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| I've moved my site to a new place:
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See you there!
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| Jeff lives in a little suburb outside of Chicago called Clarendon Hills. Last night I got to participate in the village's favorite tradition other than Christmas, called Free Trash Day. Every year, Amnesty International picks up donations from the residents of Clarendon Hills, anything they don't want can be left outside with the trash. This saves tons of money and trouble if you're too lazy and cheap to call Waste Management to take your old furniture away. But what this means is that people leave a gold mine outside their homes, and all the residents load up their SUVs and trucks to look at everyone else's trash. If you see something you like, you simply pick it up and take it home. Sadly, you might have noticed that at some point, Amnesty International has to come by and pick up the leftovers that nobody wanted. There are rules to this game, of course. Residents aren't allowed to put their trash out before sunset, so Free Trash Day only starts at night. People in the village also have a slight sense of shame, so people try to avoid seeing or making eye contact with others. Of course, people drive suspiciously in a zig-zag pattern towards piles of trash with their high beams on, so it's pretty obvious what they're doing. Here are the highlights from our night: -finding that some Mexican pawn dealers were rolling through Clarendon Hills with a U-Haul
-Jeff's brother saying "we picked up some towels.....which are unrelated to Free Trash Day"
-seeing that people were actually ripping open trash bags and boxes to look at their contents
-somebody put a table and recliner on top of a dark hill, making it look really creepy. We added a lamp. Our take from the night was a couple planks of wood, two boogie boards, and a bike with no chain. There were tons of plastic chairs, lamps, and children's toys. BTW, Jeff wanted to roll around and start breaking stuff, but he decided that he would literally be taking stuff away from charity if he did that. | | |
| My trip to Chicago was more than relaxing and enjoyable, it was highly inspiring. Jeff is becoming a monster at motivating himself and it made me very happy to see him learn to push and analyze himself. But anyways, I made up some new life dreams and I'd like to share them now: -judo fight former Russian president/now Russian dictator Vladimir Putin Putin is famous for a lot of things - killing or jailing political rivals, being a hatchet man for the KGB, taking Russia back into its unfinished fight with America, etc. But you may not know that he is a highly enthusiastic and passionate practitioner of judo. He never quite got to being a national level competitor (turns out you can't win judo by secretly killing your opponents), but he has really pushed Russian judo clubs and he continues to regularly practice the sport. Conveniently, the people in his judo club who have beaten him have all gone on to become oil billionaires and members of his cadre. I want to pull a Rocky IV and judo fight Putin. I'd like him to tell the media in a pre-fight interview "If he dies.....he dies" and tell me as we bow to each other "I must break you". Ideally, he would also scream in Russian "he's like a rusty old piece of iron!" while we were fighting, which would be subtitled so I understand what he said. I would also defeat him in dramatic fashion. -ride in the boxcar of a train with a hobo Jeff told me that Chicago has gotten good at throwing hobos in the trash and keeping them there. Except in the underground portion of the Wacker, where hobos have formed a small colony and they'll rob, rape, and kill anybody who enters their territory. It's exactly portrayed in Batman Begins, that part was more documentary than fiction. But the train that Jeff uses to commute to his job has some boxcars and I would like to sneak into one, only to find a hobo and his bindle (the stick with the bag on it). Hopefully I could convince him not to rape me, but I wouldn't mind fighting the hobo and throwing him out of the moving train either. If I fought him, I would throw him out just as he was pushing my face towards a wheel and laughing maniacally. This would also require me to say something unnecessarily bad-ass in a deep and gravelly voice. Like the hobo would yell "You're going down!" as he was pushing my face out of the train door, and I would reply in a super deep voice "No, I don't do that" then throw him out with a sacrifice throw. -live in Tokyo and enjoy the finest food in the world I'm working through material for a post on the best food cultures in the world, but this year food connoisseurs have been shocked to discover that Tokyo is the food capital of the world. Tokyo offers 147,000 restaurants, including 6,000 in the financial district. This leads to extreme competition and the very finest result of such pure capitalism, which is that eating establishments serving anything less than exquisite food are promptly wiped out. But in terms of stars, Tokyo's restaurants received more stars than Paris and New York combined, and Tokyo features French and Italian food that rivals anything you find in France or Italy so the Japanese aren't just a one-trick pony. Restaurant magazines show Japan's love for connoisseurship, as they are second in sales and readership (sex is first, fashion is third). What all this means is that you could live in Tokyo indefinitely and find a new revelation about an undiscovered restaurant almost every day. I'd like to live there for a while, maybe a year or two, and sample the foods. And you know, just to show their concern and love for food, Japan's other great innovation is in toilet technology. Everyone knows about the electronic bidet, but few people know the lengths to which Japan has gone high-tech. At this point, toilets in Japan are just pots of water without electricity. Some can't be flushed manually any more. Japan's latest toilet features no less than 39 buttons. Every detail is covered, from seat warmers to the air flow in the bathroom to a control for a stream of water to cover the sound of pooing (a favorite among women, the maker says). You can wash, mist, and dry just about every part of your groin area. So Japanese restaurants are so nice that they not only cover every detail on the way in, they also cover details on the way out. Pretty sweet. | | |
| Yesterday I watched my brother graduate and officially become a doctor of medicine. It was pretty cool, although there were some people there who were gods among the gods. One girl was an absolute beast, sweeping a MD/PhD on top of being recommended as the top student in three different areas - women's care, overall care, and research in obstetrics. My brother said she was a monster and the type of person nobody wanted to share on rotations. She was a tireless worker and she would run everyone into the ground with her knowledge and her insightful questions. Afterwards, I went to dinner at the original Morton's in Chicago. It was easily the best restaurant I've reviewed thus far, eclipsing the Morton's in LA. I will say this before the verdict: at some point in your life, you have to enjoy the original Morton's. Decor: 10 This place had much the same decor as the Morton's in LA. Why this got a perfect 10 is because it put on the perfect Chicago touch. There is a plain 1950's type sign for the restaurant and you will be greeted by a plain door with a very plain sign on it. I actually thought we had the wrong place when we first got there. But open the door and you walk downstairs into a prohibition-type basement where the party is being thrown down. The absolute perfect touch of Chicago - mafia-type shadiness and the total American feel. This is a feel of what American class looks like. Service: 10 Service was the same as the Morton's in LA. Introduction of the menu with a tray that has every major component of meat on it. The maitre'd came by at least three times to ask if he could anything to make our meal better. That's the maitre'd on top of the waiter, the guy who fills our water, the guy who clears our plates, and the guy who brings out the next course. You will not have better service at any other eating establishment.
Food: 10 I ordered French onion soup, Chicago-style ribeye, Alaskan king crab legs, mashed potatoes, and chocolate mousse. The food was absolutely fantastic, as you might expect. But let me heap all my praise on the crab legs. To put it frankly, my life is better because I ate those crab legs. They quite literally melted in my mouth with all the freshest of taste. Aki had one word for the crab legs: "perfect". The French onion soup was also the best I have ever had, with a good kick but not too salty. The ribeye basically melts in the mouth at a perfect medium rare, and the mashed potatoes were about as fluffy as you're ever going to see. The mousse was great, but I didn't think it was the best possible effort. In short, perfection is the standard. Ambience: 10
The mood lighting, the location, and the general feel of the place make this the ultimate location for a date or any type of intimate dinner. If you take a girl here, I guarantee she will fall in love with you and you will have sex with her when you make your move. The restaurant takes every measure to avoid the rude, including a cell phone jammer so nobody who is eating can take or make a call. Score: 40/40
Price: $110 per person
Verdict: The gold standard of restaurants. If you are a restaurant connoisseur, you must go here. | | |
| The title seems a bit odd because one might think that the opposite of success is failure. To the contrary, I've come to a point in my life where my own experiences and the experiences of others has convinced me that the polar opposite is to quit. As they say, despair will crush you far worse than defeat ever could.
I think this is particularly relevant to fitness and the pursuit of physical excellence, but it applies to any endeavor that requires motivation and is pitted with the competitive desires of other people to achieve a goal that only a limited few can attain. As I noted in my pre-birthday blues entry, I always thought of my life's great failures as distractions to a greater success. I've come to believe that meaningful achievement is punctuated with hard work, dedication, self-awareness, and a sense of renewed effort that can only be brought about my failure.
I actually kind of look down on people who have drifted through life without ever knowing the bitter sting of failure, whose lives have been defined by their successes. To me, that speaks of a life without challenges and a person who eventually holds on to that fleeting sense of success so tightly that they become too afraid to push themselves. The power to change yourself only comes with abject honesty and a burning desire to improve. And anyways, talent is a dime a dozen these days. Wasted potential is a cliche. Everyone gets too little sleep, they're hurt all the time, and eventually we'll all die. What makes you so special.
This is why I love sports like tennis and running. When you get to a certain level, you realize that the people who say "I could have won, if only I wanted to try" or similar excuses are the real losers. There's no shame in saying "I tried my best and he beat me" nor anything wrong with asking yourself "what can I do better next time". That's where running comes in. During my workouts of the day, you have no idea how many times my mind begs me to quit, to stop short because nobody would ever know if I cheated or not. There's a real humility in facing that and realizing that I am not quite as good as I thought I was.
I've noticed as I climb through life that I find myself with more and more doubts. When I ask myself what's the worst that could ever happen, there is a fearful part of me that says "I may fall short of expectations. I may not be who I pretend to others. My perception of self may be proven very, very wrong." It's kind of pathetic that my courageous part replies "When did you start caring what other people thought of you. Anyways, most people's opinions of you are already negative. Any change is bound to be better." But the real tragedy is losing that sense of fun, that passion for learning a new skill and trying it out against a person who is equally passionate.
Anyways, what I'm advocating here is risk. It's stupid to say move beyond success and failure because most endeavors still measure themselves on that scale, particularly sports. Not everybody is a winner but neither do losers stay that way. Don't be afraid of failure...or success. Learn something new. Try something different. Test yourself and confront your true capabilities. You won't like some of what you find, maybe even a lot of what you find out about yourself. But face your flaws and let them push you further than you ever thought you could go.
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