Bad jokes about deap rappers aside, let's have a look at this thing seriously. All round good guy and man about town, Mr. Paul Salamone, is issuing a challenge: Can you turn your life around in 90 days? Not through the use of recreational drugs or Anthony Robbins tapes, or some exotic combination of the two, but through the use of the newly created ILP. Now, I'm new to this self help game (the closest I've ever come is trawling soulseek for jokey self-help mp3s to pass the time), so I'm coming at it with a fresh set of ears, and hands, and eyes. I'm both horribly cynical and yet terribly naive at the same time, so you can count on me for something that might resemble an honest review. That, and the fact that I've spent lots of hard earnt money (damn you weak  Australian currency!) means that I have quite a bit invested in getting this thing right.

First things first though.

1) Who the hell has a 90 day challenge? Hire a decent PR guy Salamone. yeesh. You need something catchier, like THE HUNDRED DAY CHALLENGE or A HUNDRED WAYS IN A HUNDRED DAYS or suchlike. Also, my ILP kit is still in the mail, so I'll just extend my challenge out to the 100 day mark.

2) That means, a blog post a day on the effort. All serious chatter will happen over at vomitingconfetti.blogspot.com. Don't worry, I'll still post here, and it'll still try to be funny. However, the focus is now on getting this ILP to work.

Ok, so until the kit arrives, I'll be outlining what exists of my current practise, and how it will change shape and whatnot in the next three months.
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STEP 1:

The first step to getting your rear into gear is to learn how to rest properly. Wikipedia, the doyen of all things sleep, suggests that the minimum anyone should sleep is about 6 hours. So do the good people at Swisse multivitamins, and who am I to argue with a man who wear a polkadot tie and doesn't flinch. Air five for Swisse!

Ok, that brings us to Alarm Clocks. Now, your garden variety alarm clock  just beeps and beeps like Chris Rock hosting the oscars, so you need something a bit more gradual. Hence, companies like Now and Zen have created those Zen Alarm clocks with a progressive bell chime that gradually wake you over a ten minute period. Brilliant idea, except they cost too damn much (to buy a brand new clock and ship it to Australia would cost about Australian 230 dollars, 60 of which was shipping. Seeing as this is the 21st century and they weren't shipping the Pope's DNA, I decided that this price is completely unreasonable). Thus, I needed something better.

I decided to create my own Zen Alarm Clock, (more clock, less Zen). You need to buy a CD alarm that lets you play CDs as the morning alarm (prices range from 40 to 160 dollars Australian, feeling rich I went for the 90 dollar model). Then it's a simple matter of using a music editing program (FrootyLoops, Guitartracks etc) and creating your own bell soundfile. A quick google search will turn up the actual sound used by Now and Zen, but if you don't like that then pick your own soothing whatnot to get you out of bed in the morning. The Now and Zen people have a chart on their website that shows you exactly when the bell is supposed to ring. You can follow this chart or make up something more to your own liking. Whatever works.

That's my step one. As this wasn't much of a blog entry, the actual HUNDRED WAYS IN A HUNDRED DAYS will start tomorrow. We'll call this day zero.

My goodness me am I not fit. I used to play a lot of sport. 4 or 5 trainings a week, Tennis, Football (soccer), Volleyball, plus miscellaneous whatnottery. This, couple with natural teenage exuberance, kept me at a pretty high level of fitness.

I just went jogging and almost collapsed after about 500 metres. Stabbing pains in the chest, stabbing pains in the stomach.

Oh well, at least I'm in for the long haul.

I think it was Haruki Murakami who said that every writer should get fit first, write second.

Still, as they say, the longest journey starts with a single step, quickly followed by stabbing pains in the chest.

You might think I'm in trouble writing a blog post called persistence on day two, but bear with me here. I had a moderately interesting last twenty four hours. Last night I went out with friends to celebrate the fact that I'm going back to Melbourne. Another friend is also setting sail for Sydney, so it was a bit of a farewell drunken shindig. Now, what was interesting was having a drunken conversation with a close friend of mine, about, of all things, Tony Robbins.

You can call me a Tony Robbins skeptic. Not because his stuff doesn't work, or whatever, but just because his whole image is so hyperreal that it's hard to take him seriously. Doubtless some of that comes with the territory, but it would be nice to have a super duper motivational coach who didn't give off batshit insane super achiever vibes. TONY ROBBINS HUNGRY.

Anyway, my friend is a bit of a fan of Tony, so we got chatting about the strengths and weaknesses of NLP and the various approaches. By chatting I mean "How FUCKING GOOD is the hour of power? Hell yeah man!" All loudly shouted in the confines of the very yuppie Belgian beer bar. I think at one point I may have said "With my booksmarts, and your ability to exploit people with booksmarts, we're gonna change the world!" This was followed by several promises to call him in the next couple of days, though for what purpose I can't remember.

Still, it was nice to have some common ground to discuss some pretty wide ranging topics. He was notably impressed that Tony Robbins had endorsed Ken Wilber (cue several more Fuck yeahs!) and me likewise. It's also nice to see someone who's gone the Tony route and succeeded, at least in material terms if nothing else. It's also challenging for me to put my cynicism in a box, at least for a little while. That's what I'll be doing for the next 90, sorry one hundred, days if nothing else.

This morning I went to church, to listen to the chaplain from Baxter detention centre talk. To be honest, it wasn't a particularly good talk, but interesting nonetheless, particularly since the chaplain's job involves counselling suicidal asylum seekers. Very much a world away from yuppie beer bars and superachiever talk.

So we're trying to find the happy medium between those two poles. Personal Power and Personal Powerlessness.

A while ago Mr. Salamone wrote something that struck me as really good advice. He wrote that in any practise, in particular any physical practise, you should aim to complete at least one repetition per day. Now, one push up or one sit up or jogging one metre might not seem like the hardest task, but just doing it each day seems to be enough to keep me going to the next day. Also, if you're going to go to all the effort of doing one push up, you're more than likely to press on and turn that one push up into 10, then 20, then 30.

More importantly, however, it's a way to keep your practise going when things get sticky or difficult. For me, this means when I'm hungover, or tired, or sick, or distracted, or writing essays at 3am whilst flirting with polyphasic sleep. It's a way of beating the demons of procrastination to a slimy, masticated end.

This is, I think, the main problem with experiments like this one. It's one thing to be motivated when things are running smoothly, quite another to keep it up when your cat dies, or your friend flies in from Singapore and all you want to do is bake cakes and watch Kung Fu Hustle. For more thoughts on this very topic, read the delightful Jean (speaking of people that I owe cakes).

But for me, the hypermasculinist ILP is what I need right now. As Coolmel once said, you've gotta bake the bread before you can make the self toast (or words to that effect). So right now I'm an Army of One, as the army used to say.

That, I think, will be the real test of how applicable and useful the ILP is, whether or not it helps me through the shower of shit that will no doubt come raining down one day. That's not to say I can blame the ILP when things go "Tits Up" as we uncouth convicts like to say, but I'll be keen to see how flexible the overall approach is.

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Jogging Update: The stabbing pains weren't quite so bad. I played tennis later in the day and absolutely kicked my friend's arse, 6-0 6-3. In my family, a 6-0 loss is called a 'pants down' - one guess as to why - but my friend, in the interest of public safety, kept his pants on.

Oh and another thing, would the US postal service hurry it up already!

Within four days of kicking this thing off I've pulled a back muscle playing tennis and developed a minor chest cold thanks to early morning runs. But I'm also feeling more motivated than ever before. Of course, this is still the rather obvious afterglow from my conscious decision to kick some more ass, goalwise.

Just in case you might think this 100 day thing is trivial, guess again. I'm deadly serious about this, and the reason why is leverage. This isn't just to do with ILP, but rather the culmination of a whole lot of crap boiling over.

In other news, I'm back in Melbourne on Friday, resuming my job as a residential tutor. Fun times ahead corrupting the youth of our nation.

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I see Paul has noticed that I've thrown down the gauntlet.

We all know I'm the Daniel San to his Johnny Lawrence (Cobra Kai!) and that this will end with a well placed crane kick to the face.

Share your thoughts on transcendentalism, soccer and the superbowl here.

Things are kicking along nicely, but not much to reflect upon today as I'm packing for Melbourne, followed shortly after by a conference.

No internet access until monday Chochacos. Will have much to report on when I get back.

Lots to tell! An interesting couple of days. Highlights included:

- Four hour conversation about radical feminism
- Documentary about shoe collecting

But I need to sleep now.

Bury Me With It.

Hello Chochacos. You may have noticed a bit of a gap between day 6 and day 7. A lot has been happening; 77 new students have moved into residence, and we've been happily sheparding them about, avoiding sleazy drug dealers and drink spikers along the way. Plus I've been setting up my room, making time for my girlfriend and having long conversations. Hurrah!

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On the downside, my ILP kit still hasn't arrived, making this challenge a little harder to do. However, it is due within two days (according to the upper limits of the Shambhala shipping schedule) so soon I'll be super duper keen.

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Today, a quick talk about holding things lightly:

"I'm Jim Ficks, and I'm dead now... I jogged every day, ate nothing but tofu, swam 500 laps every morning.... and I'm dead! Yul Brenner drank, smoked, and got laid every night of his life. He's dead!.... Shit! That Yul Brenner.... smoking, drinking, girls sittin' on his little cue-ball noggin every night of his life! And I'm running around a dewy track at dawn. And we're both f****n' dead." -- Bill Hicks

Leave it to Bill Hicks to cut through the crap. As much as we'd all like to change the world here at Zaadz, we're still all going to die, and our relationship with death very much conditions the here and now. To that extent, doing the 100 day ILP challenge is just an attempt to die well, or die now so later when you die you won't die. Et cetera. Either way, this whole here life business is still a ridiculous absurdity. It just might end up being ridiculously funny as well.

So I've been thinking about my funeral. Why? Too friends of mine have gone into the funeral business. Two guys that you would never have picked to become undertakers. Smart guys, but funny, practical jokers in the get in the back with the corpse kind of way. So last night at the pub I pitched the idea of opening a themed funeral parlour. What with all the baby boomers getting old and dying, no doubt this is a huge potential market (I'm not kidding here either). Most people limit thoughts of their own funeral to picking a certain song to play, or in my mother's case, a familiar refrain. I'd like all you kids just to say a few words. Easy.

None of that maudlin stuff for me!

Here is my living will:

When I die, dress me in an all white suit with a bright red bowtie that spins around fast. Then stuff my corpse, leaving with an absurd (but friendly) grin. Stick me up the front of the church, arm outstreched, so that everybody who comes has to shake my hand.

When the eulogies are being delivered, put me next to the lectern, and put my arm around the shoulder of whoever is talking. Nothing like the cold dead arm of your friend to keep your stories positive. (PS, stuff me with beanbag balls so I'm all floppy and bendy. If Bill Murray isn't available to do a reading, just play a clip from Rushmore).

Fire me out of a cannon (ala Hunter S. Thompson), my whole body that is, not just my ashes. Try and aim me so I land headfirst inthe grave, my feet sticking out. Don't bother to bury them, leave them sticking out. All this will be done whilst 'friends come in all sizes' plays in the background.

Still no ILP kit! As much as I enjoy practising the vice module (endorsed by Mr. Salamone), I'd actually like to start reviewing the various techniques, which requires me having the kit. Shambhala post, what's the deal?

From Spiritual Instruction by Sri Ramana Maharshi:

What are the marks of an earnest disciple?

An intense longing for the removal of sorrow (tick!) and attainment of joy (tick!) and an intense aversion for all kinds of mundane pleasure (.....damn).