Tired Post

Sometimes there are just those days that take so much out of you that you just can't fight it. Well folks, today is just one example of a hard fought day and I lost at the end. I think there are days and weeks that a person just needs to mentally clock out and refocus on something else for a while. Lately, I have been focusing on a couple of big things that take up the majority of my mental and physical energy, leaving me with very little extra to work with.

After full days and nights the only thing that I want to do when I get home is sleep. When I am hungry, I go out and buy gloriously unhealthy junk food as a way to tide the hunger pangs. I am constantly reminded of how similar it was to my school life, although thankfully less homework. I don't know if at this point I am too conditioned to live a more relaxed life. I feel that life is more of a battlefield and that we always need to keep fighting to win and move forward.

I think the biggest hurdle is the internal pressure that I put on myself to always succeed. I tend to burnout every once in a while due various things hitting me at the same time. When that happens I feel a never ending need for sleep which is a sign that usually tells me to back off a bit and recuperate. I only wish that it was possible to know a week or two beforehand, so that I can mitigate a burnout.

Looking forward to a relaxing weekend, hope yours will be as uneventful as mine.

Blogs Unleashed!

 

I would have to say the best way to keep audiences coming back for more is to entice them with new content and expand on previous hot button topics. The hardest part about blogging is to post something every few days to keep viewership up. A great blog can die a slow and painful death if there is too much time in between posts. People in this day and age are all for the instant gratification and novelty seeking. I myself was like this way as well.

A while back when I was first researching blogs, I would always go to a few select blogs of people I knew and read weekly or bi-weekly. After a while some people would stop blogging and their blogs would disappear from my mind and I would ultimately forget that they even had a blog. They were not entertaining me and therefore was not worthy of my time. Sad but true. Keeping people's attention is extremely hard! I had to think about this every time I blogged, knowing that my audience is in it for the small boost of dopamine my blog offers. So every once in a while I would think of something crazy to blog about, it is almost like a promo ad for my blog.

What brought about this post, is that I have recently seen a couple of people that I know, create blogs of their own. I hope to see them flourish and gain viewership and hopefully many followers as well. But I must caution them about the difficulties of sustained efforts into a blog takes a lot of time, effort, and dedication. I created this blog years ago under a different name and intent but it sat idly for years before I decided to really work on it.

I blog because I enjoy the experience, and hopefully they will find joy in their blogs as well. Cheers!

Renting out a lifestyle

Credit: http://www.toptenz.net

For those of you that have been with me from the start, I've always complained about the rent being too damn high. People that live in Mountain View and the surrounding areas(Palo Alto/Sunnyvale), know exactly what I am talking about. With the influx of the world's finest engineers to Silicon Valley, it has not been easy finding an affordable place to live, technology companies have been on a hiring frenzy as of late.

This has made the average cost of living around this area go through the roof. It has to be said that the law of supply and demand is clearly at work here. There is a whole lot of demand for apartments close to where I live, but not a lot of places that are relatively affordable. There a few construction sites that will try and alleviate the pressure of the mini-apartment boom and provide a couple of multi-story complexes, but these buildings are only available to those who will pay 2500+ for a single bedroom apartment.

 

There is only so much I can do before its not worth it to live in Mountain View. Honestly, I love the city, it is the cleanest and safest out of all the cities that I have lived in. It is located in a climate sweet spot and is near many of the biggest retailers. I can see why people flock to this place. 

Eventually, I'll have to do a cost benefit study to see if it is even worth the hassle of moving farther away. I may find that the cost savings might not be worth it in the short term, although if the rent keeps going up I'll have no choice at all but to move. 

 

If any of you are looking for a place to live check out hotpads.com. <-- I wish I got some ad revenue from this.

We are the 99%

After taking a gander at the wearethe99percent tumblr, I felt an eerie sadness for people that posted their stories on the site. It was like a never ending stream of people tormented and shackled by massive debt and on the verge of being homeless. Every race, creed, and age was represented with heart breaking stories that one can only pity.

Of all the people that posted on this tumblr, there were two primary types. One type is the college student with heavy debt and no job prospects and the other is people who are in their late 50's that have just got laid off with very little saved for retirement.

I fall under the "college student with heavy debt" category but I cannot possibly compare to those who have lost everything and cannot find work. I am extremely lucky to find employment and I do everything I can to make sure I stay employed, but others are not so fortunate. I know many people that are struggling to find a job after graduating from college. They are competing with others for simple part-time jobs, most being snatched up by recent grads trying to stem the tide before they find other work.

I wish I can help those that are suffering under these conditions, but one man does not have enough resources to help everyone in America. These problems are structural and requires new laws and regulation against those who would prey upon others. I don't know what needs to be done to solve wealth inequality in this country, but we cannot just sit back and watch the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

I did it "My Way"

There are four singers that I really want to aspire to. They have such a unique voice that is impossible not to be amazed at their talent. In no particular order, Frank Sinatra, Bobby Darin, Robbie Williams, and Michael Buble. They have a classic voice that one does not hear to often in today's music.

The video above is Robbie's version of "My Way," a Frank Sinatra song that he did at the end of his career. The reason that I am showing this because I would like to perform this for my singing class exactly how he did it. This song is bravado and arrogance at its best, telling listeners that he lived a full life by doing things his way. 

Hopefully, I can do some of the dance moves Robbie does on stage as I am singing this as best I can. The ultimate goal is to make my audience weep in amazement... I got a long ways to go.

The Count of Monte Cristo

If I wanted to base my life on a piece of fiction then, The Count of Monte Cristo would be the perfect example. In a nut shell, it is about a naive man (Edmond Dantes) who gets double crossed and is sent to jail for crimes he did not commit. During his time there, he meets a man that teaches him the ways of the world and helps him discover who his enemies are. Once he escapes his prison, he seeks his revenge on those that have betrayed him and nearly loses his own sanity in the process.

Now to be fair, nothing in my life compares to the extremes that the main character goes through during the often bleak story. Shades of the struggles and hardships that the protagonist experiences can be related in my own life in quite similar ways that I felt a special connection to the story the first time I saw it. What I most saw parallels in myself was the inner conflict and anger that had developed when he was in prison and had finally figured out who had betrayed him in the first place.

There was no person that betrayed me per se, it was more of a collective series of events that stymied and frustrated me as I grew up and forayed into the adult world. I believe it was the jarring realization that the world I was the taught and the world that actually was, were too much for me to handle. It can be summed as such, my expectation of the world was not in line with what I had believed and thus causing me to be disillusioned with how to proceed forward.

To understand me is to understand struggle. There is a need for me to continuously prove to myself that I am able to overcome any and all challenges in my way. With Edmund, his need for revenge against his former friends became an obsession that drove him to plot and plan with every waking moment that he had. I can see parallels in myself, when it comes to pushing myself to succeed and having wildly ambitious goals in life.

The fact is, my motivation to push myself comes mainly from proving to my high school classmates that thought so little of me all those years ago. Kinda sucks being marginalized all those years. It is absurd that events occurring almost 10 years ago could have such a huge impact me now. But as someone once told me, "we are our own experiences." Edmund spent 13 years in jail, learning and planning for the day he gets outs and starts his revenge. Likewise, I have spent most of the 10 year learning and gaining status so that one day I might come back and prove my worth.

I have thought about what this blog has helped me done in the past couple of month, which is to catalog my thoughts but also to grow as an individual. But part of that growth is to also realize that I must learn to eventually let the past go and look towards the healthy prospects in the future as Edmund finally did in the conclusion. Until then, the need to be better than my contemporaries is fueling the fires of success, but I must make sure that I don't get burned in the progress.

Can I get a house to go?

I've always wanted to own a home. It just seems like it would take me a really long time to try and save up for one, especially in the Palo Alto area where housing prices are routinely about several million. But I have a idea that might allow me to live in Palo Alto, I just don't have a lot of space.

In comes a brilliant idea from Jay Shafer, a guy who founded Tumbleweedhouses. It is like a mobile home but a lot smaller and a whole lot more pleasant to look at. One of these babies are only tens of grands rather than hundreds. They come pre-built or comes in a DIY kit for those who are crafty.

The whole idea is to be minimalistic while being cheap and mobile. It is excellent for people just starting out after college or people that want to take their vacation home on a vacation.

I just love the efficient and ergonomic design of these things, couple with the fact you can take your home anywhere and kind of life off the land. The roof can be outfitted with a solar array for power and rain water can be collected for use in the shower and toilets. There is even a fireplace that uses propane during those cold nights. The only downside is the lack of stable internet connection, a person would need to find a local hotspot.

My plan is to buy one of these things if it looks like the housing market is too expensive for me to buy into and I can't afford the rent in my apartment. Realisticlly it would be hard to give up running water and internet without substitutes. Also I would still need an area of land to tether myself to during nights, unless I can squat in a Walmart parking lot for a couple of months.

Some day though, I want to be free and take a journey like the person above with all my belongs to a distant and far away land. Until then I will only dream of owning a mobile home.

Taking a Chance

Life is all about taking chances and hoping for the best. The picture above is the best visualization for this, once the fish leaves it's bowl it does not know whether or not it will make it into the next bowl, but still tries. I wish that I could have the ability to take more chances in life and risk it all. It is harder than it seems to put yourself into a situation that you know very little about and even less about how to navigate through it.

I may talk about this risk taking in a general sense but the it applies to all facets of life; school, work, and romance all require some risk taking in order for one to make it through. I truly believe that most people are fearful of the consequences and subsequent embarrassment of failure to take a lot of chances in life. I know this because I have been there on multiple occasions and still fight my fear on a daily basis. It is incredibly hard to put yourself out there and not have doubt in oneself.

This culture is absolutely horrible in fostering peoples' ability to express themselves without fear or criticism from others. I think if people try to do something that is different or difficult they are mocked until they either have taken on a thicker skin or quit due to mounting pressure. It is as if the people doing the criticizing are jealous of those taking risks because they can't do it themselves.

My point is that we all need to take risks in life, that is how we grow as an individual. We can't let others stop us midway or before we take the first steps. It is important to each one of us that we know the pains of hardship and even failure so that we can look forward to and cherish the good times.So go out there and take a chance on something.