How far are you willing to go to make a little extra cash? I have already talked about the very talented Thai girls who seem to be OK with (or are forced) to make some serious social and moral adjustments. I struggle to imagine the sums of money that would be needed for me to join those entertainers. But I am sure we can all think of some time when we have done something that we know we shouldn’t have done but since we had enough money pushed in our face, we went against our best judgement. I would love to hear your examples of doing just this but for now, it is my turn. This is the story of how I killed my best friends hamster for $5.
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Freshman year in university during the mandatory writing class, we were asked to write a short story. I was reading a lot of Hunter Thompson at the time and decided to try my luck at the great writer’s gonzo style. I decided to write about a true life experience that had happened right before this assignment. My marks were dismal, and what I thought to be an entertaining story, was ridiculed by the class and the teacher (who didn’t wear shoes). I struggled, apparently, with the form and function of my writing style which was the last thing on my mind as I wrote the story. Even my good friend Pat sent me to the ground with his critique and I must admit that at this point in my life I had decided that writing was not my thing and I should stick to the nerd world. (Funny enough, as well as Pat and I get along, I still think he hates my blogs, but that is another entry.) So now, in blog form, is the story of one of the stupidest things I have ever done. There will be no pictures unfortunately, probably for the better of everyone involved. I will not use the real names of the people to protect them even though I doubt they read this blog. Continue reading One of the Stupidest Things I Have Ever Done I absolutely adore aggressive city cycling. I am not talking about the usual getting from point A to point B, although that is the main objective for me. I am talking about a heart pounding, flat out effort across town running every red light you can find From Argentina, I went to California for two weeks thinking that was enough time to settle my life in that continent before heading off to England. The complexities of “settling my life” in that continent will be saved for another entry. Two days after arriving in England, I boarded a plane to Istanbul. In Istanbul I had enough time to buy a bottle of fine tequila and then get on another plane for Izmir where my good friend and fellow blog author is currently living. I spent two weeks in Turkey with three days on some Greek islands where I learned about the intense problem of middle eastern immigrants trying to get into Europe and the idea that certain generations of people just simply hate each other regardless of any sort of reason. But I will not pass judgement on some of the things that they had to go through. Charles was a fantastic host as always and a play by play of the trip should be given to give him full respect but instead I will go through a tattered page of my journal that I found with a bullet point list of things I needed to remember. In order as I wrote them and to the best of my memory. I have the second to last race of the regular season in about 3.5 hours and one of the major sponsors of our team is going to be there. I need 22 more points to move to the category 2 level and to be honest, I am pretty freaking excited. Category 2 was described to me by a friend in California as the point when the only way to do better is to start taking drugs. No drugs yet but this sponsor does load me up on protein shake which I guzzle down regularly so I feel obligated to show my respects. Pre race preparation involves me standing naked in my shower and shaving almost all of the hair off my body. I particularly enjoy this to be honest but I get a lot of people doubting my methods and habits. So here is my reply. While growing up, my parents (or at least my mother and her family) would always say how my mom prayed before I was born that at the very least I would get my mother’s eyes. My mom was pretty hot so I wish she had asked for more. In the end, I was my mother from the tip of the nose to the top of my head and my father for the rest. So the almighty had answered her prayers but she was not explicit enough and although my eyes look like my mother’s, they functioned like the 143 year old eye balls that my dad uses on a daily basis. I had an astygmatism and very bad short sightedness. Then I got laser surgery and it was all solved. I have recently come to love Drupal. A content management system that easily allows you to do all sorts of fancy things with web pages without doing too much coding. I thought this would be great for my online radio station I enjoy bragging about that I run with a cohort. The general idea is to have the XML stream that the Shoutcast radio station produces read by the RSS reader in Drupal and then be able to have nodes for each of the songs that is played so there can be commenting, voting, etc. All seems well and easy right? If you plan on sharing a conversation with anyone in England, you better be prepared to discuss the weather. Without fail, it will be the second thing talked about regardless of the encounter you find yourself in. For example: “You alright?” (Equivalent to ‘how are you doing’ often said without the ‘You’.) “Ya, excellent|lovely|not bad.” (excellent is heavily used here and on par with ‘like’) “So how ’bout that weather?|What crap weather.|Beautiful day we are having.|Absolutely pissing down.|…” (many more but all roughly the same) The other person will usually take a long hard look into the sky, and then agree with the given conclusion. Last night, apparently there was one of the most visible meteor showers of the year in the northern hemisphere. I was meandering down a very dark lane blasting my iPod to “The great gig in the sky” and gazing upwards into the lightly misting rain wishing the cloud cover would move. It got me thinking… Moving to University and staying in the dorms will be a requirement for my child(ren). Take a developing teenager and remove their parents and support lines and stick them in an over crowded arena full of other people in the same situation. At eighteen, the dorms had a strong influence on the development of my character that you may know today! I thought I would go through some of the memories that I remember from the dorms so you can have a little insight as to how I became who I am. My usual method of planning a trip is to make absolutely no reservations and simply pick a few things that I must do while I am in the area that I am going to. For my European two month train journey with a rag tag bunch of friends, this list included; visit Rikard in Sweden, start in England, run with the bulls, try and goto the olympics in Greece, stay with friends in X, Y, and Z. This is always a loose list and liable to change. A last minute addition to this list came from a long lost friend from high school who randomly got a hold of me and suggested I visit her in Siena Italy and if possible, arrive on these specific dates to watch the Palio. I had no idea what the Palio was, but it was a welcome respite to stay with someone after being in hostels for ages so in a very warm August, we arrived in Siena. |
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