Here are two commercials cut back-to-back by some Portuguese dude. The first half starts with a segment representing “The women…”, followed by a segment representing “The men…”, both of them capturing a stereotype of both sexes.

I can’t help feel that the ladies got the short end of the stick here. I mean in the first clip I thought the lady was using the screw driver as an electric saw to cut a window in the dry wall (would ALSO have been funny). So what do we gather here? Those handy tool in a ladies hands aren’t so handy.

In the second commercial we see a pile of dishes with a decrepit screwed up dude looking for a clean mug for his espresso. So other than the representation as a guy being a lazy slob, we also get the unspoken comment about women being responsible for dishes.

By these examples at least women look nice and pretty when screwing up menial tasks. We guys can’t even get that right–and that why we love them, and why they pity us.

On a side note, I’ve been known to massacre a perfectly healthy wall, but it involved my elbow, not a drill, and too much alcohol, not a hammer and nail. I also contemplated drinking espresso straight from the nozzle. Also during the same night.

True story.

Three years ago now I left a decent paying job in order to pursue my creative endeavors for a year. It’s not that I hated my job; I mean, it started to get irritatingly stressful, but most jobs have a level of stress, right. It’s just part of the job. Well, I wanted a year off, and I took it; for bad or for good. If you’ve ever looked at your life and though, “God, I hate what I’m doing,” or “I never have any time for myself,” then this blog post is a life-story that I hope inspires you!

When I took that year off in November 2005 I started Webtertainment.tv with two friends. We produced over 60 online videos in 4.5 months–-shows like The (original) Lowdown, The One Minute Show, Legends of Bronson, The El Chico Show and Deep Space Asinine. They were fun and they were fulfilling. Waking up in the morning to 8-12 hours of working on this stuff was a breathe of fresh air. It felt right and it felt healthy. I was doing something I loved… then the money ran out and I incurred a frightening amount of debt.

I lined up my old contacts and scrambled for work once again exactly a year later in November 2006 (as I promised I would if things went south with WTV). I was lucky enough to discover that my old job as Assistant Editor and Content Manager at TheServerSide.com and TheServerSide.NET were opening up once again and I hopped back on that train and explored my old job with new eyes. I had seen a side of the web that I was aware of but never really had the time to pursue an investigation on: Web 2.0 and “social mdiea” as it was starting to be called.

Now it’s a rare individual who ISN’T a part of some sort of online community, whether it’s vlogs (mefeedia.com), link aggregators (delicious), webcomics (comicspace.com), blogging (blogspot.com), picture collectors (flickr.com), news sites (digg.com) or social outlets (facebook.com). Signing up for RSS feeds is starting to get easier and easier for the non-internet guru to be able to click a button (hopefully connected to feedburner.com) and select from various options to receive the feed.

Republic Domain, along with most of what’s on NunoXEI.com nowadays, was created as an alternative to leaving my day job in order to do something creative online. I had ran the RD strip just past 50 strips before stopping due to family responsibilities, travel amd self-discovery necessities. I’ve redesigned the strip to allow for faster production and started re-releasing them on NunoXEI.com. I did this because I didn’t want to kill off this project. It allowed me to express my humorous side and it made ME smile, which is ultimately the most important goal.

Why re-design and re-release? When I decided during–and slightly after–this “time away” to bring all my creative projects together under one roof, it all seemed right and like the ONLY option for keeping myself focused and able to time manage more effectively between work and creative fulfillment. Since doing that I’ve been able to increase production to account for a three-time-a-week schedule and even add the new Digginshit webcomic to the fold (on a very sporadic release schedule dictated by Digg community inspiration).

I’ve come back to doing The Lowdown as well but something still doesn’t feel “fast enough” with the process that makes it efficient for me to commit to. I’ve purchased a new digital camera to start taking photos again and take advantage of Flickr more often. I got it so that it was capable of doing video that I could feed into a streaming service like Blip.TV or YouTube faster without capture time, render time, encoding time, compression time…

It just didn’t seem worth it for me–ONE guy–to have to sit through a process like that while having my attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) kick in randomly, sending me off on another creative journey. I used to HATE that aspect about me–Now I accept it and work WITH it. It all comes down to finding that zone that no longer creates frustration to occur. Frustration equates to hating the process; and if you hate the process, why are you doing it?

My final thoughts here are: If you ever feel bogged down at your job, don’t be afraid to leave it! You can always find another job.

If you end up coming back a year or more later–come back with a fresh start and a fresh look at all the old habits that frustrated you. Just be sure to make any time off a valuable addition to your life experiences–even if it DOES put you 20 grand in the hole! Suck it up and live onward, with a positive outlook and with unwavering integrity!