This Guy Loves To Party

Lost? Looking for something... more? (Photo: Todd Michael M.)

Everyone has big dreams.  You’ll be hard-pressed to find someone in this world who doesn’t have high aspirations for doing something.

The only problem is that most people are lazy.  Super lazy.  They’ll talk about wanting to do something, but never actually put in the effort to achieve it.

What these people need is a little bit of motivation, and I know just where they can find it.

What’s the big secret?  If you’re looking for motivation to get things done, you should sprain your ankle really badly.  I recently tried this tactic out, and I can tell you that it works like a charm.

You can sprain your ankle in a variety of ways.  I chose to do it while playing basketball, but I’ve heard of people doing it while running, skateboarding, or even just walking completely normally.  The possibilities are endless.

You see, this technique works every time because sprained ankles completely incapacitate you.  Going outside of the house becomes an absolute chore as you struggle to hobble along on crutches, the sizzling summer sun beating down on your head.  Even moving between rooms in your houses makes you wince in agonizing pain.  As each activity-less house-bound day progresses, the hungrier you become to actually do shit, until after the first week you are desperate to tackle every lingering goal you’ve ever had.

Don’t listen to the so-called “experts” who claim you should break an ankle to find the motivation to get things done.  Their information is outdated and they’re just out to make a quick buck.  Sprained ankles will heal faster and don’t require costly medical bills or trips to the “doctor”.

In other news, my sprained ankle is healing pretty well, thanks for asking.

There’s one item that I always have in my backpack.  I go nuts when I don’t have it with me.  I could lose most of the other things I have, but I’d be a manic mess without this little necessity.

I’m talking about my tennis ball.

In case you forgot what a tennis ball is. Fucking idiot.

I shouldn’t have called it my tennis ball.  I don’t have an emotional attachment to any one tennis ball.  I like almost all of them equally.

That’s because, as long as it hasn’t been molested by an attention-deprived dog or left out to bake and decompose in the sun for months, any tennis ball is the ultimate self-massage tool.

How To Use A Tennis Ball For Self Massage

I have two horrible, chronically-tight spots on my body: in the muscles near my shoulder blades, and my virgin pink asshole.  Just kidding, let me start that sentence over again.

I have two horrible, chronically-tight spots on my body: in the muscles near my shoulder blades, and in my hip muscles.  On any given day my entire upper back region feels like it’s a bunched up, tight mess, and my hip muscles especially bother me when I’m sitting in a relatively cramped spot, like the muscles connecting my legs and my back are about to snap.  This is because I’m always developing knots in these muscles.

It wasn’t until I started applying pressure to these spots with a tennis ball that I had any kind of relief.  I just place the tennis ball on a wall at the level of the affected muscle, and then rubbed away with as much pressure as I could stand.

A couple good resources for self-massage with a tennis ball:

Soft Tissue Work For Tough Guys – great explanations for why soft tissue work with a tennis ball is so important.  This article recommends massaging yourself laying down, but I find it more effective standing up against a wall.

Just fucking massaging yourself with a tennis ball – they’re super cheap. Buy one and just try it out.  That link doesn’t go anywhere, by the way.

I Would Be A Whiny Mess If I Left Home Without It

No matter where I’m traveling, a tennis ball always comes with me.  If I lose it, I drop a dollar on a new one.  Along with my pirated DVDs of the High School Musical series, it ranks as probably the most important thing I carry around with me at all times.

When my grandma passed away a couple years ago, my parents were surprised by what they found rummaging through her stuff.

Among all the pictures, gifts, and more that she received from us and other friends and family members over the years, there was only one thing she kept.

Greeting cards.

Every holiday.  Every birthday.  Every special day for her that we acknowledged with a cheap, last-minute card.  She kept all of them.  My parents discovered stacks upon stacks of the guys, all arranged in chronological order.

Her old family photos?  Nah, just old trash, thrown out years ago.  The computers and other expensive electronics we tried to give her as gifts?  All returned to the stores.  The only thing that she held onto were generic Hallmark cards that, I’m pretty sure, my parents normally signed off on for me and my brothers.

It’s not just my grandma who was into greeting cards.  In the 1960s, there was a car salesman named Joe Girard who was considered the most successful car salesman in the world, pulling in around $200,000 a year in commissions.  (This at a time when CEOs were making far less than that.)  The secret to his success?  Every month, he’d find a reason — usually some kind of major holiday — to send every customer he’d had a postcard.  It would be holiday themed and always contain the same message: “I like you.”  Nothing more than that.  That’s 12 carbon-copy cloned cards a year to every person he’d ever gotten contact information from on the job.

I realize now that I struggle to describe historical events without making them sound super creepy.  (Please see previous paragraph.)  But the point remains: people love greeting cards, no matter the occasion and no matter the effort put into making them.

One more example.  I don’t celebrate my birthday, for a number of reasons.  I don’t tell people when it’s my birthday, and don’t really advertise the date unless asked.  My birthday this past year was uneventful, spent in Ushuaia, Argentina with a group of people that had no idea I was officially a year older.  But what absolutely made my day were the four e-mails from people who remembered what day it was and wanted to acknowledge it regardless of how I acted.

People love greeting cards.  It doesn’t matter the format.  Just send them if you want people to love you like they love me.

I set a goal a while back of making $1,000 a month all through online ventures.

I haven’t hit that goal yet — half-assing everything will give you results like that — but I did make $378.50 total in the last month.  In other words, I’m fucking rich as shit now.

What brought in the majority of the results?

A good portion of my income came from 1 article I wrote, that led to one text-only web page I made, that contained one link to a digital product.  $298.90 of my sales came from that one article alone.  I did no maintenance on this article or the site that it leads to after it was initially put up.

I’m working on expanding and replicating that success right now by creating nearly identical sites targeting different keywords.

What’s my current strategy?

I’m still trying to sell both digital and physical products.  I’m actually working on a couple basic sites to sell physical items through Amazon.

But, for the most part, I find keywords that get at least some (50+) searches a day and use backlink building to target those keywords.  In other words, I perform basic SEO to get my sites to rank higher in Google for not-so-competitive keywords.

Does none of this make any sense to you?  I’ll have a thorough post explaining everything I do to make money online once I’ve hit my $1,000-a-month goal, which shouldn’t be too long from now.  All the stupid terminology in here will make sense in that post, and I’ll explain how much work I put in daily, what I outsource, what I do myself, and so on.  A teaser for it: I’m doing all of this as low-effort as possible.

Mostly I just wanted to put this up as a reminder that I’m still alive.

This is unrelated to anything I’d normally ever write about on this blog, so put up with it.

When I got to my parents’ house in San Francisco, I found that the wifi was slow.  Old-person-too-proud-for-a-wheelchair slow.

But the odd thing was, it was plenty fast on every single other computer in the house.  It was just my MacBook and OS X that was that slow.

While investigating, I found that pure download speeds were perfect.  It was just loading web pages that was slow.  All online speed tests indicated the connection was perfect, but every web page loaded like I was on dial-up.

The point of this post is to provide the fix for this problem, since I don’t know how well-documented it is.  All I had to do was go to my root hard drive (not my user-specific folder), go into the “Library” folder, go into the “Preferences” folder, throw away the “SystemConfiguration” folder, and then reboot.  Everything was flawless after that.

(There are probably specific files in there you can toss out to fix the problem, but it just seems easier to toss the whole folder to solve the problem.  Nothing gets hurt or lost in the process.)

I was running OS X 10.5.6 when this happened, but I’ve seen the problem happen in the past with older installations too.  And I promise to never post anything this nerdy again.

If you don’t plan right, eating on a road trip is expensive and nasty.  Restaurants are way too costly and not very good on your stomach or your health.  Both my opening sentence and the sentence that follow it are almost literally the same thing.

I’d love to write a detailed article on this, but there are really only two tips I need to give you:

1. Buy snacks that don’t expire easily at the supermarket before you leave.  Protein powder, mixed nuts, fruits, and dried meats like beef jerky are the best.  Don’t argue with me on this.  That’s a mistake.
2. Buy pre-prepared meals at supermarkets instead of eating at restaurants whenever possible, since meals at supermarkets are always cheaper.  Again, you’re making a mistake if you argue this.

If you take anything from this article, it’s that you don’t fucking argue with me.

I got a hot deal on a rental car that I’m keeping for two weeks.  In New Jersey, after taxes, I’m paying roughly $27 a day to have a fire-hot, sought-after Chevy Cobalt.  The pussy I pull with this bad boy doesn’t cost any extra.

Even the guy at the rental pick-up place seemed surprised at the deal I got on the car.  So, by popular demand (my mom suggested I write a blog post), here is how I got it.

1. First check expedia.com or kayak.com and do a search in your local area for deals on car rentals.  I went for a compact car because I don’t need anything more than that.  Find the cheapest and best deal and take note with which rental agency you’d get it.
2. Next, go to this thread over at the FatWallet Travel Deals forum.  Locate the “overall top five” portion for your rental agency.
3. Enter a few of the listed codes into the appropriate field at Expedia, Kayak, or directly at the dealer’s web site (this will likely be halfway through the checkout process).  See which one gets you the best deal.

I rented my car with Hertz, and one of the listed codes ended up giving me 20% off in the New Jersey area.

The other hurdle I ran into was at the actual rental location.  I haven’t driven a car for about 10 months, and for that reason, am not insured.  Insurance from Hertz cost more than the car itself every day.  However, I found out that if you rent your car using an American Express credit card, you get insurance from American Express themselves and it’s free.  If you don’t have an American Express credit card, this will still work if you rent the car under someone else’s name and list yourself as a secondary driver, as verified by a charming American Express phone rep.  Just find someone nice enough to rent the car on their credit card.  A family member is usually a good choice, and what I opted for.

If anyone has any tips on getting bullet holes out of rental cars or if this is covered by my insurance, hit me up on the comments.  It was my fault, if that’s relevant at all.

I’ve been back in the USA for about a week now, in widely-talked-about and very popular New Jersey.

A couple days ago, Derek and I decided to rent a car so we could get around a little bit easier.  (It came out to $377 for two weeks total.  We are very successful so this expense is OK.)  Shortly after having rented the car, we realized we could leave the state and explore with it.

So we are, for a couple days.  Ah, the beauty of having absolutely no responsibilities.

Right now I’m writing this from Brooklyn, New York.  Tonight or tomorrow we’ll figure out the rest of our route, and when we’re returning to New Jersey.

More updates on impromptu USA road trips coming soon.

As I write this, I’m sitting in beautiful and popular New Jersey, USA.  The last eight months of my life were spent all over South America.

Although I was never homesick, I discovered there were a few things I missed in my time away.

1. Sassy Black Women

This list is in no particular order, except for this entry.  This is a definite #1.  With a strangle-hold on the government service industry in the USA, sassy black women show other black women the world over how “being black” is done.

2. Leaf Blowers That Just Blow Leaves Out Into The Street Instead of Sucking Them Up And Turning Them Into Mulch Or Something

I didn’t really see any of these in South America, but everywhere I turn here in the USA, there’s someone in their driveway using one of these leaf blowers to blow stray leaves onto someone else’s property or nearby onto the street.  Wouldn’t a leaf vacuum of some sort be way more effective, and not result in the wind just blowing the leaves off the street right back onto the driveway?

3. Bros

The fraternity system in South America failed.  Where are the bros?  Luckily they’re all here in the USA, ready to awkwardly and drunkenly try to bond with me and ask me how much I got laid in South America.

4. Sane Drivers

The taxis in South America usually have a sticker asking, “How am I driving?  555-5555.”  The answer is typically, “Like a fucking maniac.”

5. Cash Cab

I never actually watched this show before I left, but I’ve watched a few episodes already and love it.  The host is charming.  Yes I said it.

6. Wearing Work Out Shorts With Knee-High Dress Socks

All my other socks are dead and I haven’t bought any new ones yet.  Thanks for not staring at me, USA.

7. Bumper Stickers That Offensively State An Opinion

I had trouble telling where every car owner stood on issues like abortion and gun control while in South America.  Not here!

8. Dogs Without Balls

It’s relieving to be able to pet a dog in the USA without it running in circles around me, trying to gnaw on my arm, and then pooping somewhere, all in the time span of six seconds.  Dogs without balls are awesome.

9. Cats

People can have cats in the USA because the ball-less dogs don’t eat them.  I like cats.

I didn’t want to end this on “I like cats,” but that’s all I’ve got.

I’m in Bogota, Colombia right now, about to go back to the USA in a couple days.

But the truth is, I want to be back in the USA now.  All my goals are very USA-centric, and staying in international hostels doesn’t make me very productive.  I feel like I’m not really doing much here.  Being a tourist doesn’t excite me much.  I’m South America’d out, for now.

The problem, though, is that I booked my plane ticket a month and a half ago, and it costs $100 to change it.  Not worth it.  I’d rather spend that money intelligently on H&B (hookers & beer).

When out of curiosity I hopped onto JetBlue’s web site to see how much a plane ticket leaving tomorrow would cost, I discovered it was the exact same price as the plane ticket I bought a month and a half ago.  Son of a bitch.

And almost every other search I’ve done in the past has brought up the same results: a lot of airlines charge the same at the last minute that they charge months in advance.  Often, the last minute tickets are even cheaper.

This isn’t always the case, but it is often enough to have made me realize: buying a plane ticket even a month in advance is pointless, and I always regret it.  I hate limiting my time somewhere, or keeping myself trapped somewhere I don’t want to be.

From now on, I am only buying plane tickets at the last minute, when I know I’m ready to leave.

NOTE: updates on here are a little sparse right now because of my travel schedule.  I have a couple big updates planned for this site, and will be putting everything into action in the next week.  I recommend subscribing to my RSS feed to be automatically notified of my updates.