I’ve been reading lately and that takes more time than watching TV, so I haven’t been blogging. Not an excuse, just what it is.
I do come across some hilarious videos though that are worth sharing. I know it’s not the nuts and bolts of the blog, but entertaining nonetheless.
Bill Gates Deposition
Justin Bieber Deposition
Lil Wayne Deposition
Robin Thicke Deposition
Tupac Deposition
I almost feel that the sub-titles are made up but it’s hilarious. Stop investing in Shit Coins!
This guy is the happiest guy on Earth in November until…Bitconnect suspended all trading last week.
Also a funny video about Bitcoin:
I see my poll is bombing. Apparently people are either at work or too much of a pussy to click on a choice about such a sensitive topic. This was the first poll I’ve taken since October and it made me take a look at my list of other polls. Most polls die a few days after they are released but certain posts continued to get votes which I found exciting. Here are two that continue to get action.
[poll id=”150″]
[poll id=”155″]
Scary Spice with the most votes?!?!
Maureen Welsh – I can’t remember if it was Welsh or Welch. We were in 2nd grade art class, near Valentine’s day, and we had to cut out hearts. You would fold the construction paper in half, draw the heart on the half, cut it out, and then you’d do whatever the project was with the hearts. Problem was 2 fold 1) I couldn’t draw the heart 2) I couldn’t cut it out. Before I go into the conclusion, I hated art class and Mrs. Hunter. She called every kid Henry of Henrietta. Don’t you think that’s confusing? Now my art skills are minimal and maybe non-existent. Every project I ever did would go into the trash can. We’re talking my mom would draw all my assignments. Anyway, I started to cry like a little bitch because I couldn’t draw the heart right and my cutting skills were that of a kindergartner. Maureen was probably the most athletic girl in the class and held some artistic skills so she did it for me. It was extremely nice and looking back I’m glad she did. It saved me from being scarred for life.
Steve Emanuelson – I’ve shared this story before but I was 2 years or so out of college and I went to visit Jeff for the weekend. We started off the day slamming some beers and then decided to play basketball. I must have used my old student ID to get into Trees on a Saturday. There were many players there like usual and we called the next game. Once the game ended and we were supposed to be on, there started to get some confusion on who was the next team. Being an outsider, I didn’t really have much say but Steve and Jeff were forming it. I started to get the feeling that I was going to be the 6th man but Steve stepped up, commanded the group, and made sure I was on the team. There is rarely a worse feeling than being left off of a 5 man team when you’re the 6th guy because your chance of playing again with your friends is 0. Steve didn’t let anyone else join the team when I’m sure there were better choices than an out of town, drunk, friend of his brother’s. Still don’t forget it.
Ed McGrath – Freshman year of college is a tough time for some. It’s your first time away from home and making friends isn’t as easy for everyone. Ed was someone who I went to high school with so I knew him. This was before the age of cell phone’s I should add. Ed was pretty popular because he smoked cigarettes in the ash tray and got invited to all the parties. I was in Tower B and he was in Tower A. As he developed friends on his floor in Tower A, I was stuck with my poindexter roommate who would secretly jerk off when I went to sleep. I never actually caught him doing it but I was happy when that year ended. On the weekends I would not want to stay in and I didn’t have a great enough grasp on friends yet to get invited anywhere. Well, Ed would actually call me up on the Tower phone and tell me to meet him and whoever to head to the party. Huge social favor. Still won’t forget it. I remember one time I went solo to a Pitt game, made some random friend on the bus, then hung out with him and his two other friends during the game. Really weird. Times were different back then.
Exactly like this.
Paul Long – Not sure why all of these are coming college but Paul was the one who drove me to the foot doctor in Pittsburgh after I got frostbite on my foot. Paul and I were friends, but it was mainly friends through friends so not super close. In college not that many people had cars, and I had crutches so public transportation would have been tough. Paul volunteered to take me to the foot specialist. I have to imagine no one reading this blog has ever gotten frostbite before. It’s actually quite scary because you start thinking that they’ll have to amputate your foot. The foot starts getting really purple. I’m talking scary purple. Then it starts to turn into this one massive blister. So after the initial visit to the hospital where they give you crutches and some bandages, you have to schedule a visit to see a specialist. The specialist sees this huge pussed up foot, starts to cut the skin off, then gives you some cream to help it heal. I was lucky that my foot didn’t have to get chopped. Paul was a friend who came to the rescue in a delicate time and I won’t forget that.
Here’s the full story written in 2012. (7 years after the event which still would make details not as exact as they probably were)
I ended up finding a post I wrote in 2009 which was pretty good too.
I didn’t do anything stupid in all of high school, didn’t even take a sip of beer. Second week of college when I was 17 I got my first underage after doing 5 beer bongs (total light weight) and stumbled into a cop. Only person to get a citation. I got frostbite after getting hammered and taking off my shoe to climb a fence on the coldest day of the year (long story with foggy details). I was driven home in the paddy wagon one night. I received a public drunkenness the night I faceplanted into the sidewalk.
I got caught pissing by the cops next to a wall at 3 in the morning when I decided to make a run for it. I ran up a hill in manayunk for about 800 yards before I got exhausted. I stopped in the middle of the street, saw the paddy wagon behind me, and turned around and put my hands behind my back. They took me in where I acted like a badass telling them I was getting my lawyer and they slammed me in the wall and let me go. I still got a citation for public drunkenness. I had a standoff where I climbed a fence to the post office and police were on the other side telling me to come back. The only thing I remember is climbing back over saying “I’m going to tear my sac.” Fortunately, I was released with no problems. Final things, Yes I’ve patted Samuel Dalembert on the back and yes I’ve asked Freddie Mitchell if the 4th and 26th was the greatest play of his career (obviously). I don’t even want to get into AC or strip club stories.
Unrelated Gif but thought it was funny.
It took about 4 months and now I can say that after today’s workout that I’m finally fully healthy. After going all out on the track some afternoon in September, the following day my knee started bother me. It didn’t hurt at all after I was finished the workout, but I when I tried to go for a jog the following day, I couldn’t. I tried to push through and pain was too severe. It messed with my walking and ability to climb stairs. Then my golf game wasn’t right because I couldn’t put proper weight on my knee. Around Thanksgiving we played the McGraths in bball and I was able to move ok, but I couldn’t go all out because it felt like it would give completely. At that point in time I was able to use the treadmill but couldn’t run on the black top. I wasn’t sure what was taking so long to recover.
Over the next 6 weeks I got back to using the treadmill to regain the fitness that I had lost after that one fateful day in September. I could tell I was still pushing the knee through that time period but I didn’t get the feeling that any part of it was going to pop. I’m sure that bowling prolonged the recovery time.
After this week’s series of workouts, which were 5 day’s straight and 8 of the last 9 days, I can say I’m back to full strength. I’ve had injuries throughout my life and I’d go as far to say as they are unavoidable as you age. I can’t explain why my knee started hurting other than it was overworked. It was a complete non-contact injury. They are annoying and a 4 month recovery time seems absurd to me but I think those are the breaks. I’m happy to be out from under it and will move forward. No real point to this post other than sharing the experience and working through pain.
The more life you experience, the more you know nothing. I’m reading Principles by Ray Dalio and a main principle is to keep an open mind which is hard to do. Ask yourself when you make decisions how you are arriving at them? Are you going off of instinct? Are you conferring with experts? When I’m betting a football game do I think I “know” what is going to happen or do I drunkenly throw money at the game.
I am a big advocate of the Win Friends and Influence People book and with that you learn the golden rule. It provides thoughts to understanding and communicating with other people. That book, along with these Principles, are laying groundwork for my involvement with human beings throughout my life. Win Friends was written in the 1930’s. Principles in 2017. A lot happened between these years to allow new literature to provide deeper insight. Evolution is the key to life and you should be continuously looking to evolve by gathering new information.
Knowing your weaknesses is essential to building. Keeping an open mind will help you learn from other people. This idea starts getting fogged up when you are told all your life to be decisive and a wrong decision is better than a no decision. Now you have this billionaire hedge fund operator who has traveled the world, had conversations with world leaders, and used every instrument at his fingertips telling you that being relentlessly truthful, and getting as much info as possible is a true principle to a fulfilling life. Sheesh. What’s a normal person supposed to do these days?
As I plow through the book, for some reason World War II started to interest me. This is probably completely off topic but I wouldn’t be surprised if the book triggered a thought in my head. Last night I read the entire Wiki page on WWII and it starts to make sense why so many Europeans speak English. It’s not like we, along with Britain, Russia, and China, didn’t influence the upbringing of many cultures after it ended in 1945. You’d think there’d be tremendous disdain for the USA.
I further thought about the 2 A-bombs that forced Japan to surrender and wondered why on Earth a Japanese man wouldn’t hold a grudge against an American. It’s not like I dropped the bomb, but my country did, and now they look at us and Donald Trump is our President?!? I’m not sure why I hadn’t really looked at it this way before. I think my thought process was “it was in the past”. I’m learning that the past is a good place to visit in order to understand the future.
Then I started getting interested in Vietnam and the Cold War because it became quite apparent to me that even though I may have learned bits and pieces about them in school, I really knew nothing. It got me to thinking that I’m reading a USA Wiki page and I have to imagine the history of this war is completely different in Vietnam. With all this swirling in my head I started to tire of the activity. I came to the conclusion that history repeats itself, people are still the same, and I’m a privileged white dude who didn’t have to fight in any of these wars.
Why is that whatever I feel like is at the end of the tunnel is nowhere in sight? I have near zero problems. I have money. I have shelter. I have good health. I have weaknesses like gambling and alcohol but even if I corrected them I’d be asking, now what? I’ll add that this isn’t depression. This is a realistic look at what the fuck is actually happening. People 100 years ago didn’t have the internet to gain this type of worldly view from their desk chair. We are evolved and it’s scary to think how quickly we’ll be teleporting to work instead of driving. What to do. What to do.
I don’t believe in psychics. The idea of people being able to predict what is going to happen to you is nonsense. If what they knew was so valuable, they would use it on themselves.
I am a believer in people’s brains being able to communicate with unspoken word. When two people start singing the same part of the same song at the same time. When you get a phone call from someone who you were just thinking about. It’s hard to explain because it doesn’t happen often but I had the oddest example happen to me today.
I was shipping a package and when the weather gets cold, the tape doesn’t stick right. So I started thinking about our packaging, and I thought about our boxes, and it struck me that the box salesman hadn’t contacted us in a while. Then I thought that it must be pretty boring being a box salesman, but it synced up with his personality. I couldn’t remember the last time we placed an order for boxes. I knew it was a while and he’d be following up shortly. Lo and behold, I got an email today at 3:38pm today from the box guy.
Now this could simply be that he was alerted in his CRM to contact us. Most likely that’s what it was. It’s unbelievable to me that box man would contact me on the same exact day I thought about him. Probably haven’t thought about our box situation, or him, in 4 months and the day I do, he contacts. Unreal.
This scenario also came hand in hand with the crossword puzzle I did today was asking for ESP as the answer. I couldn’t remember if it was ESP or EPS and then I remember the Mean Girls joke was ESPN which confused me more because why would you just add an N to something that was already right? Should I be expecting a call from Amanda Seyfried? Let’s cross our fingers.
“Hey Nick.”
“My name is Josh.”
There isn’t much more embarrassing then swinging for the fences on a name guess and missing. It’s even worse when you’ve met the person before, sent about 10 emails back and forth, and know you should know their name. It makes the other person feel small and makes me look like an idiot. I’m not going to lie though, I do a decent job socializing and I know that remembering names is important. However, when you start compiling hundreds of names of people who you know you should know, it gets tough. There will be times when I’ll see someone and a name flashes into my head and there is only a split second to decide if I’m going to go for it or not. I bat about 83%, don’t say anything 15%, and whiff the rest.
Not getting out of the woods yet, I wrote a blog post called “7 Principals In Life” and sent it to our account manager to see what he thought. His response was, “I should also note in this case it should be “Principle” vs. “Principal”.” Goddammit. How bad can I look? People are supposed to think I know what I’m doing and I make myself look like a dipshit time and time again.
The great thing about life is that unlike Seth in Superbad (People Don’t Forget!), everyone forgets. There are obviously levels of what to remember, but I think I’ll survive on these misses.
My job, and life, has become creating content. 9 years and 2,945 posts later from rnningfool.com, I create information for my job. There is a formula that works and it’s come up with an attractive sales pitch, create an enticing webpage for said sales pitch, create an email to a targeted audience…then watch the money roll in.
Who would have thought that 9 years after the creation of a personal website on WordPress it would be my entire life. I’m essentially doing rnningfool.com for 3 other people right now utilizing that exact formula. Am I an expert in WordPress? I don’t think so. I can create posts and spread info but nothing I do would be considered cutting edge. Who could have predicted that disseminating information through a website would be a way to make a living. By that I mean that anyone over the age of 40 most likely has to rely on a younger person to do this work. I’m sure in Silicon Valley I’m in the stone age. Yet for what I’m involved in, people rely on me to do this work and to create email blasts. Then it comes down to how well you can delivery a message to your audience which…delivers.
Round and Round We Go
Take Barstool for instance. Their Instagram gets a million views. Posts they put out get 20-100 comments each days. They are a company that only produces content to entertain. What do they offer? Rough and Rowdy Rednecks? Pres eating pizza? It’s mindless drivel. People want it though because their life sucks and the majority of the population is bored. Fucking WordPress. Or Devnet. Whatever they use.
I post mainly because my skills in life are not specialized. I’m a jack of all trades in business. I can talk to people on the phone. Deliver on what I say I’m going to do. See potential in certain sales. But am I good at any one skill? No. Being able to use WordPress, any monkey to learn. Where is the value?
Last night’s weather was slipperier than Riley Reid’s punany. She was the most searched female of 2017 (on a certain site). We had our final bowling week of the season and a decision had to be made on whether to cancel it. The alley said that unless it was a state of emergency, it was on. Then they started getting numerous questions and the alley reverted to the league. Considering I’m the President, the decision fell on me and the treasurer to decide if we should make people drive in those conditions for bowling. If the league starts at 6:30, people would need to be alerted by 4:30. At 4:30, the weather wasn’t coming down too bad and I decided that bowling was on. I asked the list if they would not be able to make it.
There are about 60 people on the list and 4 people immediately said they couldn’t make it. Then I walked home and almost fell on my ass because it was so icy. Now I was starting to have second thoughts. Making people drive to bowling in wintry conditions may not have been worthwhile. Between the hour of 4:30 and 5:30 I was monitoring the situation but by then, it was too late. I got to the lanes and started talking to a few people and I was getting mixed reactions. Some people said it was a bad decision and others applauded the guts. In the end, the majority of the people arrived safely and no real damage was done (to my knowledge).
Now, I write this post because this wasn’t easy for me. Cancelling bowling for the night was the safe move. It would have made the season last longer and throw off next season’s schedule, but it was the safe one. Deciding to move forward with league night put people’s lives in jeopardy and I didn’t want that on my conscience. If anyone got hurt, I would (and still would) feel terrible. This is what it’s like when you have to make decisions for a reasonable amount of people which I’m getting used to as I gain more responsibility as I get older. I know it’s pretty dumb and you can think, “what’s the big deal?” All I can say is that hour leading up to whether people were going to show or not was a straight up indicator if the right decision was made. I think it was. Bowling first. Safety second.