Blinding Flash of the Obvious

I had a Blinding Flash of the Obvious (BFO) today.  Actually several of them. 

1) I cannot sew.  

2)  I am a terrible gardener 

3)  I cannot cook (though I sort of suspected that) and 

4) I am neither an educational visionary nor a powerful force for change.  

I have no doubt that I could learn to do any of those things, if I really wanted to.  I also realized, however, that I lack a work ethic of any kind.  And developing a work ethic?  That actually requires a work ethic.

I am, however, decorative and occasionally entertaining.  

Living La Vida...um, What's Spanish For "Working too damn hard?"

It's summer. I'm sitting in a basement meeting room, engaged in relatively interesting conversation around educational legislation and policy. With people I don't know. And there's no booze and thus far no one has laughed at any of my jokes.

This? So not badass.

But when I get home I'm going to sit on my deck with a beer and ponder the world-gone-mad in which people ask *me* for input on educational legislation and policy.

Calling me out

"You know, I still have yet to see signs of bad-assery..."

Thanks to my friend Katie and these words, shared in a recent exchange over why she needed to write me a giant grant to fund this project, I'm do a teeny bit of soul searching today.

She makes a good point. I haven't done that much, outwardly, to merit the title "Badass." A little shooting, a little shouting, a whole lot of thinking...

Then again, there's a reason this whole thing is called "Becoming Badass" you know.

It's a process.

So get the hell off my back and write me the damn grant already.

Badass Poultry

I rarely make posts out of other blogger's stuff. It feels vaguely ooky and just a little dishonest. But then, I rarely come across something this perfectly, beautifully badass in just exactly the way I one day hope to be badass.

Behold. The Chicken.


This is golden. It is perfect. It is all I aspire to be in life. I need this chicken. I need it with the most powerful force known to man or woman. I need it more than sex or chocolate or a cabana boy named Pedro. Where can I find this chicken?

Bang

I have lots of things on my Becoming Badass list of skills. Some of them are internal- I want to be able to carry my Screw You internal attitude into the world at large. I want to stop caring so much about what people think of me. I want to let go of my impossibly high standards. I want to say what I'm thinking- even if it's not the nicest thing to say. Some of them are what we call "hard skills"- stuff that I want to be able to do. I wanted to learn to hotwire a car (though I learned better), to throw knives, to fight, maybe to ride a motorcycle, to shoot...

So that last one was proving to be tougher than I'd imagined. I never occurred to me that the guys who wanted to teach me to shoot might also want to teach me other stuff- like how to manage their zippers. As a result, it took me awhile to find some one with both the appropriate skill set, but also appropriate expectations. Turns out, the guy I needed was a guy I'd known for years. Never in a thousand years would I have known that this mild-mannered teacher with an amazing wit and a great brain would also be a guy with an arms stockpile to rival a small-time militia. Other people, however, were hip to his real passion (besides teaching and his wife)- small arms.

We made arrangements to meet at the local "Rod and Gun Club" (which was really just a firing range). The local police department was re-certifying so it was like walking onto the set of a John Woo movie: lots of pop-pop-pop, lots of yelling, lots of stinky gun powder. I'll admit, I was surprised to see picnic tables- this didn't really seem like my first choice for a Family Friendly outing, but R assured me that the community of folks who frequent the place were harmless. I took him at his word but I also kept my eyes peeled. He opened his trunk and pulled out a duffle full of stuff. And by "stuff," I mean guns. Big ones and little ones. Being a teacher, he started me off with a bit of history and a quick overview of how they were the same (they all have safeties, they all go boom, they're all wicked helpful in the zombie apocalypse), their differences, and then- just to scare the crap out of me- the skinny on what exactly happens when a bullet enters a person- er, a zombie.

Suffice to say I had a healthy respect for the thing going into this. After his little lecture, I was scared shitless.

Then we went down to the range. And, without further ado, my results:



See those red arrows? Those were my first three shots.

Yeah. Pretty badass.