Stating the Obvious

For me, reading the news usually serves a threefold purpose. The first one is obvious, which is getting caught up on current events and happenings around the world. But, if you've had a Bloomberg news feed on your computer for the last few years, it's really hard to be earnestly interested in the news anymore. Good news, bad news, market fluctuations and employment figures have all become white noise to me. I like to say I’m a big picture person. This could be misconstrued in my industry as being imprecise and, well, lazy.

The second purpose just might be a personal quirk, but I like reading really weird or cute news. One article I really, heartbreakingly enjoyed in this category had to do with a baby bear that got its head stuck in a cookie jar: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/15/bear-cub-jar-stuck-head

The final type of news articles I gravitate towards is those that refine and articulate the obvious, on topics that have previously crossed my mind. Maybe this category is a little narcissist because it lets me momentarily believe that I could, as well, be a printed journalist for a paper such as the New York Times.

I read an article this morning about how people who don't check their emails constantly and consistently have lower stress levels. These statements, naturally, are supported by bonafide governmental and sociological studies. The piece by Nick Bilton is titled 'Taking E-Mail Vacations Can Reduce Stress, Study Says'. Hmmm... no sht!

Experts should consider running an empirical study on the stress levels of smartphone users. I use mine for mostly social purposes, so I can only speak to that point. I really want to lock my phone and laptop in my work desk drawer for a weekend and see what happens. Will I literally be bored to tears, or will I actually have a restful weekend sitting in front of the television with no other distractions? Most friends would probably think that my self-imposed social experiments are masochistic. But I think I need to unplug a little... typing 190 wpm on a phone with just two thumbs should be considered neither a talent nor a skill. It’s an illness.

Now, I just need to pick a weekend where I haven't already arranged things. That brings me to ... Saturday, October 20. Please pencil me in for dropping off the face of the earth.

Phone person

I think at one point in my life, I used to be a phone person. I woke up this morning, with the morning sun shining through my window blinds, the distant ocean roaring, and I actually really felt like calling someone to chit-chat from bed. I haven't had that feeling in a really long time.... the sad part was twofold... I couldn't think of a person to call, and on top of that, AT&T reception doesn't reach the confines of my bed. I guess the latter was technically the more constraining, but I realized we've really progressed (or digressed, depending on how you look at it) into a generation of texts and chats.

The progressives will say that we're more productive as a society - we can juggle more meetings and conversations simultaneously than we previously could. Those seeing this phenomenon as a psychological/social digression will say that we're really failing to develop healthy human connections.

On exes

I took a drive around Berkeley today before meeting a friend up for brunch. Since moving to the city, it's a rare occasion that I find myself in Berkeley, so I made an extra effort to joyride through the places I was familiar with. It was definitely a blast from the past, but the fact that I spent the majority of my college years in a serious relationship with one person, I found that most of the experiences and places I was excited about had a bittersweet emotion tied with it, since I'm no longer with that person.

Yet, we're still friends. That's something that most of my friends and my family can't understand. I'm not even on talking terms with the other two guys that I dated seriously, but this one particular guy I experienced college with -- we're still good friends. We're in completely different cities now, but we still manage to keep in touch and meet up when the chance arises, which has been pleasantly frequent in the last year or two.

I'm at a fork in the road now, because I actually found myself sending him a short line about the lack of snow at Tahoe this year (he liked to snowboard). It's a trivial one-lined email, but the implications behind it could be far more profound: we're all grown-ups and have weathered relationships where we were devastatingly invested; thinking about an ex randomly is probably not completely out of the ordinary, but acting upon it to let that person know you're thinking of them (even if in a platonic way) is [ insert completely inarticulate adjective ].

Is that adjective I'm searching for 'self-validating'? I seriously hope not...

Restless

It's amazing that on evenings when my schedule unexpectedly clears up, I actually end up staying up later than I normally would a regular, busier, day.

The next few weeks should hopefully be productive. I've always wanted to start a chapter in my life in a dramatic way. I've been sitting in the car on the drives home with my roommate, talking about how I'd like to leave my industry and just wear black and scarves and other crap all day long. I'd love to be an artist of some sort. Or get some new scenery, some new muse. Let's see how this one goes.

I think everything happens for a reason, but the reason is most often not the one we carved from our own imaginations, and there's really no use speculating on what the real reason is. Maybe we'll be old and grey before we find out. Maybe everything is just interconnected and beautiful that way.

From Hong Kong, with love

This is my last layover for the year. It's been fairly entertaining, to say the least. In an already efficient airport like Hong Kong, there apparently is zero foot traffic past 10pm. I flew through security and found myself with way too much time on my hands.

So now I'm sitting in a food court. Originally I was sitting here by myself, but apparently another flight from France must have landed because all of a sudden I'm surrounded by at least 50 french people, all trying to order food and drinks with zero English. There was about a minute of confusion while ordering beer, between 'quatre' (four), versus what the waitress understood as 'three'. A part of me wanted to intervene with my subpar knowledge, but a larger part of me reasoned that these language clashes are healthy for people. It's good for people to be outside of their comfort zones, because at the end of the day, people have universal languages: body language, facial expressions, and most importantly, patience with one another: it wasn't hard to count 'un, deux, trois, QUATRE' on a hand to clarify how many beers they wanted.

But the cordialism practiced over language clashes in an international airport such as Hong Kong are to be appreciated. The international space is an asylum, if you will. Why can't the rest of the world just, well, get along?

If the cellphones could speak

For the longest time, my iPhone 3 worked as an iPod, but now it's been officially demoted to an alarm clock at my brother's place. That's quite an expensive alarm clock. I know there are organizations taking cellphone donations and distributing them to domestic abuse victims, but I hope to God that there aren't as many domestic abuse victims in this world as there are functional, discarded cellphones.

Where have all the cellphones gone? What is this new green movement they speak of?

Are you feeling it, too?

Living Consciously

Have a seat. Line 12 (the green line) was mine. The above was my station. I did a good amount of thinking while I was in that city, but since then, the relationships that I've built with people have burgeoned into excellent conversation and even better times. Treat each substantial conversation as a privilege. You never know where it'll take you in life.

Ever since my roommate mentioned the concept of "living consciously", I haven't been able to shake the idea. The conversation came about during a late-night/early morning tête-à-tête over full mugs of Rémy Martin. We tired of whatever it is we had been doing M-F, and needed to really hash it out. How many people go through life unconsciously? From personal interactions, many people in the financial sector tend to live life without really questioning why they do what they do, and more importantly, what else is going on out in the world. We seem to cover the following topics well: food, leisure, material goods. But when breaching topics such as human trafficking and illiteracy in America, often times, we start to hear the crickets chirping.

And when the Tsunami hit Japan this past spring, the outcry in our sector seemed louder on the financial repercussion front than in any real, human, aspect. Any expression of sympathy was usually followed by a five second moment of silence, before delving into the investment opportunities that may or may not subsequently materialize.

Have we forgotten to be people?