I Memorized Your Order

Me: Could I get...

Him: :: Reaches to the side of the register and grabs a coffee and hands it towards me:: I mmmmmeeemmmooorrrriiizzzeeedddyyyerrrrroooorrrddeeerrrr (Drizzy Voice)

Me: Nah, lemme get a coffee with....

Him: I already gave it to you - I mmmmmmeeemmmooorrriiizzzeeedddyoouuuurrrrorrrderrrrrr (Drizzy Voice)

Me: (Shook and confused stumbling to pay, not sure if I need to even because he already walked away from the register) Ha ha, well I don't know I think if it was I good thing think not sure..ha ha... Oh, Okay. (Walk away confused).

Location: McDonalds

Time: This morning

Did it have two creams like I normally get: Yes

Journey Home Today

Took a wrong turn on the way home - that is, forgot to take a turn I should have taken. Next thing you know it took me 1.5 more hours than usual to get home. Can you believe the traffic in LA! I wish they would have kept the trolley system here! Anyway, so I got home from a long day at work and I needed to #relax(drizzy voice). So I tightened the brakes on my fixie, loaded up instagram, drank a pabst, did crossfit, did yoga, grabbed a drink with a friend, read the hunger games (drizzy voice), threw on a fedora, my skinny jeans (drizzy voice), updated my blog (drizzy voice), checked out darfur and the other african guy, (oops, forgot, <= was in #drizzy voice) and then finally ate some vegan pigs feet (drizzy voice). 

The Silent Man Makes Everyone Nervous

The fitness game. The intelligence game. The money game. In general the following applies to most "games":

Keep it quiet - if found out keep it nonchalant.

Applying the above to the fitness game should be the most clear. No upside to people knowing you are either 1) On your fitness game hardcore or 2) don't really dabble in the fitness game at all. If you are working hard on your fitness game then the results should speak for themselves. When you find yourself in a situation where you have no choice but to reveal the fruits of your labor - you want it to be shock and awe - not "damn, this guy is always talking about going to the gym, working on his fitness etc etc and not really impressed." In fact, if people don't know you go to the gym at all, it can only be a positive surprise. You may realize that I have discussed this issue many times on the blog, but I just wanted to re-emphasize a point that is relevant for all of us preparing for a run of the mill pool party that you may be invited to by a co-worker, neighbor, or the team mom of your kid's soccer team. You want do apprehensively - and only after someone asking you to, or it become a necessity - go ahead and acquiesce.

But enough 'bout the fitness game because talking about it myself, you might get the wrong idea that I'm trying to work on it - I'm not. The intelligence game. No one likes a knowitall, no one likes an idiot. But if you focus on the title of this particular post, you want to be the guy who casually happens to have a knowledgbase that is borderline absurd. And this provides a nexus to the reading game. This isn't aimed at you wikipedia fiends, this is aimed at the more "long formed" bases of knowledge that provide nuances, tangential intelligence, and first and foremost the ability to say "I read a book about that and..." as opposed to "I read on wikipedia that..." The latter category is quite obvious because it either begins with "I heard that" or "I read that." You need to be able to drop the work "book" somewhere in there to show you are really into the intelligence game and the reading game.

Which (haha) brings me to a few interesting facts from my latest foray into accumulating knowledge.

"Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, Ivan the Great's expanding Russia, Songhay in the Sahel, Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, the cresting Otoman Empire, the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known) and any European state was the Ikan Empire."

This is both a) an interesting fact and b) something that is dangerous to know because if you ever force this into your office small talk/banter type situation you will immediately be viewed as a jerkoff. But that being said the Inca were tight and were pretty much doing the damn thing better than anyone at the time - then they got caught slippin and 95% of them got "zipped up"

Moral of the story, play the background. Let the other guy make all the noise and try to get all the shine while at the same time keep your eye on the prize: Pool parties, getting your intelligence game proper, and being known for having a mysterious, yet quietly intelligence poise to your day-to-day doings. If you do this, people will respect you and always have a hesitance to try to ever throw you under the bus or attempt any other type of slight towards you because you haven't put all your cards on the table. People are always nervous about what they don't know, and if when you opine you deliver with quality consistently - the silent man becomes a force. (Unless you are Incan and your immune system was mad weak and your entire people essentially got zipped up along with all other people in the hemisphere.) 

Book Review

Have I been getting my reading on? Partially, but partially I'm being misleading because I haven't been in the reading game, and getting back into the reading game corresponds with me getting back into the blogging game. In any case, wanted to share another piece of literature that I just finished. The book was called Native Son and it is something of a commentary on our country in the 1930's. You may or may not see where this is going, but the book is about a black guy from the south side of Chicago and what his world was like.

Ill keep this short so he basically was from a very poor family and didn't have much going for him then he got a job working for a white guy and he got drunk and then got caught in an awkward situation so he killed the white guy's daughter and chopped her body up and put it in the furnace then he killed his girlfriend and was overall a bad 48 for the guy.

Now, my take on the book was that it did a good job of telling a story about a guy who really didn't have a bright future and how life was back in the 30s and the interaction between two groups of people who had never really interacted with each other ever. Then communists come into the picture and of course no one likes them and they contribute to white girls (and black girls, yet no mynxses were hurt in the creative process) gettin straight murked out. The book doesn't make you really feel bad for the guy, but simply does an extraordinary job of allowing you to feel what it was like to live in these curious times. Was some crazy times indeed and people in general didn't know quite how to act normal around each other (much like when you go to college and find yourself living with many gay people in consecutive years) and I suppose by process of elimination people learned killing people didn't make it better.  In the story people try to help out the would be murderer and post murder and may be generally interested in helping the guy out but he in turn doesn't know how to trust these people because this is a new thing for him as well (kind of like when you listen to this song it just confuses you and you want to like it but not sure because you don't understand).

Thing I appreciate about this book is that it did a good job of showing the times, but lets be real - the biggest thing it did was give me the ability to say "oh yeah, I read dat book" when it (hopefully) comes up in conversation in the business world. I'm pretty sure you see where this is going that if it don't make money it don't make cent$ to me and that if you're doing something that doesn't help you in the business/franternizing/small talk/shmoozing/uppity convo game; then you're not really doing anything. Yeah I read books so that I seem smart. And what? You think this post took a sudden turn at the end? And what? So what if I am about getting money first and foremost? STOP HATIN B! GET MONEY GET PAID! DAHHHHHHHH!!!!!

The Moving Game

The routine game. Juxtaposing concept/ideas/visions? Possibly but in my current situation they became complimentary. Had to do something that would be classified as "change" (should to the POTUS) in order to get my routine game tight. What I went out and did was go ahead and get the new pad where I could come home at the end of the day and really hunker down and get down on my routine game. First few days were rough because I didn't really have much as far as "niceties" or things that make a place => home. But now I have a couch and some rugs so I'm so young money etc. The first few guests at my pad had to sit on boxes, but now they can sit in a chair. But the place is small enough that it is already cozy with "nick nacks" and "objects of character" strewn about. It will be a home before I know it.

So the plan, you guys want to know the plan. The plan is to get knee deep in the reading game. Possibly knee deep in the music game (guitar, keyboard, not quite sure yet). Knee deep in the finding self game. Knee deep in the local eatery/coffee game. Knee deep in the game of life.  When you have too many options aka too many friends and events and what not you can't focus on the self. This aptly describes the impetus to my move.

If we don't talk for a few years it's not that I don't love you the same, its that I love you the same. Time to get back to basics. Time to get back to the self.

Damn Damn JB Where the Hell You Been?

Man I'm sorry guys, I just can't seem to be on the blogging game in any sort of regular fashion. To be fair, things in my life have been a little "cray" of recent because of moving and having a battle with diarrhea. But those things have somewhat settled down (the former mostly) so I will be making a solid effort to find time to get on the blogging game. As my first post back I want to do a book review of a book. The book is called "One Hundred Years of Solitude"

This book was a real good book. The reason I think it was a real good book is because the author just said the most fanciful, amazing things out of normal situations. For example there were many people who lived 150 years or greater, there was a girl who just floated away, there were alchemists and there was a situation where a man lived tied to a tree for years on years. This author wouldn't say things like "it rained really bad for a few days"; instead he'd say "it rained for 20 years." (did I use the ";" correctly? who knows?) Other interesting things that happened were a guy living in one room and not leaving that room for a very long time.

Essentially this book was successful because the author used his freedom to create fantastical events and situations whenever possible. These types of things are inherently more interesting than things we are more familiar with and they greatly added to the story.

That being said I think that there is another possible answer to why such amazing things happened in this story when it comes of as somewhat of a historical fiction type piece. Lost in translation. AKA I think Bill Murray wrote this book. No I'm kidding. But I am serious about translation issues. I think this book was written in Spanish so its possible that when the author was translated as saying "And the guy killed 124199 men in battle" what he actually said was "And the guy was in battles where 124199 men were killed." Or something of this sort. The sentences are often quite choppy and abrupt and it is not clear to me that this is necessarily the original wording's goal - or if it was entirely translated via google translate.

In any case, a fun thing to read because lots of things happen in this book that don't happen in the real world.