I have to discuss point 3.

3. You can’t help others until you’re successful. This is the hardest lesson to swallow.  There was an entrepreneur who was trying to revive his small town with a manufacturing company. He was making a great product but at a loss because the cost of labor was so high. The sharks wanted to be partners with him, but they wanted to manufacture the product in China. The man said absolutely not- it went against his beliefs.

I sympathized with the guy because when I first had the idea for BeddyBye I had grand plans of reviving manufacturing in NYC, and hiring new parents as consultants, and providing state of the art free day care and the list goes on. Daymond John, CEO of Fubu, is one of the sharks and he asked the entrepreneur how long he could continue making the product at a loss, and the man said a few more weeks. At that point he would be broke, and couldn’t help himself let alone his town. Daymond stated that if the product was made for less money he could then hire sales reps, website developers, customer service, office managers, and so on. He would be able to help a lot more people if his focus was on success rather than martyrdom. Damond said “first you have to make it, then master it, and then you can matter.” You’ll be able to do a lot more good once you have some money behind your beliefs. Just look at George Soros.

The part that the sharks never even looked at was the single most important. Why did the distributors want to set the price on another man’s product? he can be profitable AND manufacture in the States, he will just have to charge more than the “Car-Zones” want to price it at.

It’s a genuinely good product, with lots of possibilities for expanding the product line. The hard part is convincing the box stores to sell it for what it’s worth, rather than letting them do what Walmart does and force their will on a manufacturer. If I had the money he would have had my investment, because I know where I could successfully market the product at the price he needs to get, and I know people who can help make it happen.

The idea that you have to be an iceberg (some jobs in US, manufacturing outsourced or based overseas) to be successful in America is just plain wrong. Apple does employ a lot of Americans, but those are 49,000 jobs which fall into mostly only two categories: High-Skill, and Retail. So, you either have to have an advanced degree (or massive experience) to have a hope in heck of making a real livable income as an Apple employee here.

The reason our economy is in so much trouble is exactly this. We have built a service-only economy, which cannot work. We have a widening rift between the rich and the poor, only because people without college degrees cannot get long-term reliable employment that will pay all of their bills. There are also VAST numbers of people who have a degree, but can’t get employment in their field due to saturation. Some of that is poor choices in direction, but it’s mostly that everyone is expected to go to college now. There simply aren’t enough well paying jobs to go around in a service economy, because all the money flows out.

There is so much focus on college in this country, that we have forgotten what allowed the prosperity of the 1900′s and victory in WWII… Manufacturing excellence. China knows this, and they protect it with the ferocity of an angry bear.

All of that said… I don’t believe he can’t get it done for $150 per unit here. Rather than buying pre-built parts and assembling them in Sparta, NC, he could just have them manufactured in one location which saves on all that shipping. His problem is not his unwillingness to move production overseas, it’s his unwillingness to move production away from Sparta.

I’ll refine this more later, with some fact checking and all, but I’m just too tired to manage that right now, as I have been awake for 16 hours and slept poorly last night.

I am not going to turn this into some grand post advocating for Democrats or Republicans because, let’s be honest, both sides are exactly the same. They bicker until after elections, all the while, accomplishing nothing. Then (after they are either going home anyway, or are safe) they try to push things through right before the end of the term. The only other thing they seem to love doing is hiding stuff in bills that “must” pass, so we don’t notice or at least can’t tell them not to do it.

So… No, I don’t really like any of them.

Today I am going to focus on an article that was brought to my attention yesterday. It’s an old article, but the headline is rather shocking.

“The Wisconsin Lie Exposed – Taxpayers Actually Contribute Nothing To Public Employee Pensions.”

In the article, you will find that semantics are what we are actually discussing. The headline is a sensational one, which is very misleading. Let me break this down so that we can all grasp it a little easier (that’s not meant as an insult to anyone, but I am assuming that most people who will see this are not financial planning experts.)

Unions don’t bargain for wages, they bargain for “Packages.” This includes: Wages, Health Care Insurance, Vacation/Holiday pay, Retirement/Pension plans, etc… The sum of all those costs are wrapped up in a “Compensation Package” that the employee receives. Some of this will show on a paycheck, some will not. Wages are simply the money someone receives on their paychecks; hourly or salary pay. All of that money comes from the taxpayers, regardless of how you want to define or categorize it, and WE DO pay ALL of it. What Walker’s plan is doing is this: Recover some of the fringe costs by deducting that from the salary portion of a teacher’s pay, then return the saved money to the general fund. It is a pay cut, spun to sound nicer.

I will use a fictional, but realistic example to demonstrate how Walker’s plan works.This is NOT an argument for or against the plan, just a realistic breakdown involving truth, and no spin or rhetoric. If you want to skip it, just skip the blue section.

First, let me explain my compiling and give my source: Wisconsin DPI. On that site you will find an excel spreadsheet giving key financials for every school district in the state of Wisconsin: 2011 Average Salary Report for Teachers. That is a direct link to the excel file, so if you cannot open .xls files, you may encounter problems. I do believe OpenOffice can open these files with little problem.

In that document you will discover that there are 424 school districts in the state, and the following sort-able metrics: Low Salary (actual), High Salary (actual), Average Salary (total of all salaries divided by number of salaries), and Average Fringe (no data provided for actual fringes.) There are many other ways to sort the data, but these are the ones that matter for what I am doing here.

I averaged each category, and here is what I came up with:

• Low Salary: $32,721.25
• High Salary: $64,274.30
• Average Salary: $50,627.00
• Average Fringe: $27,052.76

So, now I can make a fictional school district with those metrics. I took the three salary numbers and averaged them, which gives me $49207.52 per year. I will make the district employ 73 teachers, all making that rate. They all will receive $27,052 in fringe.

The difference is $179,607.74 just in my fictional district where everyone receives the same amount of compensation. If we expand that to the entire state, the savings are $144,321,337.66… Yes, almost one hundred fifty million, which works out to about $25 for every man, woman, and child in the state***. The savings are a little different when you use the real numbers, but this was an exercise that everyone should have been able to follow.

The bottom line is: no matter how you want to word it, taxpayers DO pay for public employee “fringe” packages. We pay for every cent the government pays out, no matter how or where it goes. While the CONTENTS of the article, and the one it got it’s information from, are technically true… The headline is  a ridiculous sensationalistic attempt to sway people to one particular side of the argument. The writer of that article knows full well that most people will only see the headline, and then spread it around without ever reading the contents therein.

Using a headline like that is not reporting, it’s misleading.

**According to Teacher Portal there are 59,552 teachers in Wisconsin. ***According to the US Census Bureau.

10 Things Nobody Warned Me about my Twenties

When I turned twenty, I was under the impression that life was going to be a party for the next ten years. I was sorely mistaken. You see… I was warned about a couple things: my metabolism will decrease, I’ll get fatter, academic work will get harder, I’ll have to pay taxes; but there are a lot of things no one warned me about.

So I have written this list, projecting my personal experiences onto my fellow twenty-something friends and colleagues who are themselves possibly struggling with the same things I struggle with in this deeply confusing decade we call our twenties.

 

1. Twenties are the new teens.

People in their thirties often tell me that the thirties are the new twenties, so what does that make us? Well, unfortunately, as if we didn’t already suffer enough in the confusing and disorienting teenage years, we have to do it all over again. The sad truth of our generation is that we often move home, and while I haven’t yet moved home, I’ve visited home enough to know the only difference between being around your parents as a teen and being around them as an adult is, as an adult, they can’t tell you to do your homework because you probably don’t have any.

We are just as rebellious, angsty, emotional, and unstable as we were back then, but throughout college we were far enough away it didn’t matter. This isn’t unique to being in the twenties – I compel every post-thirty adult who reads this to consider: what would life be like living with your parents? It would probably send you straight back in time to loitering at the local Seven Eleven just to escape the folks and their 9pm bedtimes.

“Girlie, where you going?”
“Out, Mom.”
“Don’t take that tone with me young lady! You’re not going out with that Johnson boy again! He’s trouble!”
“Mom! He’s my husband! I love him!”
“I won’t have it! I’ve been talking to Jimmy Lewis’s mother, and she thinks you two would make an adorable pair. He’s a retired lawyer, you know. Good genes.”
“You never listen to me, Mom!”

But, since people past the age of thirty don’t live with their parents (the shame eventually drives them out of the attic), this peculiar age-family dynamic rests on the shoulders of twenty-something boomerangs.

I am one of the lucky ones. The ones who never went back to his parents’ house. That was, and remains, no small challenge. I am staring at the opening of my 30′s in less than 8 months, and still find myself debating whether I should “go back home” to make things easier. I still have roommates and cannot afford to live on my own, but somehow I feel that I would have failed if I have to go back to mom.

Perhaps that would not be true, perhaps it would. i just can’t imagine going back to a life where I have to live on someone else’s schedule, and abide by rules I don’t necessarily agree with. In some ways I feel I have already lost the fight, because most of the people I know have moved on and had kids, wives, houses, etc… What they don’t have though, is my level of freedom, which is a small (yet sometimes satisfying) consolation.

On the bright side: if I do have to go back home, I will not have to worry about the ever-pressing wishes for producing grand-kids, because my brother already accomplished that. His accomplishment is something I use to my advantage when the subject comes up; “You already have one Mom, I don’t have to.”

2. I still don’t know what it’s like to be an adult.

I remember once waking up at 6:30am to drive a friend to LAX. It was still dark, the streets were empty, and there was a certain amount of peace in the air. It was an hour I had rarely seen since my high school days, and even though I was dead tired, there was a certain amount of satisfaction in waking up before the world.

Then it became 7:00 and I was stuck in rush hour going 5 to 10 miles per hour on a freeway crammed with the morning commuters. Who the hell are these people, and what are they doing up before 10:00?! It was window into a confusing world I had never experienced – that of getting drive thru Starbucks on the way to work, being home by 5:30pm to eat dinner and then falling asleep after the evening news – and as I got back home from the airport at 8:00am, I tucked myself in bed realizing that as long as I eat dinner at 10pm and fall asleep around 2:30am every morning after doing my midnight grocery shopping with the drunkards and insomniacs, I will never know what it’s like to be an adult.

This is also true as long as I fill out a 1040EZ for my tax returns, but that’s probably connected to my sleep schedule. And don’t even talk to me about 401Ks or the Stock Market, whatever that is. A “bond” is a connection between two people, or at the very least the last name of James.

The feeling of being up before the world is perhaps one of those things some of us will never get over. This is the reason I like to be up extremely late, or wake extremely early. There is something grand about looking at an empty city, something almost surreal; and I love it. I have tried to “get with the rest of the world” many times, but I fail whenever I rediscover the empty street a few days later, or when something has my mind going a million miles an hour.

I have to admit though, I haven’t used an “EZ” tax form since 2005. I have invested in my 401K, and hope to soon enter the real market. This is something that comes slowly, rather than with the swiftness of a Facebook rumor, so we are less likely to notice these kind of financial security changes… Unless it goes the other way. You will be PAINFULLY aware when you suddenly have to go back a few spaces in the game of life.

3. I don’t belong in a socially distinct or recognized demographic.

As my twenties go on, I realize that I truly am not an adult (see above). In fact, I’m pretty sure adulthood is entirely a lie, but eventually people get comfortable with calling themselves adults and group themselves into a mass of people that have TV shows about their problems and ads for their migraine pills. As long as I don’t have a “career” and my knees still work, I’m not sure I can call myself an adult.

But then, I can’t call myself a kid either. I can’t hang out with teenagers and converse about not-yet-shattered hopes and dreams (at least not without the police showing up). I can’t even call myself a college student – I’m not about to do a keg stand and hook up with some vomit-mouthed coed who still drives home on the weekends to do laundry.

But in popular media, nothing exists between adulthood and college. Sexy shows about young people are almost exclusively about high school (Glee, Popular, Roswell, Dawson’s Creek) or at the very latest college (Felicity, American Pie 2, Animal House), and then it jumps straight into sexy young professionals (Scrubs, Grey’s Anatomy, Entourage) and that’s just a stone’s throw away from the established but uncomfortable adult (Friends, Sex and the City) and before you know it, you’re at Matlock.

What do we, the non-professional post-college good-for-nothing twenties have? Futurama? Is Philip J. Fry the torch-bearer for my people?

Well, if you’re going to measure your life in TV terms… Yes, Fry is our great representation. If you measure it in social media though, we are the largest group there is. We are the ones who discuss politics online, and arrange massive demonstrations of those opinions. We are perhaps the most politically active “young adults” (and I don’t mean that in the way most people do when they refer to teenager) in the history of our country.

So, while we may not be as successful as early as our parents were, we are making a huge difference in society. I’ll leave it to you to decide if that is a good difference or a bad one. One could say we are the most informed young adults in history as well.

4. Relationships actually result in marriage sometimes.

A year ago, I was 23. I had married friends, but none of them went through the process of marriage during our friendship. Then, sometime between then and now, my first friend got engaged. I was thrilled. I’ve always wanted my friends to get married. It was about time.

But seriously, six months and daily engagement notices later, I’ve decided: you guys can stop getting married now. It’s not that I’m not happy for you – I am very happy for you. But, as awful as this sounds, I also enjoy the intrigue of future ambiguity. You see, I’m selfish, and I like being able to say, “So, meet anyone special lately?” But I can’t say that when you’re married. It’s more like, “So, did you… meet your wife lately?” It’s like a mystery novel whose ending has been revealed. It was fun while it lasted, and I enjoyed the twist, but now what? Part II: Babies? I’m not sure I’m ready for that yet.

I admit, this is selfish of me. It’s not about me, it’s about you. But no, I’m making it about me because this entry is about me projecting onto everyone I feel like might be similar to me. So I have to be honest about my feelings, and they are as follows:

If you’ve read my writings for a while, you can probably figure out I do a lot of pining, and a lot of my identity is based on the idea of missed connections, unrequited longing, or the need to overcome a lack of courage to pursue a dream that is probably best left out of reality. I see this akin to the ideals of a nineteenth century romantic, and I compose music accordingly. For me, it’s an element of psyche that contributes to my art.

But here’s the thing: in high school, when two people were dating, I could always say,“When they split up…” and that idea would somehow bring peace to my irreconcilable pain of being unable to pursue the woman of my dreams, whoever she might’ve been at the time, even if I knew damn well I was never going to do anything about it anyway if she were single. Then college happened, and I could still say, “When they split up…” and it might take one, two, or three years, but it was bound to happen eventually. After all, you can’t stay together forever unless you get married…

…and now they’re getting married, and I realize now that the caveat of time no longer applies. We’re growing up. Things last forever now. The pool of eligible ladies is shrinking permanently.

All I can say here is this: It doesn’t get any easier. Keep trying and don’t stop until you get it right. If you get a job opportunity that will restrict your ability to meet women, don’t take it! The money you’ll get doesn’t stop the desire to start a family, it stops the free-time needed to accomplish it.

This is why so many high-paid professionals have no family. They simply didn’t devote any time to doing anything other than making money, or making connections that would lead to more money.

The other part of that problem is that you’ll find a lot of women discover you make decent money and that is the biggest reason they show any interest, which is usually not enough to move forward… Unless you’re OK with supporting a gold-digger.

5. I am physically incapable of staying up all night.

Yes, I realize I’ve already confessed I stay up until 2:30am and sleep until the double digits. But that’s simply my schedule. It’s no more or less sleep than someone who has a 9pm to 5am schedule.

But God forbid I stay up until 3:30am. Eventually I’ll fall asleep standing up if I have to. Once upon a time, I would have a paper due the next morning, and with a cup of coffee and a shot of whiskey, I was good to go until 6 or 7am to turn it in by 9. Now, if I’m writing a paper last minute, I get to about 4am and say, “Shit. Well, I guess it’s gonna be late.” And then I pass out on the floor.

That goes for parties too. I have a 1:00am self-imposed curfew. Take that, college!

Try changing your diet. I can still manage all-nighters, but not nearly as often as I used to. Some of this is because of aging, the rest is probably a less than healthy diet. I’m not saying to eat salads for every meal or anything, but try to go back to three meals a day, and make them rounded like they were when you were growing up. It helps… A lot!

Please don’t take that as some attempt to steer you into the “health-freak” zone. I have tried balancing my diet and got a huge boost in energy. I don’t count anything, but I did put a higher priority on vegetables… Homemade Asparagus Risotto is nothing short of amazing, and it costs about $12 to make a single serving. That may seem high, but the rice and asparagus are expensive ingredients and it’s only a few dollars more than a crappy McMeal.

6. I have forgotten everything I ever learned in high school.

I mean everything. Even people’s names. Calculus? Don’t know. Physics? What’s that? Great Gatsby? Read it once, someone dies. How to cite sources? Ask the internet. Gilded Age? Something about wacky facial hair on rich men. Algebra? YES! Oh wait… that was junior high.

I’m not kidding. Everything is gone. Sometimes I’ll have conversations with old friends that go something like this:

Me: “Hey, you remember that one guy who had the skateboarding accident sophomore year?”
Him: “No.”
Me: “Damn. He was in like all of my classes for all four years.”
Him: “What’s his name?”
Me: “I have no idea! That’s what I’m trying to figure out!”
Him: “… do you remember anything else about him?”
Me: “Uh… he lived in Los Altos Hills… gave a speech at graduation… blond hair, green eyes, about 6’1” 170 pounds. Always wore blue hats. Dated that brown-haired chick. Went to UC Davis to study history. I think he had a sister two years older…”
Him: “Oh… I think it was… was it …Dustin? Justin? Crustin?”

I actually laughed out loud on this one. I am the same way (except the Algebra, for me it’s Civics) and have conversations like that all the time. Don’t feel too bad about it, because for every one of us, there is probably 5 or 6 people who remember everything about high-school and never got over it.

I can’t tell you how many times I have gone into a store now and end up having a conversation like this:

Random: “Hey! How’s it going?”
Me: “OK, I guess.”
Random: “I remember you from *insert class here*.”
Me: “Ahh, OK, nice to see you”

Really what I’m thinking is, “I haven’t got a clue who you are, and I really don’t have the time or desire to care.” Yes, it’s incredibly rude to have those thought, but it’s really what I think when I am presented with a situation like that. There are actually very few people from high school that I think I would be able to hold a conversation with, because it’s just been… too damned long! Try me on Facebook first, then if we actually start communicating I’ll be more interested in talking to you in person.

7. Not only am I dumber than I used to be, I’m also more retarded.

Maybe the first clause is due to this principle: “The more things you know to exist, the dumber you feel,” but that doesn’t help me feel any less retarded. And I don’t mean that in an offensive-slur kind of way. Literally, I feel like I’m mentally handicapped, at least compared to how I used to be. Let’s take language as an example:

When I had just turned 20, I took a class in Lithuanian, a notoriously difficult and obscure language. There were four people in my class, and one of them was a benevolent middle-aged man who tragically stumbled through lessons day in and day out. This would happen:

Teacher – “’Pusryčiauti’ means ‘to eat breakfast.’ How do you say, ‘to eat breakfast’?”
Man – “P… p… pa… pra…”
Teacher – “…..”
Man – “It starts with a P, right?”

I felt for the man, but I didn’t understand his problem, because frankly it couldn’t have been easier for me.

Teacher – “Anybody else?”
Me – “’Pusryčiauti.’ Aš pusryčiavau bendrabutyje. Aš valgau jogurtą.”
Teacher – “Labai gerai, Džefai.”

Fast forward. I’m in my fifth year of Polish. Every damn week for the past five years, I have the same conversation:

“Pani Profesor, jak się mówi ‘to receive’?”
“…dostać.”
“Shit. That’s right.”
(I actually had to look that up just now)

Just as frequently, this happens:

“Pani Profesor, jak się mówi ‘achievement’?”
“Osiągnięcie.”
“Ośśś… oś… …..”
“Osiągnięcie.”
“Osiągszczenie?”
“O-siąg-nię-cie.”
“Oszrzćczyszczyszśczyzczżcę…”

Now, I understand learning a language is a skill that gets worse over time, but even in my beloved music classes, I have a similar problem. I’ll be sitting in electronic music lecture and this will happen:

TA – “Once you assign the mod wheel to the parameter like this… you can adjust it like so.”
Me – “Wait, how do you assign the which to the who wha?”
TA – “Like this.”
Me – “Wait, sorry, one more time. I was thinking about milk just now.”
TA – “You were thinking about …milk? …what about milk?”
Me – “You know… just… about milk.”

And that’s the most disturbing thing: I’ve gotten to the point where my abstract thoughts drown out things that are actually happening, but my abstract thoughts aren’t even doing anything. It’s not like I would be thinking about drinking milk. I’d just be thinking… about milk.

This just means that you should consider moving on from the lessons, because you don’t really care. I am one of those strange people who find language fascinating. I have gone through the processes of translating text from one language I’ve never taken a class in, to English. Normally people would say “Just use Google translate.” I never liked it because the result is horrible, so I copy the whole mess into Word and begin the process of correcting all the grammar and fundamentals so it’s legible to everyone… I’ve also nearly given myself strokes by doing it in reverse (from English to unknown language) just because I knew I could. I find some strange satisfaction in doing it.

I recently got a couple versions of Rosetta Stone software just because of this. I will be starting my Spanish journey within the week.

8. Life becomes more tragic.

I had a conversation with a 62 year-old friend over the internet once. It went something like this:

Me – “Man, I’m bummed.”
Him – “Why?”
Me – “Everyone I know is getting married.”
Him – “It could be worse. Everyone I know is dying.”

This is a sad one, folks. It seems obvious that, as I get older, more people that I have known perish. This is the natural progression of life, and I’m thankful that I haven’t been exposed to the tragedy of loss as much as most, even those significantly younger than me. But I can feel it coming, and that feeling of dread – dread for the ambiguous future – is an awful feeling. In times of paranoia, I’m often afraid to answer my mom’s calls, because I’m afraid she’ll be reporting bad news.

But this is just a part of getting older. It’s natural, and it needs to be accepted, or else I’ll have to be locked up in the loony bin by the time I’m thirty.

It’s not just about life and death though. The twenties seem to be the years when dreams are made or dreams are shattered. We enter with such high expectations for our lives, and we are put through a trial period of emotional highs and lows that result in a self we’re not sure we even recognize. This is when people get arrested for drug use or DUI. This is when people move back home and live in the attic playing WoW. This is when people we know who enlisted in the military lose life or limb.

But again, for the sake of sanity, it’s something we need to get used to, or we won’t be able to appreciate the great joys that also await us.

This particular section really resonates with me. I lost a friend last May, he was only 29, the same age that I am now. I have outlived a man who EVERYONE loved. He was almost completely selfless, and was always there when you needed someone to listen, help, kick you, push you, etc… I literally have not met a single person who would say anything bad about him, except that he was too stubborn for his own good. He refused to go get checked out by a doctor when he had chest pains, figured it was just heart-burn.

he died of a heart-attack in his sleep. At least he didn’t feel it.

What scares me about that, is I’m the same way. I hate doctors, and even though this happened, I still find it nearly impossible to get the motivation to go see one. Maybe that’s something I should do this week… But I won’t.

9. Life has greater joys.

In high school, it’s a great joy to receive an A on a paper. In college, it’s a great joy to meet the girl of your dreams and drunkenly hook up in the fraternity bathroom. But those are mere pennies compared to the joy of finally being old enough to value your family, or the great joy of raising a snot-nosed child, or even the great joy of traveling the world without having a chaperone or an itinerary that consists exclusively of discotheques.

Yes, life has more tragedies, but the stakes are higher. Life has greater joys too. As we get older, we can buy better things and experience the joy of ownership. We can experience the joy of independence – being able to get in the car and just drive wherever the hell we feel like it.

Finally, for the first time, our lives have seemingly complex meaning. The work we do isn’t busy work, but rather other people depend on it. The twenty-something med student can experience the joy of changing a patient’s life. The twenty-something musician’s music will be heard and enjoyed by someone who isn’t his mother. This is where the seed of greatness begins.

It’s also the time when we reevaluate what direction we are going in. I am going back to school so that i can change mine. This is an especially scary prospect for me, because I will have to go back to the mindset of a 19 year old to survive it. Granted, the prospect of meeting tons of college women is a major bonus.

Maybe I’m only looking forward to it because I skipped it ten years ago, I don’t know.

8+9. You stop giving a shit about things you used to give a shit about.

I remember when I graduated college and had my big, empty adult life ahead of me with no direction or purpose. I had to ask myself heavy existential questions: why am I here? What am I doing? What’s the meaning of all this? For the most part these questions went unanswered, and merely resulted in several romantic nights between me and my bottle of gin. Frankly, there is no answer to these questions, and for the most part it’s best not to ask them.

But I was asking them, and it had an immediate social consequence: I no longer gave a damn about the petty problems of yesteryear. I’d ask my younger friends how they’re doing, and they’d say, “Horrible. I have a huge midterm tomorrow and I haven’t studied,”and I’d have to catch myself from responding, “Oh, that’s cool. Be glad that your sense of self-worth can still be defined by the letter grade on a test you’ll immediately forget about.” Or sometimes they’d come up to me and say, “I’m upset. My roommate had a boy over last night,” and I’d want to say, “Really? Wow. Welcome to not being sixteen anymore.”

Don’t get me wrong – it’s not that I’ve become apathetic to your joys and sorrows. It’s just that my dictionary of joys and sorrows have increased beyond college problems, and what would have once evoked my greatest pity is now just annoying. And, for those of you still working away at that bachelor degree, you too will find this out soon enough: tests come and go, but existential crises are here to stay.

I think that is the exact reason you don’t remember peoples’ names from High School. As I said earlier, you stopped caring about it a long time ago. This cycle will never end as far as I can tell.

10. You’re still changing.

I was fairly certain when I was a teenager that by the time I turned twenty, my identity would be set in stone. That didn’t happen. I look at myself today, and I’m a different man-boy than I was one year ago. Next year, I will look at myself again and surely I will again be different.

 

And thus is the beauty of the lonely twenties: it is a decade devoted purely to the molding of oneself into a better human being. So why am I wasting it on the internet?

We spend our teens trying to fit in, and we spend our twenties trying to stand out. Our thirties will probably be spent trying to fit in again, only this time it will be with the neighborhood rather than the school.

I enjoyed this post a lot, and it deserved it’s “Fresh” status. Congratulations to the author.

Thanks to my reader for putting up with this.

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• 10 Things Nobody Warned Me about my Twenties (doctorquack.wordpress.com)

In the image above (created by me with a lot of aggravation) you can see the best known Windows logos, and some giant blue thing. That is the new Windows logo, which is supposed to represent the new “Metro” styling in Windows 8. I get it, and yet… I don’t.

Why could they not have just done something like this? It took me all of 2 min to make, and I would have done better, but I am so sick of looking at graphic-editing menus right now, I want to bang my head on a wall. I think maybe have two blocks on top and a large rectangle at the bottom would have worked better.

It would certainly match the ultra-colorful design that they use for the touch interface on everything now, which you can see below.

I just finished watching an episode on Hulu and was stupified by the last man to enter the room. He invented a rather ingenious way to preserve wine while it’s still in it’s original bottle, which will help prevent pouring bad wine down the drain.

The cost to produce the product is $6.50, which could go WAY down if it is manufactured in mass quantities. One shark estimated $2.50 per unit. The retail price is $22.00, which equates to a profit of $13.50 in small quantities, and $17.50 in large quantities. Assuming that you can manage a hundred-thousand sales a year, that amounts to a possible yearly take of $135,000 to $175,000.

Kevin offered $40,000 for 30% of the company, with the catch that they license the patent out to a manufacturer who specializes in this kind of product. Assuming that they can get even a small 5% royalty, that would amount to about $8,750 per hundred thousand units sold. The company already sells several hundred thousand units of their own inferior product every year, so this would be a good opportunity to supplement his normal income with some bonuses. On a 500,000 unit year, the team could make $43,750 annually, which equals $30,625 a year to the inventor. Not too shabby if you ask me, that’s like having a second full time job, and not having to do anything for it.

Two other sharks offered $400,000 to buy the inventor out completely. That seems huge, until you run the numbers… It would take a little over 13 years to make that with Kevin’s offer, BUT the money wouldn’t stop there. There could be improvements and tweaks which would renew the patents and licensing long into the future, as I can think of 4 improvements I could make to the design right now.

Do any Americans plan for the future anymore? What is going to happen when that one-time check runs out? Mark Cuban (Dallas Mavericks owner) and Lori Greiner (the QVC lady) will make millions off of this, and the inventor will not be able to collect any of it, which is why they shot down his counters of 3% and 2% royalties so fast.

Personally, I would have said no to both of those offers and tried to make it work another way. Sometimes the quick-money is the small money, and we lost sight of that, which is why we get killed in the global marketplace. The Sharks don’t often make moves like they did here, and Eric could have made a lot more if he had recognized it for what it was at the start; a feeding frenzy at his expense. He basically did not have enough confidence to walk away, because he was blinded by dollars.

Here is the episode in case you’d like to watch it. The Swilt is just another snuggie-style product which looks stupid and isn’t really practical, the same could be said for the ShowNo, and the Puppy Cake thing is ridiculous.

This blog illustrates my point, because you have to believe in your product enough to say no sometimes. http://whointernational.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/never-say-now/

Have you ever rented a movie from Redbox? I have many times, and mostly on DVD. This was great because I got to watch a number of pretty crappy movies without spending a great deal of money. Sometimes you want to watch something to find out if you like it, before you spend $25-$30 on a Blu-ray pack.

Take Real Steel for instance. This movie was actually pretty good, despite the obvious father-son bonding motif that is often ruined in Hollywood. It took a bit of a different path which I commend. I rented it on DVD to see if I wanted to bother buying it, and if I wanted to spend the extra cash on a Blu-ray bundle. I decided that it would be worth it and bought the movie the same night I watched it. No, it’s no American Gangster (which I also picked up on Blu-ray that night) but it is a special effects heavy movie which lends itself to the medium better than regular DVD.

Universal Studios has decided that you aren’t entitled to see any “bonus features” unless you actually go out and buy their movie. I discovered this after renting Cowboys and Aliens; a movie I would give 2.5 out of 5 stars. I saw it available in Blu-ray for an extra $0.50, which I figured was great because then I could really see it in HD and make a truly informed decision. Well, the movie was a disappointment, but what got me most was the menus and nag screens within the Blu-ray. You actually have to wait for some crud to load, then deal with it reminding you about some smartphone/tablet app that is supposed to “enhance your movie experience.” I just want to watch the damned movie, not try and watch it AND my iPhone at the same time.

Beyond this ridiculous nagging, I discovered that ALL of the special features were locked. Rather than allow me to watch the “making of,” I was treated to this fine little nag screen…

“This disc is intended for rental purposes

and only includes the feature film.

Own it on Blu-ray to complete

your movie watching experience

with additional bonus features

and language options”

A similar message will appear if you try to watch the extended version. In fact, the only thing you CAN access is the movie and the previews for other Universal Studios products and movies. This would not be so bad except for one tiny little detail… Redbox sells used DVDs and Blu-rays after they no longer bring in the expected level of revenues. So eventually some poor sap is going to buy a Blu-ray from Redbox, or Blockbuster (they have blue rental boxes at many locations now) and discover that they got ripped off.

Needless to say, it will be very difficult for me to justify buying a movie from Universal in the near future. I will most certainly NOT be buying Cowboys and Aliens (it’s simply not good enough) and will probably pass on many others as well.

Anyone else think this is all just stupid? The price to go see a movie in the theaters is at an all time high, and that’s before getting any snacks. The discs now have nags and restrictions. The companies make crappier and crappier movies. Is there any wonder why they would have to try and get legislation to block video sites? I mean, there’s only so much we can afford to pay for movies in this economy. Maybe it’s about time that Hollywood figure out that they’d get more sales by dropping the prices just a little bit, or producing better quality movies, rather than trying to sell bonus features.

To be “legal”: I took a picture of the nag-screen with my camera, but I do not claim rights to the contents within said photograph. The rights to those contents remain with the respective copyright holders.

A reminder: The SOPA/PIPA fight isn’t over yet people, it’s just begun.

The confetti has fallen, the stars have left the stadium, and the cleanup begins. As per my prediction (my 5th straight) the Giants overcame the Patriots in Superbowl XLVI. 21-17 seems like a rather low score for such a big game with two seemingly explosive offensive programs.

I have to be honest. I did not watch, as I could care less about these two teams once again appearing. I stopped caring the moment Green Bay was knocked out of the playoffs, ironically getting taken out by the very same team who ended Brett Favre’s dreams of making a third Superbowl. They did it again at Lambeau Field in Green Bay, and again went on to win the Superbowl. It’s funny how the Pats forgot how that went down last time.

The reason this is titled “Superbowl ad-day” is because I get to talk about the commercials, which is a big part of the reason why anybody watches the game when their team isn’t in it. These are not “the most popular” or “most liked” commercials, just the ones I liked best. I will give you my 10 favorites, in order from least to most. So prepare for this to be a long post. I embedded the videos so that you don’t have to keep switching tabs or anything.

10) I think someone needs to sign this kid now. Forget college and high-school… Just get him on the field.

9) This is probably the best E*Trade baby commercial yet.

8) The Cola-Bears are back! I can just imagine the refs… “Upon further review, the catcher did not have control of the bottle when he crossed the line, pass is incomplete, third down”

7) At first I was like “OK, a hot chick who likes coffee, must be a coffee commercial” then… Just watch.

6) Three words: It fights crime!

5) Betty White rocks.

4) They didn’t think this plan through very much.

3) Much better than some of their previous commercials. For some reason they chose not to upload an HD version, which I do not understand. You can find an HD version on YouTube, but I chose to only show the “official” ones from the advertiser’s channels here.

2) I guess VW figured the Vader-kid from last year worked so well that they would tie it in this year as well. Vader-kid was better.

1) I’ll let my inner geek fly here for a moment and say this is my favorite only because it’s dogs barking out the “Death March” from Star Wars. This one was actually the teaser for the commercial posted above.

In my opinion, those are the ten best commercials of the day. Be sure to also check out Madonna’s Half-Time Show, because it was pretty good, with the exception of a couple stumbles on her part. This is not an official copy, and I will remove the link if I get a request to do so from the NFL, Madonna, RIAA, etc…

Congratulations to the NY Giants; thanks for keeping the trophy in the NFC, and away from the New England Patriots, even though you had to beat my Packers to do it.

Just a fun panorama of a local snow-sculpting event for the Humane Society. The Wolf was done by my Brother and Step-Father, so I am being biased when I say it was one of my favorites.

They took first place.

My favorite one, even though they didn’t get to coloring it before time ran out.