that this whole concept of eight virtues isn’t my idea at all, but it was something that I heard and really identified with then I was a kid.

As you may now I am a recovering addict… a video game one that is! :-P   Ok ok  I’ll be serious.  That was actually true though, but I deal with it well, and for some reason I have found it pretty easy to ignore “the stuff” most of the time. (it helps that the closest real arcade to me is in NH)  Well, I got to playing this one game series called Ultima.  The first time I saw someone play Ultima IV I fell love and really wanted to play it.    The game was genius.. y’see it was an RPG (role playing game), but it wasn’t about stopping the evil thing that was about to destroy life as you knew it.  After the 3rd one, the evil was pretty much gone.  Instead, in Ultima IV, the king at the time was trying to join all his peoples together in hopes that they could rally behind one great virtuous person….”The Avatar”.  In it you played as the hero travelling across the lands, and trying to figure out how to become the most virtuous person in all the lands.

In this game there were eight virtues.  Honesty, Honor, Valor, Justice, Sacrifice, Spirituality, Compassion, Humility.  Each virtue was part of one of the principals of Truth, Love, and/or Courage. Your goal was to learn these virtues in and out and meditate at that virtue’s shrine with a particular mantra… once you were virtuous enough you’d get an eighth of an ankh.  Once you had a full ankh you could go to the biggest dungeon and get the book of ultimate wisdom to finish the game.

I don’t know what it was, but I took all of those virtues to heart in one way or another, and i still do today.  Some more than others of course…Either way I find each of them blog worthy.

It was kind of cool as each virtue had its own color, and as the primary colors mixed you’d get other virtues.  Spirituality was white (the combination of all the virtues), and humility  (opposite of pride)  was black as pride is the absence of virtue.  Humility is the foundation of all virtues.

So that’s my background on that… eventually I’ll get to them all.  I’m almost done with Honesty… :: gulps ::

Hope to have it done soon!

Singles anyone?

I write for lots of reasons, and one of them is for me.  Now I know that starting off posts with a long(ish) sidestory isn’t the best way to get people to read to the main topic, but I honestly wrote this post that way because I personally think it rocks!  If you wanna skip down you can…you make the call haha!

So I know this guy, (my friend’s dad actually), who lives a structured life.  He’s the guy that will put his bowl, spoon, napkin and cereal box out the night before, lay out his clothes, the whole nine.  I’m talking his car tires cross the train tracks and first drop of water from the shower hitting his body at the exact same time every day kind of structured!  He was a marine and it shows.

Well get this, he even planned his child conception.  Three kids, five years apart.  The reason?  For years of college and one year to save!  I suppose I should mention that they all were born within 2 weeks of each other (starting on Halloween)!  Believe it or not there was a reason for that too.  See when you’re a parent looking to get your kids in school, if they are born at that time you can get them in a year earlier than everyone else, giving them a jump start on  their entire life!

I can only imagine it, “Ok honey, are you ready?  T-minus 37:00 hours and 16.7 Seconds!”

Well his son can be just as organized, always preparing for things and making sure all his bases are covered.  He’s got water and trash bags in his car for emergency hangover relief/containment, does his due diligence to acclimate himself to the altitude when skiing when the risk of danger is reasonably low.  Hell,  we were in Florida during a hurricane,  he slept in his shoes, away from shelves just in case of an freak tornado.  A little different from his dad, this kid loves the extreme, he’ll ski the tallest peaks…in a blizzard, and will pretty much scale whatever mountain you challenge him to.

Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with being organized, but sometimes it is just funny.  Well a few years back I found this video of a guy unpacking his “41 lb suitcase”, and he had my friend matched to a T!  Right down to the room selection being on the first floor (closest to the conference room) and extra laptop charger,   to his “tighter than a frog’s butt” waterproof laptop case and elastic waisted jeans that would expand and contract based on the quality of food.  This is just a funny video.

This guy cracks me up so below that I posted another video about this guys amazing business card and why (your and everyone else’s business card is crap) haha too funny.

While this first video is way more funnier to my friends and I.  Here are some general highlights if you’re just skimming through it:

• 0:50 Watertight like a frogs butt neoprene laptop case
• 2:56 Elastic waisted jeans
• 8:16 Mary Poppins
• 8:30 Jacket with 55 pockets, that hold 35lbs of gear, including a “4/4.5lb laptop”, isolated hood, and removable arms to turn it into a vest…and even a “high tech” pocket,… “cause…travel is an art form”
• 11:04 “Juvo” a food with more vitamins and nutrients that you receive in a year of what you usually eat.
• 12:20 Speech to us about how thanking the camera guy, assures us that although said cameraman  may go through life thinking his job and how he is spending his life is pointless/mundane that he actually “is” valuable.
• 15:56 Travel sleeping mask and neck brace/bag buffer

Here are the highlights of the second video I tried having it start 1 minute in, but it wouldn’t let me… either way it’s pretty funny:

• 1:09 business card that took 25 years to make
• 1:50 and yes friends it’s a pop-up book….

“…and hey it doesn’t fit in a Rolodex because it doesn’t belong there!”

Man,  all I know is that if it doesn’t fit in the place where you normally would keep a business card like a wallet or Rolodex, someone is either going to throw it away or lose the damn thing.

I’m all about foil, embossing, color, whatever you gotta do to get your message across, and stand out from a stack of other cards.  Hell if I could find a way to make an affordable neon sign business card I sure as hell would do it,  but to me a business card just HAS to have 2 qualities…. it’s gotta fit in a wallet so people won’t lose it/remember where it is, and you have to be able to write some info on it somewhere so it is more personal and/or the person getting it will have or see more of a personal connection to it.

But hey that’s just me!

Alright I’m off!  Thanks again for reading!

Last we saw our hero sitting in his bosses office about to get exactly what he had coming to him…..

an Employee of the Month Award.

Was he serious?!?

The irony, is that part of the reason I got the award was because I thought I sucked.  I personally think it takes me longer to grasp a new job, and since I felt I wasn’t getting it, I just tried harder.  Well, I went on to do some pretty cool things with that company with regards to retail, some corporate office work, managed millions of dollars of inventory, and in general just kicked ass and took names for a part of my time there.

The thing that was this…later in life when I went on to build my music business resume,  just as at that other job,  I didn’t have the self confidence to make it happen.  It was like in 6th grade… there was no way I was going to talk to that girl Liz, until someone told her that I liked her.  What made me really think that someone was going to pay me when I  was already working for free and didn’t have the cojones to even step up to the plate?

Well, this happened all through college, with my only real pay coming from my retail job at the shoe store (and this one time I sold knives… but we won’t talk about that).  I graduate,  took a little pay cut and got a better position at another sneaker place, and then eventually got a couple of $15 or so an hour jobs to get me started with this whole “real world thing”…well those didn’t work out.  One was a temp job with a giant software company doing database integrity work, my boss didn’t like me, and I didn’t really like the work.  After that I was a merchansider at a beer manufacturer, where I did merchandising with a crew that I totally didn’t fit in with.  (as an example one guy had a sweet little nickname for his girlfriend…”Slutface”… yea real mature), either way I could have been faster and on the last day of my initial probation period I was let go.

Well the whole time I was working at those jobs, I was still working retail on the weekends, I then went back to full time, and with the flexible schedule decided to hook up with my friends who designed t-shirts and  Audio Cotton was born.  AC started off a little rocky in the finance department, but in an effort to “push it over the cliff to eleven”  so I could Finally be able to spend less time on the operational stuff and more time doing what I love I decided to bump back down to being a part time retail associate.

Well my friends, only working a part time job, and running a business that pays for itself only most of the time and pays you a hell of a lot less of the time can only go on for so long.  So I have decided that it’s time that…  I “get a real job”.   Having realized that things need to change with AC have made me really work towards tweaking things, but the new concepts I have in the works aren’t coming soon enough.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m back at the first shoe place part time, and it is great, but it does not really pay my bills.  So I’ve decided to make the sacrifice and instead of having my dream oh so amazing super bad-ass job,  I’m looking to do something that I think is just a regular bad-ass job.  So far I am  going to at least apply to work back at the corporate offices in footwear.  Not sure how it’s going to work out…we’ll see.

It’s kind of funny, I started this in post part to put off having to write my cover letter, I’m pretty damn nervous.  But I have to get over the mental block/lack of self confidence, that tells me that I don’t have the skills to succeed…. because if that stops me from applying then I just made my worst fears come true…and failed!

I guess my new mindset should be one of not wanting to fail so badly that “I would do anything for a job (but I won’t do that)”, haha!  What I mean is that I should just have to feel like I need to prove to the world that I can dominate the scene.

So with that, I am off to finish said cover letter, and “dominate said scene”.

———

Oh, and if you actually read all of this.. you are so ah-mazing.  I ended up finishing that cover letter and have spent some time tweaking my resume to be more general.  I plan of making two kind of general ones depending on the job.    Either way, I kind of feel like this was just me rambling, so thanks!

These are going into the “Things I said Today” area, I put posts there that are just about me personally (among other things), and this is one of those.  But for all those that did read this… even if it is just 1 person, I appreciate it more than you could imagine!

And if you haven’t voted on “Get a Haricut“….” Do it!  Seriously, do it…vote on that puppy  we’ll blow it away” haha

Talk soon everyone and thanks again!

-Kevin