Bypassing The Glass Joe Ceiling

Imagine yourself in a room with the length and width of a royal banquet hall and the height of "King" LeBron James. There are hotel-style bedrooms on the outside of the main room and nothing else on the floor where you are staying. The food could be worse but it could be a lot better and the same could be said of the people, but the environment as a whole is certainly better than the wintry weather and barren peoplescape outside. You feel content at times, but then you look up through the ceiling located mere inches above the top of your head.

The ceiling is made of glass and thus transparent, and the floor above you appears to be full of people who are generally much better looking and in much better moods than the people in your floor. It appears to be that way because it is, and you wish that you could get up there. However, there is one staircase going up and that staircase is guarded by a former A-list nightclub bouncer who won't let you go up them. You see people go up but you don't know what they did to receive permission to ascend, and they never stick around long enough when they come back down for you to ask them for advice. Any attempts to get to the next floor through the actual ceiling will result in at the very least public humiliation and there is potential for serious bodily harm. You've seen severely bloodied hands that recently followed a cerebral order to try to smash the Glass Joe ceiling, and unbeknownst to you all that had to be done is show your room key to the person at the reception desk in order to get the password to tell the bouncer. Going up is not that hard at all once you know what to do, which is why I call the most prominent barrier in this scenario the Glass Joe ceiling.

Glass Joe, in case there are people reading this who don't know, is the first opponent in the classic boxing game Mike Tyson's punch out and like all first opponents in fighting games and not the most skilled of fighters. The game included text of quotes from the characters between rounds, and Glass Joe expresses a desire both to retire as soon as possible and to take a nap. I never really played the game before about a year ago and I never played it much, but I've lost to Glass Joe. Repeatedly. This was apparently quite laughable, but I couldn't seem to be him on any sort of consistent basis. Mostly because I didn't realize how to stop punching high when high punches were being blocked. Quite simple, but I missed it and had to ask for help and the help allowed me to finally deliver a TKO to Glass Joe last night. Therefore, a Glass Joe ceiling is when not knowing or not knowing how to apply a simple piece of information completely stops progress.

There is no Glass Joe ceiling preventing me from finishing a novel. Writing a book is a long process that I believe I know how to complete as well as I ever will - it's just a question of putting in the time and effort to do it. Which I unfortunately haven't done much of since my last blog entry. But I do have other goals with a potential Glass Joe ceiling in the way. Like the Dream On entry from a few days ago - I honestly believe that if it is properly pitched then it could earn millions of dollars for a network and I wouldn't have to ask my parents for a few hundred dollars again anytime soon - maybe there's a simple way to make it happen that I don't know about. I want to start marketing my parody-writing ability on a freelance basis but I may have a GJC in my way for that too as well as not having ten spare dollars so that I wouldn't have to try to run the operation out of a blogspot domain. I want to run a weekly show in the city and have wanted to for a while but I haven't been able to - possible GJC there too. Finally, at least for now, upon reconnecting with fellow former community bloggers I've been reminded how fun and popular the games I used to run were and I'd like to start a site entirely dedicated to that sort of thing but don't know how to go about doing so - Glass Joe Ceiling again?

The tricky thing about glass joe ceilings is that they are much easier to spot in hypothetical scenarios than real life.