Real Joe

Joe Stiff essay: Beauty in Motion

As a young man, whenever I looked at a beautiful woman — in a picture, a movie, or just passing in a crowd — a mostly unconscious notion began stirring in my brain. Yes, the usual flash of lust kicked in but accompanying it was an underlying assumption that her looks would be enough to satisfy me were I lucky enough to be in a relationship with her.

It occurred to me that this assumption still lurks in my brain to a small degree when I read a piece… MORE–>>

I’ve never been away from my wife Robbie for two weeks before. She’s been in Oregon with my daughter, staying with her mother.

It’s been a good experience for me. She was the busy, preoccupied one this time, whereas it’s usually been me on business trips that’s been too busy to really miss her.

I made a long list of things I house-related stuff I did for her while she was gone and when I picked her up at the airport, I told her I had surprises for her. She’s been really appreciative as she’s discovered each one.

Absence does make the heart grow fonder, as long as your hearts are in a good place already.

Newsblog: Father of baby left in van said he forgot child was there, police say

Man, what a nightmare this would be. In Iowa last week, it was a mother who did it. Assuming it was forgetfulness, I think I would’ve been capable of doing something like that as a young father. And I don’t think my marriage would have survived it, given the shape we were often in back then.

I wonder if public opinion will judge the man or the woman more harshly?

Newsblog – Fortune magazine: God and Business: Bringing spirituality into the workplace violates the old idea that faith and fortune don’t mix. But a groundswell of believers is breaching the last taboo in corporate America.

I’m going to have to write about a piece about all this God and spirituality in the workplace stuff. Some it just rubs me the wrong way, but I’m not quite sure what it is.

The Door Magazine bills itself as “The world’s pretty much only religious satire magazine.” Others say it’s the Mad Magazine of religion.

And it’s put out by a Christian group.

Newsblog: British Web site allows confession of your sins

I can’t really see how this benefits people, though I don’t see how it could hurt.

As I consider a shift to a subscription revenue model for Real Joe, I investigated a couple of the Internet marketing books/programs.

The two most popular are Ken Evoy’s Site Sell and Corey Rudl’s Internet Marketing Center.

I opted for Evoy – lower cost, less hype. His first book Make Your Site Sell is only $16 for the digital version. But it’s two years old and covers the whole gamut of ecommerce, so I’m considering his just-issued new collection called Make Your Knowledge Sell – $60, which is specifically aimed at “info products” only.

NewsBlog: Time mag had a cover story a couple weeks ago titled Blind To Failure: Mountaineers scoffed at the notion that Erik Weihenmayer, sightless since he was 13, could climb Everest. But a killer peak is no obstacle for a man who can conquer adversity.

Buried in the article was this line, “Married in 1997, he and his wife Ellie have a one-year-old daughter, Emma.”

IMHO, the headline should’ve been: Blind climber leaves wife and baby behind, risks life in order to prove himself on Everest. I did similar shit in my younger married days, too, including leaving my sick wife at home so I could ride in a motorcycle event. As it turned out, she was more than sick. She was miscarrying. Yep, what an asshole, I know. I still regret it.

Tired of “supercrips” in the media? So’s this blind woman, who wrote a piece in the Washington Post titled, He’s Your Inspiration, Not Mine.

Funny sidebar to the Post story — From NBC’s “Today” show, June 1:

KATIE COURIC: Also, we’ll be talking with an amazing man who’s very methodically going about making his dreams come true. Thirty-two-year-old Erik Weihenmayer is blind but that isn’t stopping him from attempting to climb the tallest mountains on each of the seven continents. He has just summited his fifth, Mount Everest, and he’ll tell us firsthand about that experience, live from the mountain. Exciting, huh?

LAUER: He really is. Speaking of greatness, Al Roker is outside with a check of the weather . . . .

Not what we have but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance. - John Petit-Senn

I really wanted to borrow my friend Jim’s BMW motorcycle yesterday and go for a long ride. I called him on the way back from Minneapolis to make the arrangements and it was all set. But as I drove home, it occurred to me that this wasn’t a good time to go road riding. My daughter and wife Robbie are out in Oregon visiting my mother-in-law, who’s been having a rough time since her husband, Robbie’s dad, died a couple months ago. If something happened to me on the cycle, they’d have to cut short their trip and come home to tend to me… which would be a huge withdrawal on the emotional bank account of our marriage. I just decided that I didn’t need that. Robbie’s been through plenty lately with the kids’ and her own surgeries as well as her dad dying. Plus we now have a son on a fishing boat in Alaska for the summer, and she’s pretty worried about him.

It really didn’t feel like I was denying myself, like it has in the past. It felt more like a gift to my wife. And I felt a little grown up about it, too…. like I’d overcome my teenaged rebelliousness with a motorcycle.

So instead, I got on my old mountain bike and hit the bike trails through the Carleton Arb, all the way to the Waterford Bridge and back. It was a gorgeous evening, I hadn’t biked there in a while, and my legs were surprisingly strong. Like the saying says, it’s what I enjoyed that constituted my abundance.

I took a vacation from writing Joe to Gos the past three and half weeks. It was a combination of both A) a lot going on with my day job and personal life; and B) needing some distance from it to rethink what I’m doing with Real Joe… basically, preparing for a subscription model. I submitted a proposal for this to Johnny Walker Scotch Whiskey’s Keep Walking Fund last week. They’re awarding $500K to 5-12 startups and I figure we have a good chance to get some of it. I’ll know whether we’re a finalist by mid-August.

We’re still on track with the radio show pilot. We finished recording multiple takes of all the segments last week. Paul is now editing, while David and I started selecting a variety of music tracks for the opening and closing, plus the transitions between the segments. Our goal now is to have the first cut ready by July 20 so that a producer who’ll be visiting MN then will critique it for us.