Amazing weekend!

3 weekends ago was one of the best weekends ever. I don't usually write about my experiences too much, but this one had to be up there.

I hosted a beer pong tournament with Doug at our house. In last year's tournament I was last place and didn't even finish all my games. This year, I won with Cahill as a partner. So already it was a good entire day of playing beer pong.

After that Cahill, Ahmad, Emily and I went to this stupid going away party. Then came the real fun. There was a roof top pool party going on at an apartment complex a block away from my house. We could see and hear it from the street on about the 10th floor. Cahill had the idea to crash it, everyone was with him, I said that we would probably not get in. I was the downer. They convinced me to give it a shot anyway. First we get into the building and briskly walk past the guy at the front desk, who chases after us and makes sure we sign in. After Ahmad signed us in with a fake name (1 name, 4 people) of John Foster we walked the opposite direction we originally came in and found some elevators. Finally made it up to the party and it was incredible. There were girls in bikinis walking around, people in the pool and hot tub, free booze and tons of people hanging out. This is where all the good looking people in Arlington went to party. We made friends with someone who knew the guy throwing the party, so we didn't feel totally out of place anymore. At first we thought we were going to get thrown out because of all the ridiculous meatheads there, but it was fine. Cahill ended picking up a really hot girl who everyone was hitting on (we all get take a little cred for that one though). I got yelled at by a bunch of Asians to take a shot, which I took part of. Ahmad got obliterated at the shot table with Emily. We spent the rest of the night drinking and looking at hot girls (some in dresses so short I could see their birth canals, ouch, too much).

Won a beer pong tournament.

Crashed a rooftop pool party.

Amazing weekend!

2 Non-lethal accidents in 1 day

This post is a long time coming. I've just been slacking a lot on writing it.

Two weeks ago I decided to ride my bike to bar trivia(take note I had not had anything to drink yet) since it is so close. I was obviously not wearing a helmet because it was nice out and its Virginia. I was going screaming fast towards an intersection with reckless abandon when out of the corner of my eye I see a car coming from the right doing the same thing. Since they seem to have no intention of stopping or seeing me at all I made the quick decision to slam on my brakes on my bike. Now a bike is a lot like a car when you slam on the brakes. You keep moving and the car or bike stops. The difference in a car is you have a seatbelt which stops you from flying forward most of the time. On a bike, the bike stops and you keep moving. So I was thrown off my bike. The car schreeched on their brakes as soon as they figured out what was going wrong. I went flying off my bike and onto the ground where I did a tactical roll and came up somehow completely unscathed. This is definitely the first time I have done something where I could have been terribly hurt and wasn't. I just got back on my bike, rebent the handle bars so they were facing the normal way (when I was thrown off they got flipped to face 90 degrees the wrong way) and went to trivia where I got most of the answers wrong.

After trivia I got back on the horse (bike) and rode home. This time I had been drinking but definitely not intoxicated. Nothing exceptional happened on my way home and I was pretty happy about that. When I got home I played with my dog with his rope toy. He was full of energy so it was a great time. One time I had the rope toy and brought it close to me forcing him to pull back hard. He ended up bringing his head up into my chin slamming my teeth together. My roomate thought he heard something snap or break but I felt fine. Then I realized that one of my front teeth were chipped. Good old dog, always there to help out. I was fine other than it being really sharp.

So I survived to accidents that had potential to be really bad, with no real injuries to show from it. I have knocked on wood about 1000 times in writing this post, let's hope it works.

Time

How come sometimes time moves fast and sometimes really slowly? Some people will try to argue that when you are having fun it moves fast and when something boring is going on it drags, but that's not always the case. Next time you feel time moving too fast try to force it to slow down. Get time in a chokehold and make it your bitch! Alright, that's probably a little much, but you know what I mean. Maybe its when you stop realizing what you are doing that time moves quickly. But, if you tried to keep yourself in the moment and constantly aware of what is going on then maybe you can feel like time went more slowly.

In actuality it probably doesn't matter. Time moves at the same speed no matter how you try to perceive it. That is all theorhetical of course, but the way we think about it now is that it always moves along.

No Rain

Short post this time.

I was driving through a terrible storm today. One of the worst I've been through second possibly to the tornado with huge hail in Kansas. As lightning was striking down all around me and my vision was being obscured by so much water the song No Rain by Blind Melod came on the radio. I agree Blind Melon, NO MORE RAIN!

Porn vs. Prostitutes

No this is not some sort of death match between prostitutes and porn "actors" which will be known .

I have had this conversation before but I was wondering what other people thought about it.

When you are making a pornographic movie you pay the actors to engage in sexual acts. You also pay prostitutes to engage in sexual acts. Assuming both the porn actors and prostitutes are willing participants in this scenario, which is not always the case, the only difference that I can see is that one of them is being filmed. I understand that prostitution has to do a lot with humantrafficking and all those terrible things, so disregarding that for this world of ideas. The addition of a camera has some how made it legal to have sex with someone you found on the street and payed for.

So here is the question:

If you were to pick up someone on the street and have them sign a film release, could you legally pay them for sex if you filmed it with the intent of selling it?

This also brings up the question of if you meet someone in a bar is it legal to have sex with them if you pay for their drinks? Are you somehow compensating them for their time?

I honestly do not know the answer, but am curious. It seems like if someone is going to make money off of it then it is more legal somehow. In no way am I saying that someone should do this if it is in fact illegal. If it is not illegal then have a blast!

Water

The other day I found myself thinking about water and what its deal is. It's really funny to think about it in different terms. Most people see a liquid and think of a free flowing state of matter that fills any container it is put in. People also don't think of something like water being made up of anything. Of course underneath it all everyone knows what water is, just not thinking about it all the time. A liquid is just loosely bound molecules, nothing else. Liquids are made up of the same things solids are. So I was sitting there looking at a drop of water that was not soaking into my pants thinking about a bunch of molecules stacked on top of each other holding together a structure to make this drop of water stay there. Other things come into play like surface tension to keep the droplet in its form. It was fun to turn my world upside down for a second and think of water made up of pieces of things. Give it a shot!

You have to look professional!

Why can't I wear jeans?

Looking professional at work is about the same as gift wrapping garbage. It looks nice on the outside, but does not have any actual value. The same thing goes for people at work. Wearing a suit does not make you any more productive or easier to get along with, but it does make you look cleaner. In reality, wearing a suit gives other people the impression that you care about your appearance. What that gets you in the long run is that people may treat you different because you dress in a way that you want to be treated. Everyone can do their jobs in jeans or shorts or any other type of clothing they want to unless that job requires specific equipment like a fireman. What annoys me is the idea of having to wear nice clothes to work exists because its a status thing between people at the office.

This idea that nice clothes at work is important is really persisted by people actually following along. This is similar to someone being a celebrity because they are a celebrity. You find this a lot in Reality TV where someone becomes "famous" for not actually doing anything besides being known by other people for being famous. Usually this kind of fame wains over time. This also happens with fads of all kinds. They are only cool while enough people think they are cool. When the total number of people who think the fad is still cool is not enough to sustain public support then the fad fails and gets replaced by a new one. The problem with the "Nice Clothes At Work" is that too many people adhere to it giving it more and more power.

We are clearly deluding ourselves by wearing nice clothes at work, trying to make other people, as well as ourselves, think we are smarter, more attractive, and easier to deal with. People see through those mirages of self promotion almost instantly anyway if they have any kind of common sense. If people perceive you in a more enlightened way when you wearing a suit than not wearing a suit it seems like their problem, not yours. You should not have to change the way you do things because of someone's shortcomings as human being.

It also removes the individuality that we so desperately crave. Especially for men. Women have many choices as far nice clothes for work. Between skirts, dresses and pants just for the bottom half they already are outweighing the men's options. Men can wear nice pants or slacks, and a button down shirt. If you have to wear a tie, you have some small flexibility there but it is false. Your tie still needs to be professional looking. So instead of flexibility its really just another constraint of the same exact kind. The only options are solid colors, or very slight patterns. I'm sure you do not see a lot of Mickey Mouse ties from CEOs.

Stopping the Trend

The only way to stop something like this is to break away completely. Some offices realize this and let people wear whatever they want. There is plenty of research to show that people work better when they are happy which you would think would lead into, oh I don't know, trying to make people as happy as possible at work! Everyone has to change their minds for this to work. Once people see someone in a position of high authority like the president of the United States making a speech in jeans then it will be possible for the world to stop playing dress up.

I'm not advocating taking this to the extreme and wearing something that is dirty or offensive. I am not a hypocrite by thinking that people still need to be unoffensive. Clothes that smell are clearly out of the question. This gets into a different issue which is a general sense of hygiene that really should be followed because it actually makes sense.

Confession

Yes I do wear nce clothes to work, but sometimes I am given the opportunity to not wear one and its fantastic and I always protest about having to wear one. I still get just as much done without a suit as with one. Through some miracle of science I am still able to type and talk on the phone without a suit on. Someday someone will figure out how it was all done. Te only thing that changes is I get to spend less time in the morning getting ready. Some people, even those who agree with me, tell me to shut up and be thankful that I have a job to wear a suit at. To them I use a quote that is far more powerful than should be used in this post from Gandhi

"You must be the change you want to see in the world."