I’m Working… I Swear

So I’ve been thinking about how unusual I’ve made my lifestyle and my expectations lately. Like, most of the girls I’ve dated this year have wanted to either 1) be my girlfriend ASAP and I wouldn’t ask them out because… I don’t want to have to think about them while I’m gone (also I didn’t really like them). Or 2) I actually liked them and would have committed to them but I was either a) the guy that you hookup with but don’t date or b) I have no idea, not big enough of a pothead?

Here's A Pic of a Huge Cock

So in conclusion, I realized that I need to just enjoy things while they last, no matter how short lived they are. I’ve gotten in this weird cycle this year with dating where the girls I wasn’t really into lasted far too long and the ones I was into didn’t last as long as I liked. But, when I think about it, I’m happy that I had feelings for someone, even if it didn’t workout. I also realized I should be much more selective in who I date. There have been times where I’ve dated girls just to kill time and it came back to bite me because I had to explain why I dated them, and I had nothing. I guess I also realized I can date much better girls than I thought I could.

For about 8 months there I wasn’t sure if I was even capable of caring enough for a girl to be fully committed to her, and for a minute there I was, and that makes me feel a little more human. It’s actually a bit of a relief not to have that tug on my heart pulling me back home. I hate that feeling, wanting to be somewhere because someone else is there. Maybe I’m in a selfish stage right now where I’m focussing on myself, but, I think there will always be time for women later on. In fact the more I try to avoid them the more they seem to find me, annoyingly.

But, now I feel like I’m me again, I no longer have any desire to want to be at home. In fact, as soon as I can get things with lightning mma running smoothly I plan to take a short 1 month trip somewhere. Maybe New Zealand? Or Costa Rica/South America with Erica. Either way it’ll be what I’ve been setting myself up to do for the last year.

Thinking I need to convince Mike to help me rent out and manage the house while I’m gone and I definitely need to read more.

Oh yeah that’s the other thing I wanted to write about, I think everyone needs to read these books, in this order:

1. The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
   
2. Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel
3. Outliers: The Story of Success
4. The God Delusion

Let me explain:

1. I read this book about 2 years ago, just after I had graduated college. I was working at UCSB and living with my ex girlfriend trying to figure out what to do with my degree. I was annoyed with how boring my future sounded, spending endless days in a lab doing tedious experiments so that I could get a PhD… and do more tedious experiments. This book opened my eyes to a new world where the goal of life wasn’t work, or making money. In fact from the moment I finished reading this book I took its ideas and started applying them to my life. Figuring out how I could have a career, and still have time for the things I really cared about. It also drove me to want to travel. When I started working for my Dad things were not going well, I had to be there 8am-5pm every day and I was supposed to be helping with the website. Gradually overtime I created my own job, doing everything online, and it was because of this book. I had some Indian webdesigners create an eStore for our company and my job just expanded from there. As my responsibilities increased I made sure that every step I took I also worked towards making sure I never had to be at the office to do my daily tasks. It wasn’t easy at first, it probably took about a year. But as I’m writing this right now I’ve got one assistant just starting work in the US, answering phone calls, taking care of my customers. I have another assistant who has been helping me all day with my website, and I’m going to visit him in about 5 days to see if I can find more people like him.
2. I picked up this book pretty recently but it really was life changing. 4 Hour Workweek gave me the idea for how to create my life so that I could do exactly what Rolf Potts Vagabonding book describes. The trip I’m on now is sort of the melding of these two ideas. Yeah, sure, I’m “working” but I’m also traveling, I spent the weekend in Macau, in India I’ll be spending 3 days touring the southern beaches. And yeah, I’ll be meeting people and “working”, but I don’t really feel like that’s work because I love my job and I’d do it even if I wasn’t getting paid, just to help out my Dad. I’ve given this book to friends and they’ve all said it made them want to drop everything. It opens your eyes to the fact that living in Orange County we have way more than we could ever need, we waste our money on clothes, expensive food, flatscreen TV’s, PS3’s, home theater systems, cars, and a bunch of other stuff we don’t really need. For me, I’m lucky, I was born into good circumstances and I used them to create this life where I have no liablities or real responsibilities besides the ones I create for myself. I’m already in a good position to put this book into practice… Now if it wasn’t for that silly gym I just opened…
3. This book allowed me to come to terms with who I am, or more correctly, who my father is. I’ve always had a problem with the fact that I was born way too fortunate. Things were too easy, I didn’t pay for college, my Dad did, I didn’t have to work that hard for a lot of things, they were easier for me than they were for my friends. It might be that I’m a little bit smart, but I think it has more to do with how my life was set up. Outliers is a book talking about how circumstances affect a persons success. Bill Gates didn’t just drop out of college and start Microsoft and become a billionaire out of sheer hard work. A bunch of things came into play to allow this to happen in his life, his family was rich, his schooling happened to have huge amounts of computer resources, and he happened to be born in the few years that were perfect for the kind of software creation he was interested in. After I read this I realized I should just accept my circumstances instead of trying to downplay them. I started figuring out how to utilize what I’d been given even more. I had this unused college fund just sitting around at 23 years old, why not start a gym? Even if I lost all my money, who cares, atleast I’d be doing what I loved. Besides I already lost half of it anyway. After I read these three books I realized I didn’t want money anyway, I wanted my life to be about what I enjoyed doing, and I started making it happen.
4. The God Delusion doesn’t really fit into the progression from above but I think its critical for a lot of people. I know a lot of people don’t have an interest in religion but I’ve developed an interest by growing up in Christian schools and battling with Christian morality growing up. For the last 4 years I’ve had this internal conflict with science and religion. In college I learned so much about psychology, physics, biology, math, chemistry, and it made the world make so much sense. I remember as a kid thinking, there must be a god, how can you explain all this? When I finished college I started to think to myself… what can’t be explained by science? I couldn’t come up with much. I started doubting whether a god existed. I picked up this book and it kind of cemented what I had been feeling since I started college. I would suggest, if you even have a slight doubt about god’s existence, pick this up, it’ll open your eyes. A lot of people think that a belief in god is necessary to live a full, meaningful, moral life. I couldn’t disagree more. I won’t get into it but I really recommend this book.

Ok that’s a crapload of text. I’m out.

So Lili invited me to come visit her in Macau today and I took her up on the offer. I’d heard it was basically the Chinese Vegas and it basically met all expectations. The Venetian here is 4x the size of the one in vegas. There aren’t as many hotels and they aren’t as concentrated but they are working on it. They’re building a strip and Lili and her husband James bought an apartment that’s on the hill overlooking the new strip, pretty good decision if you ask me.

Oh, the best part about it is the food. It was epic. I had some pretty fantastic curry and thai food. I love Chinese hospitality, Lili had invited me to sleep in her apartment and when I got here they were like “we decided to just get you a hotel room”. Of course they refuse to let me pay for it. That’s where I’m chilling right now, its pretty tight, I have this awesome view of the MGM Grand and the Wynn, and its only 100 bucks a night on a Saturday.

Here’s a random video from when we were just hanging listening to some music in a casino, all of the sudden this couple gets up and starts dancing like retards. They were totally serious too, you should have seen there expressions, it was like they were practicing for a competition, they weren’t even enjoying themselves:

Ok so here’s the entertaining parts, Lili cracks me up. We’re sitting on this sweet dock having dinner at this fantastic Thai place, and like 10 minutes ago I had already noticed these fine looking Russian girls sitting a few tables away. Lili goes “Did you see the russian girls?” and me and James are like “yeah like a year ago”. We didn’t actually say that but me and him were on the same page. Anyways she goes “I think they’re prostitutes”. At first I was like “damn, talkin shit much?” but no seriously, they probably were. I say this because about 30 minutes later they show me the last thing on the tour. We headed over to the Hotel Lisboa where apparently, prostitutes just hang out, and then walk around in this circle like some kind of meat market. There’s a bunch of dudes just standing around creepily stalking them. Eventually the’ll pick one up and do what they do for 100 bucks (I know seems like way too much right).

I found this video on youtube of it, this is exactly what it looked like.

And to answer your question, would I REALLY be posting about this if I actually did it? Plus I’m not into asians, not enough curves.

On a side, non traveling note, me and Clouse came up with some pretty sick inside jokes today that I want to make sure I don’t remember:

“I had sex with this girl and I couldn’t cum… that’s how I knew I loved you”

“I just wanted you to know… I’m having dinner right now on my date, but i’m thinking of your cock in my mouth, just thought you should know”

“Hey, I’m eating chocolate ice cream, I just thought I should tell you, I don’t know how you feel about it”

“I want to fuck”

NOBODY SAID YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO GET IT.

PICS:

Venetian in Macau

Proof I Was There, I know I'm Smiling, Don't Get Used To It

Poor Baron, he didn’t stand a chance, gotta admire his determination though. Worked hard today, feel like I’m getting somewhere. Lightning MMA is coming along too, ordered a bunch of cool promotional stuff from the printing shop. Hopefully we can use it.

I wish I was there to see the progress right now and help James out, I really feel like I’m missing out. Oh well, I’ll get back a week after his fight and I think that’s when we’ll really be able to start concentrating on getting some clients in the door at the gym.

I’m definitely getting better at basketball, I made a pretty good shot today, our team won like 3 games in a row. My shin splits blow. China is ridiculous, for some reason they blog websites like… twitter (but not facebook), youtube (but not vimeo), and of all things… I can’t get to division1printing.com… the site that I order our promotional stuff from. That was annoying. Thanks for gotomypc and logmein.com though, Just like at work, I have ways around everything.

I’m looking forward to my trip to Macau tomorrow, Lili is supposed to show me around and I think it’ll be a cool experience. I’m not much of a fan of Vegas but this is the Chinese Vegas… soo… it’ll be more serious and with worse food. SOUNDS EXCITING.

On another note, eating at the hotel restaurant has gotten awkward because apparently one of the girls that works there has a crush on me, one of the better english speaking waitresses translated for her “she thinks you’re very handsome”… annoying. So now I’ll be eating and, for example, I’ll get a couple deserts or something, and this girl will bring by a teaspoon, at the exact perfect time. Then, right as i take my last bite off any plate, she’ll come pick it up. Did I mention there’s no tipping in China?

I took this funny pic of Baron after like 3 tiny glasses of the weakest beer in the world, he’s gotta be the biggest lightweight in the world. Poor kid, even the engineer and the manufacturing department heads can drink more than him. We tell him he must be an awful salesmen because Chinese salesman are supposed to be able to drink alot.

Oh well, that’s it for now, I miss home a little. I don’t know where I would be without Clouse to entertain me on AIM. She’s a good friend. She also conveniently stays awake the hours that I’m awake instead of normal human hours. I pretend its because of me, but i’m pretty sure she just has some kind of insomnia disease.

The Basketball Team, We are Ok

Baron Lee, Totally Sobes

It’s a little exciting/nervewracking to be seeing the effects of what I’ve been doing at work. Ok so I’ve been pushing this new line of products because… customers keep e-mailing me about them, its pretty simple. Seems like there might be a market for it I guess. Then again… MY MAJOR WAS PSYCHOBIOLOGY… I’ve taken like two marketing classes in my life, why the hell are you listening to me?

So here I am, in China, in a design review meeting for the second connector we are tooling upon my recommendation, (this ones going to cost us 60k the last one was 40k) and I start thinking to myself… wow, we’re spending 100k dollars and a ton of our engineers time because of something I said?

CA China Design Review from Andrew Lang on Vimeo.

Ok, lets get passed the fact that my pretending that I know what I’m doing has worked way to well for me, I’m actually pretty sure this is going to workout for us, mostly because I’m going to make it work. If it doesn’t they pretty much have nobody to blame except for me so… yeah.

Nobody has any idea that I’m freaking out about this inside my head, because, somewhere along the line, I realized that for some reason I get a much better reaction out of people when I pretend to be 100% confident in what I’m doing and also pretend that I know exactly what I’m talking about always, couldn’t be further from the truth.

My job is to do internet marketing for a heavily engineering based company. What did I study in school? Biology and psychology, nuff’ said.

TTYL

Here's a random photo clouse liked, Lily, Mandy, and Me in Taiwan

Ok so, what I do here during the day really isn’t that interesting, besides the fact that I’m able to do everything I do at home just like I do there. Just give me an internet connection and my laptop and I’m at work.

Anyway besides that, the company here is pretty awesome, my good friends here are the outside sales guy, the head engineer, and the head fo the manufacturing department. Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays (if we don’t go out drinking) we play basketball and sometimes a little ping pong. Thankfully I’m not in this video because I suck pretty badly compared to them, although, I am getting better. My new strategy seems to work pretty well, (stand underneath the hoop and wait till someone passes me the ball… then miss a layup). I can get rebounds pretty well too, they’re short its true.

I rock at ping pong though, I can take most of them, I think its the unusually long arms.

CA China Playing Basketball and Ping Pong from Andrew Lang on Vimeo.

I think its kind of weird how easily I fit in here though, here’s a typical day for me:

Wake up (to my dad yelling at me to wake up), answer some e-mails, get some breakfast buffet at the hotel (by far the best meal of the day) fried rice, french toast, some boiled eggs, sometimes they even have fried potatoes. Anyways, from there we head over to the office, I “work” till noon, then grab some lunch at the circle table with the department heads and my dad. For me that’s usually a bowl or rice, maybe a couple vegetables, and if I’m lucky a couple pieces of meat.

“Work” for a few more hours after lunch. My dad heads back around 3 because his eyes are tired, most of the time I stay here and “work” till five thirty then have dinner with the crew (see description of lunch). After that I go change and play basketball and ping pong for a few hours. Get a car ride home from the driver, take a shower, have a small dinner at the hotel for a couple bucks. And then, if I’m feeling masochistic, i’ll go get a chinese massage at the hotel for 20 bucks. They do good work, its really painful but supposed to be good for you right?

Uh yeah anyway here’s some photos or something…