The Word of The . . . .Until A New One is Made is:

Ecdysiast (ec·dys·i·ast) - A striptease artist, a stripper.

“for Jeff’s bachelor party, we went to a ecdysiast club.”

My Blog Post Counts are DOWN!!

End of the month is coming really fast and I’m deficient on my blog entries. I’m not ignoring ya’ll, I just have been hella busy. I’m gonna use this as a shameless attempt to increase the count for this month.

Dish Network Likes to Play

So I tried to cancel my Dish Network again.

A little background: I canceled, or I thought I canceled, my Dish Network a month ago. Some how, it didn’t go through and I got a “you will be billed” bill a few days ago.

After one phone call and 2 minutes of holding, I connected to a customer service person who asked me a whole bunch of questions and took his time hoping I’d hang up. He asked why I wanted to cancel and I told him I already said so, check the notes.

He then connected me to someone who specialized in preventing people from canceling. I told him that I really hated getting charged $4.99 for not having a phone line and he instantly offered to waive that fee. The first time I heard this I was surprised. I had previously called three times specifically requesting that Dish Network waive that fee because I didn’t even have a phone line—no dice. Yet now, they could easily do it. Ah, the power of a “do not let them cancel customer service representative.”

Given that I was dead set on canceling I went for the grand slam: “For me to stay with Dish Network I’m going to need free service for 6 months, free HD, free HD DVR, and free installation to get all that into my house” . . . . hold breath, no deal—well at least I tried.

Well, I think my account is canceled and they’re going to mail me boxes so I can mail back the equipment.

Lesson: if you think a charge is bull shit, just threaten to cancel and see what kind of good things they’ll offer. If the company says, sorry you have to cancel, just hang up and they’ll use that as an excuse to continue service.

Also, those who are prepared to walk away have the strongest bargaining power.

(How to get Dish Network to waive the $4.99 no telephone line charge)

Social Circle Is About To Bite Me In The Ass

So I’m kinda shitting bricks right now. This is definitely one of those times when my expanded social circle of hot girls has turned around and is about to take a big chunk out of my ass.

So my company is hiring. We rarely hire. In fact, for my position, I’m the last person they hired and that was over 3 years ago.

Well, it just so happens that I’m friends with lots of pretty girls in my field (and up until five minutes ago, I thought this was a good thing).

Every once is a while a few of these girls come to my office to say hi. Other people in my company also see me eating lunch with pretty girls all the time. Once, we had this fire drill so the whole building cleared out. Our company, along with all the other building tenants met at a nearby field and lo and behold I see one of my friends wearing a really hot dress—so I talk to her. And everyone sees. I say they’re just my friends, but that’s like saying “if I won the lottery, I’d still come to work.” Not surprisingly, I have this reputation of knowing lots of pretty girls.

So back to my company hiring: I tell my friends that we’re looking for someone and guess who starts applying? A ton of the hot girls I know. What’s worse is that some of the girls told their other friends to apply. Seriously. So in a few weeks my company is going to start interviewing these girls and one after another, they’re all going to say “I know NotEvenWater!”

Maybe if I worked for a bunch of horny old men this would be a good thing, but I’m quite sure that’s not the case.

Am I The Middle Child of Education?

I’ve been talking to a bunch of teachers lately about No Child Left Behind. As I understand it, at the end of the year, there are a whole bunch of tests given to the students and a certain number of them need to achieve a certain score. For example, in a class of 20 students (and these are not the actual numbers) say 75% of the class needs to achieve a 65% or better on the tests for that class to achieve a passing result.

If I was a teacher, my initial thought would be “since I have 20 kids, 75% would be 15 kids, so I need 15 kids to get 65% or better.” Then I would count which kids would be part of that 15.

Well, today I went to an elementary school to give some talks related to my work, and wow, I could pretty easily identify the top 5 kids and the bottom 5 kids.

Therefore, in my mind, I would bank on the top 5 kids to pass and not worry about them. I’d probably give up on the bottom 2 or 3, and then bust my ass to get the 10 of the 12-13 middle level kids to pass.

I’d then teach toward the middle 12-13 kids.

This got me thinking even more: was I one of those middle kids? Yup. In fact, I definitely think I was somewhere between number 12 and 17 out of the 20 kids—I was definitely one of the “on the fence” kids who was the focus of the teacher’s attention.

Granted, No Child Left Behind came way after I graduated, but that still makes me think a similar system was probably in effect.

Fear of Success

On one of the many local forums here in Hawaii, guys often ask for dating advice. Like a bad crack habit, I always add my two cents. Sometimes people like my advice, sometimes they don’t. Every once in a while, I’ll get a private (non public) message from guys asking for specific advice. I do my best to help them based upon the little information I have and the even little else I know about them.

Occasionally, guys also ask me for live in person help or “to become my apprentice.” At that point, it usually scares the crap out of me that I could actually start my own pickup school. Not saying that I’d be any good, but merely that a school is entirely feasible.

I‘ve considered starting small and cheap. I would charge something extremely minimal like $50 or $100 just to make sure the guys were committed and I’d justify that low cost with the clear idea of “I really don’t know what I’m doing.” I’ve even considered giving the money back to the student if I felt he succeeded.

The point is that I would hone my teaching skills kinda like a haircutting school offers really cheap haircuts.

Then all of it comes tumbling down with the actually realization that I would actually be teaching. It made me think of the Game in how Mystery was always sabotaging his own success; how he’d be offered a myriad of reality shows, but would always turn them down.

Do I really have a fear of my own success? Am I really too comfortable where I am? Am I just afraid I won’t do a mind blowing job helping others? Pickup teaches being comfortable stepping outside one’s comfort zone so where does this leave me? I see tons of people shy away from excellent opportunities for success and as stand on the edge of another one—-especially after being put here many times-—I wonder am I really that much stronger than anyone else?

How You View the World is the Same Way the World Views You

Most people go through life worrying about what others think about them. They’re worried that other people might see them in wrong way, judge them improperly, or just think something bad. Telling someone to not care about what other people think is like saying, “ignore the UFO above your head”—it doesn’t work.

Rather, the path to indifference requires one to become indifferent toward others. The path to freedom from being judged by others requires one to stop judging others. Only when one removes their own prejudices of the world can they accept the world without prejudices.

About a year ago I decided to stop judging people. I just accepted people for what they did and did my best to not label them as good, bad, sluts, assholes, etc. I was talking to a girl and she told me she had sex in her company’s conference room. The next day she said she regretted telling me that and tried to convince me she wasn’t a slut. I calmly told her I wasn’t judging her and she sighed in relief.

In my quest to not judge people, I just accepted that if someone did something, they did it, and that had nothing to do if they were a good or bad person. I turned off my judgmental mindset and it set me free to think about a ton of other things in life.

A few weeks ago, I realized that I stopped worrying about others judging me too. I think, because I knew I wasn’t judging other people, I felt that no one was judging me. Now whether that is true or not doesn’t matter because so long as I think they’re not judging me, that’s good enough.

So I guess the lesson for today’s blog entry is, for anyone to truly become free from the worries of what other people think, one must first stop judging others. The filter through which each person views the world, is the same filter they see the world viewing them.

You Are Not Your Job.

You are not your job. You are not the money in your bank account. You are not the car you drive. You are not the plastic in your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are not your automatic floor-cleaning robot. You are not your theater system. You are not your cell phone. You are not your sunglasses. You are not your ultrasonic cleaning toothbrush. You are not your overly large computer monitor. You are not your watch. You are not the library of books in your home. You are not your stock portfolio. You are not your vast collection of music stored on your computer hard drive. You are not your ergonomic mesh office chair. You are not your wardrobe. You are not your wine collection. You are not your matching loveseat and sofa. You are not your ipod. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are a blade of grass in an endless field waving in the wind like everyone else. When you are gone no one will notice. You are just like every other blade of grass. You are not special.

The Ultimate Self Congruence Test

I’m nearing the end of the Lord of the Rings journey people call the RSD Blueprint Decoded: 20 DVDs of possibly the most mind-bombing information I have ever learned.

Anyway, before I put up my review, I want to highlight one point:

When you see a guy who’s like you (looks, status, clothing, etc) and he’s with a hot girl, what do you think?

1. wtf?
2. good for him
3. he must be loaded
4. nothing at all

Ultimate pimp status (for lack of a better word) is “4. nothing at all”; the anti-player-hater.