Hey Crickets. How’s it going? It’s now day number sixty-seven of Operation Achieve Anything and I’m excited to say that I now feel ninety-five percent back on my game. I’m finally back to my pre-Winter Olympics sleep schedule and no longer feel like my innards are rotting from last weekend’s boozefest. Now, I just need my paycheck to come in so I can stop stressing out over when I can go to the store to buy food.

Normally, my paychecks don’t come this late so I’m starting to get worried since my backup funds are almost completely depleted. Because of this delay, I’m not only stressed out over when the money will come but I’m also starving and hating myself for spending what little money I do have on super cheap food meant to just get me through the day.

By cheap food, I don’t mean treating myself to fast-food while I wait, no, I mean going to The Dollar Tree and buying three or four bigger items in hopes that they’ll last me a day or two. Between the stress and poor planning, yesterday’s stash of supplies was polished off a little after lunch. I guess I could try and steal things, but that wouldn’t be honest or ethical.

Alright, that last part about stealing is just a joke in order to transition into sharing the results of yesterday’s assignment that continues the honesty theme. I wouldn’t say that I’m completely innocent and have stolen a handful of things in my life but at these times I was either young, dumb, or in real need.

When young, the only thing that I’ve ever tried to shoplift was a weapon from a Battle Beast that was left in a package after the actual action figure was already stolen. I was so nervous in my heist of this worthless product that I never stole anything again until I was an adult and was just being dumb.

This dumb example of the crime I committed was during my last day working at Circle K before moving up to Seattle over twenty-years ago. I worked the graveyard shift alone in a store with cameras that didn’t work yet wasn’t even tempted to snatch anything during my entire year of working at the food filled gas station.

This all changed on my last day, inspired by my manager who almost fired me the day I gave my two-day notice after pointing out that short termers are more willing to steal. Being twenty-one and dumb, this sounded more like a challenge to me, so when I was stocking the fridge, I would randomly grab a beer and say to myself, “If this is a twist-off, I’m drinking it.”

I only took two or three drinks, but again, I don’t think I would have done this unless the manager didn’t feel like he was questioning my integrity. I know, it’s a weird reaction, I must have seen it as retaliation for the frustration that I felt for almost losing two weeks worth of income because the manager didn’t trust someone who was faithful to the job for a little over a year.

Other than these two instances, and minor things like stealing a roommates cheese, or change from my step-father’s change jar to buy candy, I’ve only ever stolen out of need but even then, I only have two or three examples of times I might have stolen cheap food from work to hold me over until payday. The one time I can think of this happening, I snatched one can of Spam because I was craving protein and then went on to work a little extra off the clock to justify my desperate decision.

Though stealing is still stealing, and I know I was wrong, other than my young and dumb examples, I don’t really regret my actions during desperate times. I might even say that I used my integrity when committing the needy crimes since I did technically/secretly pay for the non-frivolous products that I stole, which again was something that happened less than a handful of times. This sort of fulfills yesterday’s assignment where I was simply supposed to keep on keeping on in my efforts to gauge how honest I am throughout the day, only this time the assignment added to keep integrity in mind as well.

Today’s assignment carries on the honesty theme but unlike the last three days, where the tasks only involved observation which usually leads to parallel ramblings like up above, this task actually has some direction. For today’s task, I’m supposed to list five people who I admire because of their honesty.

Again, I’m bummed that this book is still in self-help mode, attempting to get me mentally prepared for the work that involved in goal achievement, rather than sharing actual steps toward accomplishing anything. That said, I am excited to have another assignment where I actually have something to do so that tomorrow’s update that’s genuinely task-based and not just my insights on the overall lesson.

Until then, it’s now time for my sign-off where I say, good day and good luck to you and all of your projects.

Talk to you soon.

Sincerely,

The Wicker Breaker

P.S. Below are links to my novel, which I plan to promote as part of Operation Achieve Anything, as well as a link to where you can buy the book that is providing the structure to this project in case you would like to purchase it in order to play along.