Memoirs of a Jive Turkey

I’ve been a Red Hot Chili Peppers fan since the Californication album came out when I was barely 8, but one of the songs that I moderately disliked growing up was “Soul to Squeeze”. The band had a bunch of songs that I loved, but this one didn’t quite do it for me as a kid. Despite being recorded in the same year as their Blood Sugar Sex Magik album (also the year was I was born, represent), it was left out of their hit studio album and reached the public as a released single and made its way into the soundtrack to the unmemorable comedy movie “Coneheads”. Nonetheless, I heard it intermittently throughout my childhood and would only be reminded of what other, better songs they had that deserved more radio air time.

So 2 days ago, I heard it again:

I've got a bad disease But from my brain is where I bleed. Insanity it seems Has got me by my soul to squeeze.

It’s clear from the get-go that there are themes of depression and anxiety issues. I listen to a lot of rock songs from the 80’s and 90’s and hearing about the singers’ drug addiction and the associated emotional issues that develop before/during/after is pretty normal. Even though my initial instinct was to change the song after I heard the out-of-place Lynyrd Skynyrd intro that doesn’t really match the somberness of the rest of the song, I decided to keep listening and give it a second chance. As the rest of it poured on, the lyrics started to provide introspection towards more than a confession of a compromised mental state. To me, the song conveys a message of acceptance - through its use of literary devices to force the listener to analyze emotional struggle as well as the feeling of hope that he sings about through the last verses of the chorus. I’m not one to make quick connections that he is singing to a higher being, or necessarily God, but I can’t help but feel that through this song, he is speaking to someone that he knows is aware of his ill-state and whom he longs to reconnect with despite previously entering an isolated period of seclusion and self despair.

This song reminds me strongly of the Biblical passage of the Prodigal Son from the Gospel of Luke which tells a story of a father to two sons who are granted a sizeable inheritance. The older son stays and nobly serves his father on their farm while the younger son runs off and blows his inheritance Vegas-style. After a series of events in which he lives a life of hopelessness and anguish, the younger son comes back home expecting the worst scenario but to his surprise, the father welcomes him with a large celebration in which they slaughter up their prized farm animal and accepts him as if he had never left. All of this strikes uneasiness in the other son who inevitably casts judgement on his younger brother’s prior recklessness until his father closes out this Bibical passage with the oft cheesily tattooed quote: “he was lost and is found”. This old story stands out to many others, including myself, because most Christians who have committed a proverbial oopsy and are still able to feel the grace of God can relate to the younger brother in the scenario. Admittedly though, in my youth I didn’t like this story because I had a simplistic and legalistic view on sin and fortune - if you do bad things, you don’t deserve good things according to cosmic justice laws created from our own interpretations of right and wrong. But as I grew up and saw good fortune granted to “bad” people and misfortune happen to “good” people, it inevitably matured me enough to realize that comparing one’s fortunes is pointless when everybody has a different walk with faith. While I once perceived myself to be the good son, living my life to the extent that I wanted it to caused me to become the younger son - undeserving of a lot of my good fortunes, and grateful nonetheless.

Taking all of this into account and cherishing my interpretation, this Red Hot Chili Peppers song has a new and special place in my heart alongside their other beloved songs. Most people, if they’ve ever done worldly things, have experienced the up & down sensation of sinful action and remorse. But not everybody can forgive themselves and positively grow from their past experiences. While I haven’t committed sins comparable to a stereotypical 80’s rock star, I know that I’ve made decisions in the past that have made me feel like I’ve grown apart from myself. What’s crucially important to me now is trusting how it is going to help me grow closer to my faith and feeling graceful acceptance.

Mondays & Tuesdays are back day. Wednesday is chest. Thursday is dedicated to legs, and Fridays are for my weak, injury-prone shoulders. Throw in at least one type of cardio each day and that’s what a typical workout schedule looks like on a typical week. I’ve been following more or less this same schedule since 2010. When I started exercising, the first time since injuring my shoulder in 2007, it was gravy. I expected and trained for the worst, and got more than I bargained for. I lost 30 pounds in the first year, got substantially stronger, and even got to see my abs for the first time since well, ever. Every year that followed became a little more ambitious. Adding new workouts, tweaking my diet and researching more and more on what experts were doing until my eyes hurt. The mission I had originally sought out in 2010 when I was a chubby kid struggling to put up 25 lb dumbbells for a flat bench press set - to be more committed to my health and to feel good, became an inadequate goal after the first year. My ambition for improvement was codependent on me actualizing my desire for a bigger ego. I was more committed to health, but I didn’t feel good.

So when I did all that I could at the gym, I turned to supplements as an avenue for furthering my progress. I started off with the basics: amino acids for recovery - glutamine, BCAA, Vitamin D3, B-12, chondroitin for my joints, and then the list grew from there. I was popping pills on a regular basis alongside a whey protein shake and it was impossible for me to forget to take them because I carried a backup GNC pill case in my backpack at all times, no joke. I still remember the first time I had ever taken creatine like it was yesterday. Feeling ashamed as I was reading the bodybuilding.com forums about creatine use at my part-time internship, and then walking into the GNC at Shorewood Mall next to UOP’s campus, knowing exactly what I was there to buy, I might’ve even avoided eye contact with the cashier. I felt more guilty about it than when I took my first sip of alcohol. With alcohol, starting early wasn’t as big of a problem because I believed (at least at 15) that it’d be something I’d be casually doing for the rest of my life. The idea of taking creatine for the rest of my life depressed me because deep down I knew that once I started, it’d be a lifestyle that was unsustainable.

Looking back at it now, I think I was right. For me, alongside with a lot of other people that I observe following the same path, we think we know it all because we self-educate, but what we ironically don’t see is that we have selective hearing (in the figurative sense). I’d often find myself reading 100 articles on how to cut body fat without losing muscle mass but skip over articles that discuss how being too muscular can lead to fatal heart issues through early signals like hypertension. The ambition to see results with exercise often comes at the expense of our common sense and our inability to swallow pride. My brother who is a biotechnology nerd always scoffed at my heavy supplement usage and frequently reminds me that these companies like MusclePharm & BSN Supplements operate in a competitive industry with few regulations, and are kept alive with a strong, heaving-spending consumer base who think they are credited dieticians because they’ve read one-too-many Men’s Fitness blog posts. This Time article takes note of some recent allegations against the supplements industry: “nearly four in every five herbal supplements tested at major retailers in New York didn’t contain the ingredients stated on the label”. But supplements aren’t created to inhibit our capacity for decision-making or make us question our motives for why we take them. Similar to other vices however, they grant us the ability to seek instant gratification and lose sight of what were once positive intentions when we abuse them. 

Wise words from a man who once exclaimed in a movie that it wasn’t easy being cheesy.

I went to the bank With a pocket full of smiles This is all I have in my pocket today I took my pocket of smiles And I put them on the table And the lady said, “Sorry Sir, no currency for your smiles today” I was feeling kind of depressed Placing my smiles back in my pocket So surely the idea came into my mind By taking one of those smiles And placing it within my soul To make me smile that day   [2001]

The following poem is one that I “purchased” from a homeless man on Christmas Eve 2013. The reason why I quoted the term ‘purchased’ is because I gave him some cash which then prompted him to give me a parchment paper copy from his personal collection of poetry written by a man named “Ricky Teague”. It was only through a Google search I did later that week that I found out that Ricky Teague was him.  

It’s been about 2 years since I’ve had this embarrassing blog where I’ve shared my invaluable (and sometimes insufferable) advice and newly learned life lessons about anything from becoming vegan, why you shouldn’t say assertive things you’ll regret later on, the unfair but inescapable friendzone dynamic (which I masked ever not-so-cleverly), commitment problems, falling in love with an idea of something, death, graduating college, the occasional rant about corporate social responsibility and even over-medication awareness for young children (random..wtf?). Also, who could forget the tear-jerking why you should work for a startup post? In the two years I’ve had this, it’s developed, without planned intention, into somewhat of a logbook for the lessons I’ve learned in my early 20’s. And while I’ve obviously grown more into an adult which comes with more responsibility and stress (‘mo money, ‘mo problems), it’s given me the opportunity to reflect and compare the individual I was before and with the one that I am now. It’s allowed me to prove to myself that we all are capable of change for the better. But to really test the direction of my growth and gauge what kind of worldview and wisdom I have scraped together from my life experiences, I’d like to, for once, really get ahead of myself and tackle what I believe to be the most challenging task for a writer, to write about something I know little-to nothing about. For me, this is the meaning of life.

  Life can be a dull puzzle sometimes and it’s on us to find the answer to it. There were times in my life where I found purpose in everything I did, sometimes with minimal effort. Through this, I’ve found that when there’s a discovered understanding of why we are in the place we are right now, doing whatever it is that we’re doing and knowing who it is we’re affecting, we’re able to experience more motivation and greater satisfaction . Now on the other side of the picture, not knowing, or not caring about where we are and what we’re doing is where we experience the struggle to stay on our well-worn path. No end in sight = No reward. But these of course, are the bad days, the days where we found that the things we care about are enshrouded in negativity - we have overdue bills, our personal relationships are in a sour spot and we found out our car got poo-ed on again by those stupid egrets that are seasonally nesting in our favorite tree-shade parking spot. On these days, we just want to curl up in a ball in the morning and do absolutely nothing. Whatever willpower we possess to be productive is outmatched by the feeling of disdain we hold towards the circumstances we’re currently placed in. We ask, “What’s the point - the point of me being here, the point of me going through this, the point of me living my life this way?”. And sure, the socratic questioning is helpful in foundationally building a solution, but without a doubt, the more difficult task is accepting that we have to give up more than we stand to gain (at least right away) in order to get over the hump.

  Life is the point - we’re supposed to be kicking and punching our problems in the face to get through them so that we can live with meaning and prosperity. The reason to why we are where we are and going through what we’re going through serve as the meaning behind life. Life is the point in having to uncomfortably compromise. Life’s the point in having to spend time doing the things that don’t grant us immediate happiness but might ensure that we’ll be better off in 5-10-20 years, just not now. I’ve survived long enough to learn that things that grant me instant gratification aren’t things that have helped me grow as a person. If anything, it’s the setbacks, the  problems that challenged me and the negativity that led me to question the ‘why’ are all what have taught me the value of delayed gratification. Growing up, I was always a pretty bad student. Lazy, disinterested and underachieving are all things my teachers probably would have described me as. I had older siblings to model myself after, but I often just couldn’t bring myself to work hard and achieve the same things that they did. The things that gave me quick satisfaction were the things that I chased, and the people I idolized were pretty much people that were bored with life in the same way. I procrastinated with everything I was involved in and knew that I could get by as a teenager and young adult if I just tried when I needed to and worked hard in sprints. But life is a marathon, not a 100 meter dash. It took me a lot of time, discipline and dedication to be able to handle adversity and work through it, basically because I had to start from the bottom up. Not caring about things and half-assing everything allowed me to feel good when I did better than average, and to have an easy excuse for when I did horribly. I remember the first time I had a failed relationship - I thought the world was going to end. And in the grand scheme of things, especially looking backwards, you almost are able to find it humorous that something so small, something you know you can handle now, played such an impactful role in helping you grow as person because it was an experience you allowed yourself to be vulnerable in and you inevitably learned from it. Being vulnerable is sometimes the hardest part when you’re so accustomed to not giving a shit out of fear of failure, out of fear of rejection, out of fear of one day discovering that you’re not as naturally smart/gifted as you think you are.

  Obviously, I struggle even now with trying to give a shit but I try and acknowledge my slip-ups by correcting them whenever I can. A good example of this would be my habit of giving money to the homeless. As a kid, my mom did it. She taught me that it’s important to display empathy and compassion to less fortunate people. My sister, Liz, also does it and she even takes time out of her day to have a conversation with them, something I thought I’d never do. But one day when I was standing outside of a donut shop in San Francisco, a homeless woman came up to me and I obviously knew she wanted money. So when I reached for my wallet, she started talking to me, introducing herself, asking about me and pretty soon she started talking about her life story. At this point, I’m trying to be polite, let her finish, so I can hand her money and go grab my sandwich but then she starts talking about her day-to-day struggles and how difficult it is for her to have a safe place to sleep every night when the shelters close due to limited space. And shortly after, her eyes begin to glisten with tears. I reach out to give her $5 and after she accepts the money, she reaches out for a hug which initially prompted me to step back only to regret my predisposition to be a hygienic asshole. So instead, I took a step forward and hugged her, accepting the loss of the good cologne I put on that night. Right away, I was thinking “I’m hugging a homeless woman on a Friday night.” and right when I started to convince myself that the encounter was getting more and more awkward, she tugged me even tighter as she cried uncontrollably into my left shoulder until the sadness from her tears developed my understanding of her suffering. For the record, I didn’t cry for her or anything.

  But the quintessential meaning of life is to give a shit. To give a shit about life and its related aspects - where you are, what you’re doing and who you’re affecting. It’ll help you not take moments for granted and ultimately become a better employee, a better family member, a better athlete, a better partner, and a better person. And I guess better a way of describing this call to action would be to encourage everyone to be more mindful. To be more aware of what lies before them and to be sensible with their actions. Stepping away from someone overwhelmed with grief and emotion should be comparable to leaving them stranded on a deserted highway, and if I hadn’t been mindful in the moment, I would have missed that. I would have missed that she might have a long personal history of others abandoning her and the thought of her feeling shamed and embarrassed from seeking pity day-in, day-out wouldn’t have even crossed my mind if I had chosen to look the other way. But my example doesn’t relate to everyone, and it shouldn’t for good reason. Some people simply have different philosophies for helping the homeless, some by not helping them at all due to different logic. And I find nothing wrong with that. We all have different lives and different moments that captivate us, different opportunities when we’re able to initiate change through positive action. My only encouragement is to make them count. To be the one to take your lunch break early and grab pizza for your coworker on their birthday. To spend an extra 5 minutes to chat with your dad on your way out and ask him how he plans to spend his day. To smile more when you look across the room. To look into someone’s eyes when you speak directly to them. To not act like you’re too cool to have your picture taken and to take an extra moment to remember things, places and especially people, because they could change your life soon after.

If you asked me 3 years ago what my definition of a vacation was, I would’ve given you an example of a trip spent on a beach sipping on cocktails and listening to a live band serenading you and your loved ones. The cliche getaway that allows one to unwind and recharge for the uncomfortable reality that hits them once the airplane doors open and they step back out to the home they’re not ready to return to. If you even asked me 3 years ago if I wanted a vacation, I would’ve scoffed and told you that vacations are for people facing a mid-life crisis and that I had yet to reach that threshold.

But the reality is that I think despite one’s attitude towards escape/travel/whatever-you-call-it, there is part in most of us that desires a trip, to experience a different culture’s food, see a unique landmark and feel what it is like to be fully immersed in a place so foreign to what we know and what we’re used to.

So here I am writing this in a not-so-glamorous airport food court after watching the giant World Cup match featuring Brazil (and grateful for my safety that they won) with my phones remaining 28% battery and waiting for my friend Sam to land here in Salvador and meet me in 6 hours. I’ve been here less than a week and my desire to go home this morning reached an overwhelming high when I got to the airport at 5 am, waited an hour at check-in and missed my flight by 5 minutes only to have to plead to non-English speaking airport worker to let me have my luggage back. There was a moment where I was so fed up with hearing gabbling Portuguese I that wanted to sucker punch the next Brazilian I saw right in the face, not in the name of America, but in the name of my frustration and early morning crankiness. Thankfully, I didn’t.

But regardless of the struggles of feeling uncomfortable at times, especially since I just lived in the literal slums of Rio de Janeiro for the past 5 days (thanks for booking that one, Sam) there were moments where I found peace and felt like there was a philosophy lesson to be learned in my being here. Whether it be meeting an experienced New Zealand journalist in my hostel and talking to him for an hour or two about planning a career and an adult life or meeting and having a drink with a homeless man one night on the playa, I’ve seen that there’s a human factor in all of us that we possess that allows us to feel empathy for one another, no matter how different we appear to be. We just have to search and be open to the opportunity of finding it.

I’m sitting down right now in a food court, loud Portuguese flying to and fro across me and people batting stares at me because I’m in gym shorts and a wrinkly t-shirt. But with my headphones plugged in, I’m noticing that if you take away the natural noise of a foreign country and just observe the environment around you either in silence or with your own soundtrack, therein lies a view that’s not actually too foreign to us. I see couples, all the same, walking around holding hands and pointing to things they want to take pictures with, a young guy and girl food court worker couple on their break and eating while sharing their outgoing text messages, and parents feeding their young kids fast food because they’re visibly tired and exhausted. But beyond me just comparing my view to what I believe I would see back in America, it’s taught me that our language, cultural norms/practices (like people not tipping in Brazil) are surface level differences that are vastly insignificant to how similar we could be.

About a year ago, today, I graduated college and subsequently became unemployed for two months. The longest two months of my freakin’ life. There were times where I would wake up and not know what I was going to do with myself throughout the day. Whether to go to the gym, text to see who was around to grab lunch (yeah, I woke up at around noon) or to just go back to sleep until I came up with a better plan. Without the obligations of work or school, I didn’t have a schedule and without a schedule, I didn’t have an agenda. It was delicious freedom, for about the first two weeks.

But as all cheesy quotes go, freedom comes at a price. That price being your ego. You see, I graduated college pretty jaded about the working world, most of my friends don’t know that. I worked nonstop, back-to-back internships and like this old post I wrote here implied, I knew at the time that I wouldn’t have enjoyed any starting job if it didn’t move me in a direction that was aligned with my career interests. And that was part of the problem. Those “career interests” were over-fantasized and my ego expected me to be juggling between offers and going to interviews day in, day out. The reality was, however, that I applied to only a couple of jobs a week and got an interview offer out of every five or six. I remember talking to my older sister on the phone about how I was torn between my reluctance to take an entry level position I didn’t really care for and my desire to just start working again and earning money so that I would stop wasting my time trying to find “the right job”. “Ugh.. I don’t wanna work for the government. People there are like old and lazy.” “Y**p is cool, but this starting salary is a joke.” As much as I preached about not caring about money & doing things purely because you love them, I had a reluctance to give most opportunities a chance because deep down, I had a concept of a dream job that would grant me a sense of higher-level prestige, I just wasn’t honest with myself enough to accept that.

So why does my personal story have anything to do with what most college grads are going to experience? Well, that’s up for them to decide. My advice could be bullshit or it could be good (bullshit). I’ve worked in sales, so I know the difference. What the biggest takeaway from my experience is, of course, is to do what you love. Because it brings you happiness, yada yada. The other big lesson, one which I’ve learned over and over again in my life, is to be honest with yourself. You aren’t as wise as you think you are. You don’t know what you’re capable of (good or bad) because you honestly haven’t really worked that long and been pushed by experienced professionals who’ve risen above the challenges that you’re going to be facing. You might be over-romanticizing over your opportunity to work at a fancy corporation because you fell in love with a concept of you being there, disregarding the possibility that another company could also offer you the same experience, just not the same prestige that you’re secretly so desperately searching for.

Another thought near and dear to me that occasionally resonates is the understanding that whatever you do is your own life’s journey. I once wrote a book in the not-so-distant past because I was in a tear-jerking (but not really) self-searching conquest that left me realizing that my book’s ending was very much in my own control, just like how my next life’s decision was. I believe that this was possibly the most important lesson that I’ve learned in my entire life, not an overstatement by any means. You see, it’s easy to follow a path that was drawn out of comparison and to take a sequential pattern of steps that somebody else took to inevitably get them to the position that you’re gleaning for. But everyone is different and the people that you idolize may be a lot more different from you than you realize. I have friends who religiously quote Steve Jobs’ life experiences but would scoff at the prospect of traveling to India for close to a year, taking up Buddhism and mindlessly traveling. Your life was meant to be lived however you wanted to live it and standards are only reasonable to an extent. Comparing yourself to your peers and idols won’t do you much good if you’re focusing beyond just work ethic. Envying someone’s prominence will inevitably cloud your decision-making and lead you down a path to follow someone else’s dream. The worst thing you could possibly is to reach a goal and determine that it was overrated. It’s like hiking up a steep trail only to find out the view isn’t as great and rewarding as you imagined, or like chasing after a girl playing hard to get, only to realize that you could’ve had a lot more and given up a lot less. That second example speaks volumes to my poor life choices.

I guess another piece of wisdom to throw in here is that most of everyone graduating college in their early 20’s has considerably less opportunity cost tied to their decisions than someone 10, maybe 15 years older would have. Time is working in your favor. If you really believe that this job wasn’t what you wanted, quit that shit. You won’t be much worse off than you think you’re going to be. Just be mindful that there’s a more than likely chance that most of us don’t know what’s actually best for our own career in the long run, so most hardships should be treated as growth opportunities rather than red flags. And like I mentioned before, a dream job could be a figment of our ego, rather than a well-thought out career endeavor, representative of our whole-hearted aspirations.

Real life is the game that – literally – everyone is playing. But it can be tough. This is your guide.

The New York Times is reporting that Google will sell its Mobility unit to Lenovo for $3 billion. Details are thin, but the Times says a deal should be announced shortly.

Looks like they (Google) are still trying to figure out what works for them. $3 billion is a steal for a company like Lenovo though that has access to emerging markets and wants to grow particularly in that area. We've seen a number of cell manufacturers ramp up focus purely in that area, like the iPhone 5c, Moto G and a more extreme example would be the Mozilla phone. 

I’m currently waiting at the beginning of the ridiculously long sandwich line at Go! Cafe here on the Google campus and I can’t help but just let my mind zone out for once in the day and think about some really abstract crap. So without further ado, I present to you my short piece of writing, which may end up being very long if I have to wait here longer than anticipated (oh god, it’s going by so slow..).

Your working life is much like a sandwich line. And I don’t mean that as in you get in and get out as soon as you can (although most people would choose to do so if they got a really great sandwich and didn’t want to share - I’m hungry) or do I mean to incorporate any culinary preferences as metaphors to this piece. Rather, I’d like to focus on the thought process and how it develops or changes as we move through the line and closer to our obvious destination - to become successful and to retire happy.

At the beginning of the line (i.e. graduating and getting out there in the world), we’re often daunted by the idea of sticking it out and working for 40+ hours a week and for 40+ years of our life in order to get something that we decided that we wanted. There’s the denial, “do I actually want this?” “was the line at the other place even that bad?” and we just get tired of thinking that we get irritated or angry and decide that we’re going to stay (if we do).

Wait a little bit longer and then we start to try and talk ourselves out of it. We weigh certain opportunity costs and ask ourselves “was it really worth it?”, “is the sandwich even going to be that good”, “I wonder what my friends are eating”, “I could be getting served at a McDonald’s drive-through right now”. And it really is difficult because at this point, we’re stuck in line, like I am, now, and it’d be awkward to leave because this line is crowded and I know some kid at the end is thinking “man, if only I was where he is, right now..”.

And so we’re left with the decision to stick it out like we originally planned or to leave and take our chances elsewhere, possibly risking the chance of having less than what we have here. Possibly risking being at the beginning of the line, somewhere else, and for what? Because we’re impatient? Or because we’ve had some time to really think it through while we’ve waited. Whether or not you choose to stay for whatever reason, it’s important to remember that all things in life that we want take time to get, in whichever line we’re in and whichever job we have.