Jigsaw Puzzles and the Legacy of Terry Fox

After four months, countless hours, several beers and an almost immeasurable amount of frustration I have finally finished my masterpiece. Yes, as the picture clearly shows I have singlehandedly completed a 3,000 piece jigsaw puzzle. For those of you who want a sense of scale the puzzle is 32 inches by 48 inches and is sitting on a poster board that is meant to be used to create a 3 panel grade school science fair presentation. The reason it is on a board on the floor of my apartment is because the dimensions of the puzzle are technically larger than the dimensions of my dining room table. I’m not kidding when I say that this thing is intense.

This is easily the toughest jigsaw puzzle that I’ve ever built. As you can kind of see this is based off of a painting and consists mainly of sea and sky. To be honest, the sea and the sky were the easy parts. The boats were just hell to complete as everything was just one mass of brown. I probably worked on this a little bit every day that I was home and there were nights where just finding a few pieces that fit were a victory.

The big question here is why in the world would I do such a thing? Given that there is so much going on in my life why would I focus on a jigsaw puzzle of all things? Well, that answer is a lot more complicated, a lot more meaningful and hopefully a lot more interesting than you would think.

For one thing doing this was one of my New Year’s Resolutions and has been a goal of mine for a rather long while. So in a sense I did this because I had set a goal for myself and wanted to achieve it. That doesn’t explain why I did it over the summer though. That is because I have really been using this puzzle as a kind of therapy. As some people know I suffered a great loss this spring and needed to do something to occupy my mind as I worked through everything. It is strange in how my mind works in that sometimes the best way for me to analyze a situation or to handle a stressful event is to do something with complete focus that has nothing to do with the issue at hand. Somehow by doing so my subconscious gets to put its full energy on the problem. And I have to say that I felt a weight lifted from me when I completed the puzzle. The first thing that came to my head when I put in the last piece was Jeff saying “I did it!” when he finished a puzzle we worked on together. That seemed to make much of the past few months make much more sense.

There is one more reason behind it and to do so I am going to have to make a really odd connection here in the sense that my jigsaw puzzle abilities pale in comparison to the following. Tonight ESPN is doing a story on Terry Fox, one of my heroes, as part of their 30 for 30 series. Outside of Canada most people don’t know who he was but I remember as a kid watching the HBO movie on his life story. When Terry Fox was 17 years old he lost part of his right leg to cancer. When he was 20 he set off to run across Canada in order to raise money for cancer research. This was in 1980 so his prosthetic leg was primitive by today’s standards. It was more of a hobble and a lurch than a run. But he ran, into the wind, for 26 miles every day. Each day was a marathon on one leg, each day was his personal challenge, each day was his hope that this would help others to succeed against the disease that had put him through absolute hell. In the 143 days that he ran he completed 3,339 miles until he was forced to stop as the cancer had spread to his lungs. Nine months later the cancer took his life.

I’ve never forgotten his story. I was so happy when I watched the opening ceremonies of the Olympics this year and his mom was chosen to be one of flagbearers for the Olympic Flag. People were inspired by his bravery and his desire to raise money in the hopes that others would benefit. What has always inspired me is the fact that he took on a challenge that was so beyond comprehension, so difficult, that completion was not even required. It was simply having the will to see it through to the very end.

One of the things that I have struggled with my entire life is being paralyzed by fear. The unknown is the scariest thing in the world to me and I have built my life so that everything is structured. But I need to break out of that and challenge myself to try something without knowing that I can succeed. A jigsaw puzzle is a simple thing but it is still a challenge of will. Do you have the patience and the dedication to see it through? When I finished last night I felt like I could take on the world. So much of that fear dropped away because I had taken on a challenge and won. It is nothing compared to what Terry Fox did. But I hope that this helps me to act a little more like him, to go and look out into that unknown, to know that you are on a path where success is not guaranteed and to take step after step after step.

Please direct me to the nearest bed

Sorry for the missed post last night but my need for sleep once again won out over my need to write. I really don’t want to turn the blog into a four night a week endeavor but I have a feeling that it might turn that way over the next few weeks. My schedule is just fill and my creativity level just isn’t there at the moment. It happens from time to time. Just know that my taking a break from writing typically means that better writing is ahead.

On the plus side I did finally get some sleep last night resulting in one very strange dream. It’s not every dream where you steal a priest’s car for a joyride. Now, for the record the keys were in the ignition and the car was unlocked so it was pretty much asking to be stolen (and the fact that it was parked in a spot labeled “parish priest” made it pretty obvious that it was a priest’s car.) I was more upset in the dream that the car drove horribly and was impossible to turn to the right and could barely turn to the left. There may be a political metaphor there but I’m not sure.

Anyway, this was one of those dreams that is incredibly vivid to the point where you start freaking out and thinking that it is real. Except that I realized that stealing a car is really not part of my nature so it had to be a dream and I had to keep on telling myself to wake up as this clearly wasn’t really happening. It took me a while to wake up though and I have to say that I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the ceiling of my bedroom. Sometimes it is nice to know that some things are just in your head.

Otherwise the only other thing of note is that I have started working on a 1,500 piece jigsaw puzzle that takes up the majority of my kitchen table. I believe the scene is called “a crapload of sky” and it is a rather bedeviling piece of work. I’ve finished most of the sky though as I am kind of doing this one backwards. For some reason I have found working on the puzzle to be really soothing. I don’t know if it is because it feeds into my obsessive nature or not but I am able to make myself calm down and relax by sitting down and making a little progress at a time. I’m at least a third of the way done now and making good headway. Next will be the 3,000 piece puzzle of doom, which will encompass most of my apartment I think.

Enjoy the Oscars this weekend everyone. I’m going to try to get some sleep.

Finding the missing piece

Here is a good indication of the life I lead now that I am in my later 30’s, especially when I’m not with Kim. I spent my Saturday night alone in my apartment drinking beer, watching old episodes of Mythbusters and putting together a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle. That was my entire Saturday night and given the entertainment options available to me on a Saturday night in January in Wilmington, Delaware I think I made the right choice.

For those wondering it took me slightly under 24 hours to singlehandedly finish the jigsaw puzzle. I would have worked faster except that a) beer and Mythbusters really plays with your focus and b) this puzzle had much too much sky. Nothing is more painful than trying to piece together the sky.

This is a good first step on my goal of completing a 3,000 piece puzzle by myself as I was able to notice a few issues with myself. First off, like everyone else on the planet I now have no attention span. I swear to God, after about fifteen minutes of work I was wondering why I hadn’t finished yet. I had completely forgotten how much patience and restraint one must have when working on one of these. The desire to just quit is really strong but I am glad I stuck with it. Once I got going though it became an awful lot of fun and it is nice to see that I completed something this weekend. Next one will be a 1,500 piece puzzle and then I will move on to the real challenge.

Switching gears I will give credit where credit is due and voice my approval for Obama having an hour long question and answer session with the House Republicans and having it all recorded. It was the closest I have ever seen to Question Time in British Parliament where everyone has a chance to essentially yell at the Prime Minister who then has to answer the charges on the fly. When Obama campaigned on change this is one of the things that I was hoping for. This still doesn’t mean that his policies are working or that his focus on health care was completely flawed but at least it is a move in the right direction.

Otherwise there just isn’t much to write about tonight. It’s not like I have a stunning take on the Pro Bowl to discuss. We are entering that dead period in media and culture and sports where football is over, the Oscars are still a month or so away and it is just too damn cold out to go out and do anything. On the plus side this is an Olympic year so in a few weeks I will be able to spend every evening watching curling. Don’t know why but once you start watching you really can’t stop. Plus there is the biathlon and I like any sport that involves skiing really long distances and then firing a gun for no apparent reason.

Best of 120 Minutes: The Spin Doctors may have been the most cursed band in the history of music. I know of no other band that was so derailed by their own popularity. Let me explain. I remember picking up this cassette right before the start of the school year and going, “Wow, there are three amazing songs on here.” I distinctly remember telling guys in my dorm the first week of the semester to watch out for these guys because they were going to be huge. And they were as all three songs started being played on the radio. And played again and again and again. Seemingly every other song that was played was “Two Princes.” By the end of the school year everyone, and I mean everyone, hated the band. They were just completely played out.

The thing is, the band did nothing to get people to hate them. People hated them because the songs that they liked had become so played out they were forced to hate the band by proxy. Listening to their stuff for the first time in like fifteen years you realize that it wasn’t that bad. They probably didn’t deserve our scorn.



The five random CDs for the week:
1) Scott Miller and the Commonwealth “Reconstruction”
2) Patty Griffin “Flaming Red”
3) Whiskeytown “Pneumonia”
4) Golden Smog “Blood on the Slacks”
5) Black 47 “Black 47”

Because I don't have enough puzzles in my life...

Reason number 287 to love The Big Bang Theory: Sheldon used my favorite phrase “curiouser and curiouser” tonight when he was struck by a social situation that he could not comprehend. I do that all the time. Why yes, I identify with fictional geniuses. Why do you ask?

Let’s see what Kelli has for my horoscope today: “It’s easy to dismiss what you don’t understand. Confusion invites learning. This could even be a growth experience. You needed one anyway.”

So apparently my astrologer wants me to grow up. It’s nice to know that one twelfth of the earth’s population is having the exact same problems that I am.

Anyway, so I promised yesterday that I was going to attack the day today. That I was going to leave no stone unturned, no challenge unmet and that I would be up at 7 in order to do it. Technically it was more like 7:45 so to my faithful commenter, oops, sorry I didn’t get your kids to school on time. Eh, in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t make a difference. I had my share of perfect attendance awards and look where it got me.

But I did get up earlier than I had been and made breakfast and drove to a coffee shop in order to pick up my morning coffee. Now given that it was only four blocks away I could have walked except that a) I’m still lazy and b) it was like 30 degrees out this morning (hear that Al Gore!) and no way I was walking in that weather. I also could have brewed my own coffee as I do have a coffee pot in my apartment. However, in the nearly five years that I have lived here it has been used exactly zero times. Not only am I not entirely sure how it works but I am relatively convinced that using it will result in a disaster of epic proportions. It exists solely as ornamentation with the coffee in my pantry just being a prop to indicate to women that I could conceivably take care of myself. There is a similar theory behind my occasionally buying a plant in order to show that I can take care of another living creature (the fact said plants tend to die notwithstanding.)

So, coffee in hand I sat down at the laptop and promised myself to do a few hours of job search followed by some writing. Logged in, went to job sites and, in a word, “Eep”.

“Eep” being shorthand for “I suddenly have a feeling that I am totally out of my league here.”

Now CareerBuilder does give me some nice suggestions. For instance, they are continually recommending that I apply for a Product Marketing Manager position at Sprint, which at least meets my federally mandated daily irony consumption requirement. But I am completely lost in their system and I just felt completely overwhelmed by the whole process. I didn’t have my head around where to look, what to look for, or what to do. So I did what any rational minded individual would do. I went shopping.

Thus I am now the proud owner of the above pictured 3,000 piece jigsaw puzzle. Now as those who read the 43 Things post know one of my goals is to complete a massive jigsaw puzzle all by myself. Technically it was supposed to be a 5,000 piece puzzle but a) I couldn’t find one anywhere in town and b) those things are apparently really expensive. At least a hobby shop had this 3,000 piece one (on sale so it was obviously an intelligent purchase). I then had to find a board for it. I could give up the use of my dining room table for a month in order to complete it but I occasionally dream of having someone visit my apartment who doesn’t read the blog and I have a feeling that using an entire room of my apartment for a jigsaw puzzle would not quite give off the best impression. (I figure that there is nothing that I can say or do that would ever change the opinion of someone who reads this blog. They’ve pretty much seen me at my best and worst so they can make of it what they will.)

My solution? I picked up one of those boards that kids use for science fair projects. Fits perfectly under the bed in my spare bedroom. The plan is for me to spend some time on this every day as a kind of meditation, mind emptying exercise. At the end of the day I’ll take a picture of my progress and when I complete it I’ll create a slideshow of the progress. I’m pretty sure that if I add in some Benny Hill music I’ll be an internet sensation.

Does this get me any closer to getting a job? Well, no. It doesn’t get me any closer to finishing the novel either. But it did take up a portion of my day. Tomorrow will be a work day. Unless I decide to get my car washed. But Wednesday I’ll certainly do some work…