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What Drives You?

DriveI’ve been having an heart-felt back and forth with a concerned mom via my contact form whose 16-year old son has become non-compliant recently. He’s described as wonderful and smart, but just doesn’t care to do many, if any, of his treatments any more and stopped a sport he had played previously. I got to wondering what drives him, because I’ve been there, done that, and bought the t-shirt.

I had to burn that t-shirt the day I knew I wanted to marry Beautiful, but it still didn’t fully change what I was doing to make sure that I gave us the most time together. I’ll place a lot of the blame on my eFlow not working properly to allow me to actually have the time in the day to do my treatments (and I probably wasn’t getting the meds as I should when I did them most nights). Since that’s a cop-out, I’ll admit that I should have been more aggressive in doing whatever it took to get to a solution to be able to do my nebs properly. I take full responsibility for that end of the deal. It was stupid and will never happen again. Now, let’s get back to the underlying issue at hand: drive.

“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”

Lao Tzu

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The Purpose Behind CFFatboy.com

I have several purposes for this site, though I’ll admit straight off that it began as an accountability device to keep up with my treatments. I’m putting my life, my health, and the related aspects of my relationship with Beautiful out there for everyone to see. In addition to that, I want to educate, build a community, and entertain. I plan to entertain with my writing, which I’ve honed over the last 5 years of blogging and 3 years of intense English courses, culminating in getting my B.A. in English this coming May. Thank you all so far for the tweets to @cffatboy and e-mails I’ve received noting my writing. I truly do appreciate it.

I wanted to have an open-door policy on my writing today because I’m planning on posting my next CF-related essay that I’m doing for school. I’ve got an incredible professor for my last, and highest-level English course: Advanced Composition. To put it in perspective of my other courses, everyone in college starts with Comp. 1 & 2. That’s where most people end, unless their major requires some literature. For me, as a Professional and Technical Writing major, I continued on to take Modern Short Novel, 3 British Lit courses, 3 American Lit courses, Professional Writing, Technical Writing, Advanced Technical Writing, Expository Writing (non-fiction writing), an instructor-level grammar course, and now my Advanced Composition. Dang, I feel like an expert at this point!

My first essay for the course is getting a few tweaks before I submit it to Newsweek for publication as a “My Turn” essay. Part of the agreement is that it has to not be previously published, which includes personal sites/blogs and that sort of online publishing. Once I submit it, I have to wait up to two months to know if they are interested because they receive over 600 entries per month and only contact you if they are interested. After that, I may publish it elsewhere, probably choosing my local daily paper called tbt*, which has published all of my letters to the editor thus far.

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