Friday, January 20, 2006

Ignoring the Subtext

As long as I live, I will never understand what compels people to become door-to-door salespeople. I guess some people just have a knack for it; it’s just something that they are good at.

Personally, I have never been a good fit in the customer service industry. I fit more into the corporate world where, for the most part, I constantly work with the same people. My forays into the world of retail sales and customer service have been, well, less than spectacular.

One of my managers in my earlier days described me as, ‘Narcissistic, openly defiant, an egotist with an attitude, a person who believes that he is above the rules.’

I just have a problem dealing with people who are stupid, lazy, and inconsiderate. My attitude stemmed from people in a store who passed what they looked for seven times, were too lazy to turn their heads to look for an item, and were too inconsiderate to thank me when I showed them where the item was.

So for the most part, I decided that the way that my managers wanted me to do things was irrelevant, I tended to spend more time helping people that were thoughtful and actually needed help, and in turn, virtually ignoring the ones who couldn’t find the nose on their own face. I am the type of person that is only willing to help people if they are willing to do their best to help themselves.

I still don’t understand why my managers thought I had an attitude.

I took a stab at door-to-door sales, briefly in college. It only took a couple of days before I realized that I fit into the demographic of people who definitely don’t have a knack for it. Most people are volatile as it is, add the fact that you are knocking on their door at home, interrupting their dinners, asking money to sell them something that they don’t want and will never use, and people will be ruder than you can possibly imagine. On my three days on the job, I heard obscenities that I thought people were making up, and for the most part, I curse like a drunken sailor.

“If you want to be good at this job Jake, you have to be persistent, ignore the subtext, and don’t take no for an answer.” My sales manager had been doing the job for a couple of years, apparently, he had no idea who I was.

The difficulty of the job was compounded for me by the fact that I had no salesmanship skills whatsoever. A dyslexic, drunken orangutan is a better salesman than I am. I couldn’t sell a free life preserver to a man drowning in an ocean.

I never understood what my sales manager meant by ‘ignore the subtext’; maybe it was because there was no subtext involved with any of the people behind the doors that I knocked on. There were only threats to my life, racial epithets, and the occasional ‘no’.

I never understood what he meant until last night, when a door-to-door magazine saleschick knocked on my door, and not once understood the subtext behind my attempts to be nice to her.

The first mistake that she made was knocking on my door at seven o’clock on a Thursday. There are only two television shows that I watch religiously, Scrubs and Smallville, last night was a brand new episode of Smallville. She was lucky that I didn’t throw her down the stairs when the commercial ended.

The only reason I answered the door during one of my weekly sacred rituals was because I thought my brother was on the other side of the door with a calculator that I loaned him three and a half years ago. I opened the door to find a short, thin, blond girl in her early 20s, shivering from the cold weather.

For the purposes of simplicity, our conversation will be in quotes, with my subtext defined inside of parentheses. For example “Blah blah, blah blah blah (subtext)”

“Have you seen a young kid with green hair, kinda smells bad, running around this complex?”

“Uh, no…(Who the hell are you?)” I was under the assumption that she was looking for her little brother or a friend.

“Are you the man of the house?”

“Yes… (Hell yeah, I’m the man!)”

“Hi, my name is ‘her name here’, I am doing a contest for school in which I try to collect points by going door-to-door and selling magazine subscriptions to popular magazines. I am currently in first place. The grand prize is an all-expenses-paid trip to, guess where?”

She spat out her pre-scripted monologue in about half a second. She handed me a laminated brochure, complete with the rules for her little contest and a picture of Mexico with the word ‘Cancun’ emblazoned below it.

“Cancun? (Really, how friggin’ stupid do you think I am?)”

“Yep! Have you ever been to Cancun?”

“Of course! (No, never)”

“Cool! The trip is for two, you can go with me and show me all the sights!”

At this point, she is starting to feed on one of my weaknesses. It is a weakness of all men. You can call us simple-minded creatures, but we can’t help ourselves. All guys, without exception, will buy something from or for a woman who flirts with him. It is an undeniable fact of nature. I personally remember walking out of a store in Las Vegas this summer with a new pair of sunglasses that I didn’t need, 200 dollars poorer, cause the saleschick that worked there said that I looked hot with them on.

“Do you mind if I come in for a second to show you this?”

“Ok… (You have until the end of the commercial)”

She walked in just past the door, far enough to lay her pamphlets and other sales material out on the kitchen counter. I left the door open just in case I had to physically throw her out of my apartment if she pulled a knife on me, or something to that affect.

“If you don’t mind, could you leaf through this booklet and pick out four magazines that you would be willing to subscribe to?”

“Ok… (I ain’t buying a damn thing, lady!)” In retrospect, I was being far too nice, especially considering the commercial break was almost over.

I proceeded to thumb through the booklet she handed me, looking at the brief number of magazines therein, all with a number of points listed in their description.

“Oh, by the way, you can’t choose ‘Details’, we’re out if it.”

Now, this sent up a huge red flag for me. If someone knows how a company could ‘run-out’ of a magazine subscription, please inform me. I still played along with the game, wasting more of my time. I picked out four magazines that were on the list, and she wrote them down, assuming that I had already made a decision.

“Now this is what I can do for you…” She showed me her sales slip and explained the price scale on the four subscriptions that I chose. Not wanting to wait for her to finish her speech, I did some quick math in my head and soon realized that the total dollar amount was just shy of 250 dollars.

“I’m sorry, but you really caught me at a bad time, I have a lot of things going on in my life right now, and I can’t really afford the money… (Lady, if I wanted to spend that kind of money on magazines, I could do it at the newsstand!)”

“Well, if you write me a check, you can post-date it for up to nine days from now and it won’t be processed for another two weeks!”

“Things aren’t going to be much better for me in two weeks… (In two weeks, I still won’t want to spend 250 dollars on magazines!)”

“Well, here’s what you can do then, just to help me out with my contest, you can post-date the check, then call this number in about a week, and tell the operator that you want to cancel your order. That way, I will still get half of the points for the order!”
This little contest of hers was getting on my nerves. As it turns out, the scoring system was more complicated than the scoring system of professional auto racing.

“I’m just a little cynical about things like this… (Let me get this straight, you want me to give you a check for more than 200 dollars for knocking at my door, and assume that you aren’t going to cash the thing, based on good faith?)”

“Well, see, that’s why we don’t take credit card numbers anymore. Some of the kids in the contest were stealing them and trying to do bad things with them.”

“Really? (Now, how exactly is that supposed to make me feel better about giving you a check?)”

Let me let you in on a little fact that everyone should be aware of, checking accounts are far easier to defraud than credit or debit cards. When completing transactions online, a security code of some kind is usually required to use plastic. Most cards also have a dollar limit that is used to prevent fraudulent charges.

A growing trend online is the ‘electronic check’. It allows use of a checking account by using the routing number and account number, easily found on a check. It will allow you to spend up to the dollar amount in your checking account, and has very little security involved.

“I really don’t feel safe about giving a complete stranger a check, sorry… (You’re done here, go home!)”

“Well, can you at least let me borrow a lighter?”

“What? (What!?)”

“I just wanna smoke a cigarette before I go home.”

“Let me see if I can find one… (Wait outside!)”

I shut the door and proceeded to rifle through my apartment, looking for a lighter that I knew didn’t exist, knowing that if I found one and sent her on her way, I would be sitting on my couch again, experiencing sweet television bliss.

About ten minutes later, she knocked on the door again.

“Let me just borrow your stove for a second…”

“No, I don’t want my place smelling like cigarettes… (What the hell is your problem?!)”

“Oh, come on, it will only take a sec!”

“I’m sorry, I can’t help you, have a good evening… (Go home!)”

I closed the door and sat down again, now thoroughly in a mood. I turned and looked at the clock.

7:30

I missed half of the show, Lex was bleeding, and I had no idea what happened. My evening at home was effectively ruined.

If someone knocks on your door, and you are busy, for God’s sake, don’t beat around the bush, just do what my dad does. Tell them what you need to tell them without any subtext.

“I don’t want any.”

Friday, January 13, 2006

Safety Boy and the Cancer Club

Some of my fondest memories of college were from my freshman engineering class. It was one of the most difficult classes I have ever attended, and my professor was a real hard-liner, but he still managed to keep it enjoyable.

The mainstay of the class was group work. Our department was not only trying to teach us how to be engineers, but how the engineering environment works in the real world. From day one, we were told that the heart and soul of a project is the design team working on it. The team, and therefore the design, was only as strong as the weakest link.

For a design team to work effectively every member of the team must trust each other implicitly to complete their tasks on time, and to complete them well. Deadlines were non-negotiable, and the team members have the option to essentially vote another member out if they feel that one person isn’t pulling their weight.

As design team leader, it was my duty to find my team member’s strengths and weaknesses and delegate duties accordingly. The five of us tried different roles within the group, but after one project together, it became rather evident.

Abrams was one of the most socially inept people I have ever met. Don’t get me wrong, he was a nice guy, and smart as a whip, but he was definitely the square peg in the round hole. I have never met anyone with the number of eccentricities that he had. He used to listen to Marine marching songs to go to sleep. He was, quite literally the most sheltered, fearful person I have ever met, refusing to do anything that could be deemed remotely bad for him. He had no idea how to decompress, no tobacco, no alcohol, nothing remotely close to anything fun.

He also had a way of saying the most odd things in the world to us.

“You know Jake, you should always eat your French fries before your burger. They have more surface area and cool the fastest!”

Joe had to be without a doubt the most intelligent skater I have ever met. We were going to become roommates until he decided to transfer to ASU. He was the type of guy that could be laid back and intellectual, fitting in pretty much wherever he went. He knew when to party and knew when to get his work done.

Olaf was in his late twenties. He was a Russian born immigrant, moving to the US with his wife to get his degree in structural engineering. He spoke English with a Russian accent, as a second language, but he still seemed to know it better than a lot of people I have talked to. He would always bring the six-packs of Budweiser to the study sessions.

Steve was the dumbest engineering student I have ever met, ultimately, our weakest link. He was the type of guy that looked nearly catatonic when you asked him a question that didn’t involve chicks or beer. He showed up to more than one of our design meetings wreaking of pot, with his bloodshot eyes glazed over and barely open, making an appearance because he knew that if he didn’t, I would force a vote to kick him off the team.

During our first project, our professor handed us the task of coming up with a name for our design group. I pulled together an impromptu meeting.

“Alright guys, we need a name.”

“How about Semper Fidelis?” Abrams piped in.

“Dude, you aren’t even a Marine!”

“I got it dude, Bushwackers!” Apparently Steve wasn’t aware that I was actually looking for good ideas.

“In a word, no.”

A light flickered over my head.

“Well considering all of us party, smoke and drink except for Abrams here, who refuses to leave his dorm without an umbrella if there is even a slight chance of rain, I’ve got a name that would fit us perfectly.”

Abrams looked at me with eyes that I have seen before. It was the I-know-I’m-not-going-to-like-what-you-have-to-say-but-I-want-to-hear-it-anyway look. He was wincing as if he was watching a train wreck.

“Ok, Jake, what is it?”

“Safety Boy and the Cancer Club!”

I got the reaction that I was looking for, laughter. Well everyone but Abrams laughed, he was a guy that never liked jokes at his expense.

“You’re an ass Jake!”

“Let’s put it to a vote, all in favor of Safety Boy and the Cancer Club say ‘aye!’”

A resounding ‘Aye’ came from the group, all except you-know-who responded.

“Sorry brother, the vote stands!”

We spent the next 3 weeks in class and in study sessions without much of an incident. But as our group progress report presentations and demonstrations came up, I saw Abrams get more and more angry every time I repeated the group name in front of the class. It was as if he was building up explosive energy, ready to burst.
He caught up with me after class one day, fed up and ready to strike.

“Jake, we need to talk about the group name, man!’

“What’s wrong with it?” I looked at him with a furrow of worry on my forehead, feigning concern.

“I don’t want to be referred to as ‘Safety Boy’ anymore!”

“Alright kid, here’s the deal… A few of us are going to a party Friday night, if you can prove to us that you can relax and socialize without getting in a tizzy, I’ll put up a vote to have the name changed…”

“What’s the catch?” Anyone who knew me more than 15 minutes knew that there was a catch.

“If you can’t prove to us that you can unwind, even for a couple hours, we keep the name and you never bring it up again, deal?”

We shook hands, sealing the deal. I was one hundred percent certain that this was the last I would ever hear about changing the name.

The party that Friday night just so happened to be an engineering meet-and-greet of sorts. The only people invited were from the college of engineering and mines. The first impression that most outsiders get would be wrong. You would assume that this group of intelligent young men and women would be some of the most clean cut, sophisticated, well behaved students in a university.

This happens to be the most ill conceived preconception that I have ever heard.

In truth, I have never seen a bigger group of alcoholics, smokers, potheads, cokeheads, caffeine addicts and tweakers in my life. And if you think about the life of an average engineering student, it makes perfect sense.

To graduate with the proper amount of credits in four years, an engineering major must carry an average of 16 credit hours a semester. Most of these students work part to full time, trying to pay for classes, housing, food, and the like. Add on the fact that the classes that they take consist mostly of high-end math, physics, and chemistry, and you have a 18-22 year old ready to explode.

My personal formula was caffeine during the day and night to stay awake for class and studying, cigarettes between classes, and beer and cigarettes Friday and Saturday nights to relax. Everyone I knew, regardless of major, had some sort of way to cope with the stress load school put on us. Non-smokers became smokers, non-drinkers became drinkers, and the ones that didn’t find a way became volatile, such as Abrams.

There were 6 of us that rode together to the party that night; Abrams, Joe, Steve, Olaf, Danny (Joe’s roommate) and myself. Danny drove us; he was just as curious as the rest of us how Abrams would act outside of his element.

We gathered just outside of the house and I gave the kid a little pep talk.

“Kid, all you have to do is relax, have some fun, drink a beer or two and meet some new people.”

“Ok…” Shy and timid, Abrams looked like we were throwing him into a lion’s cage.

“Have at it brother!”

I patted him on the back and sent him in the house to mingle. Truth be told, I wanted nothing more for him than to relax and have some fun, but deep down, I knew it wasn’t going to happen.

The rest of us stood outside on the front porch of the house, observing the no smoking (cigarettes) policy the homeowner had posted on the front door. As we killed our smokes and put odds on whether or not Abrams was actually going to follow through with this deal we had, some kid tapped me on the shoulder.

“I’m looking for Jake.”

“I’m Jake.” Having never seen the boy before in my life, I looked at him rather puzzled. He returned the look.

“You’re Jake Diaz?”

“Yes sir…” I said, still a little puzzled, but interested in what he was wanting from me.

Before I could get out a ‘What do you need, kid?’ he slaps a five dollar bill in my hand and walks into the house.

Confused, but not wanting to look a gift five-bucks in the mouth, I let him go in and continue the conversation I was having with my friends. Ten seconds later, I get another tap on the shoulder. I turn around to find a girl looking at me.

“Jake? Jake Diaz?”

“Yeah, wha-” I am now more confused than ever.

She slaps another five bucks in my hand and walks into the house, not saying another word.

I turn around scratch my head, and try to remember who these people were and why I decided to loan them five bucks each. Before I could continue my conversation, I hear my name.

“Jake!”

I turn around to find a rather tall, lanky, pale white kid in my view. He hands me a five and asks me a question.

“Alright braw, where are the cups?”

“What in the hell are you talking about kid?”

I happen to glance around him to find seven more people waiting behind him with money in their hands.

“You’re Jake Diaz, right?”

“You wanna see an ID?”

“This is your place, right?”

“No, dude, I live on campus…”

He grabbed the bill he just gave me from my hand and headed inside, calling out ‘Jake!’ The line became his entourage, and followed him inside. Another kid tapped on my shoulder.

“What the hell do you w-, oh sorry Paulie.”

Paul was a mechanical engineering major who lived in my dorm. As it turns out, it just so happens that the owner of the house is one Jake Diaz, a chemical engineering junior, who was charging five dollars a head for cups.

I was a cocky, brash kid, but I knew better to think I could get away with pretending to be the owner of the house we were at. I knew that eventually someone who actually knew this other Jake would call me on it, and I was probably going to have my ass kicked.

Ten bucks still isn’t bad, all things considered.

I finally walked into the house, gave ‘Jake’ my (his) five bucks for my cup, and took a quick walk around the house. The living room consisted of three couches, a television set, and a Nintendo 64 with Madden ’98 running, and everyone around cheering the four competitors on. The garage was a makeshift dance floor, complete with a disco ball, strobe lights, a rather costly sound system, and a few couches. There was a three-inch cloud of pot smoke hovering near the ceiling, and Abrams was sitting in the corner, cup in hand, all alone.

He looked how I would imagine Jane Goodall did when she was first trying to fit in with the chimps.

“Dude, are you gonna mingle or not- what the hell are you drinking?”

I happened to glance in his cup to find an odd red substance shaking around from the music in the room.

“It’s clamato, it’s the only thing they had that wasn’t water or booze.”

“Man, get up, get a drink and chill out!”

The next few hours slowly became a blur to the four of us that were drinking. I distinctly remember yelling at Joe for the catch that his Jerry Rice didn’t catch from my Steve Young to lose the game of Madden we were playing at the last minute.

There was dancing involved, unfortunately. I wound up dancing with three or four different girls, but when they are engineering majors, it’s a major crapshoot.

My buddy used to have a theory about women: brains + beauty + sanity = k, k was a universal constant.

After the debacle that was my ‘dancing’, I turned around in the garage to find Abrams sitting in the same spot I left him in almost three hours earlier.

I huddled the troops, save Abrams, for a meeting.

“Guys, guys… what are we gonna do about Abrams?”

“We should smoke him out, dude! I’m sure he would relax then!”

“Steve you friggin’ moron, we are not going to get him stoned!” I knew that he would never resist the temptation to do it again once it let him out of his shell.

“I got it yo! See that girl over there?”

Danny turned and pointed to a below average looking girl standing in the corner, slightly tipsy, all alone. I looked at him in disbelief.

“You wouldn’t! You don’t have the balls!”

Sure enough, Danny did have the balls. He walked over, grabbed her attention, and informed her that Abrams thought that she was hot, but he was too shy to tell her. At this point, we would try anything to get him into the game and having some fun.

She walked over and took a seat right next to him. I have to hand it to her, I could tell that she was trying to start up a conversation, but he was resisting with all of his might. Four of us decided to go into the back yard to have a cigarette.

What transpired shortly afterwards was most likely one of the dumbest things I have ever done.

Standing outside, smoking cigars was a group of three or four guys. They soon finished their cigars and in a bout of alcohol induced bravado, decided to put them out on their tongues. What followed I can only explain as a bout of alcohol induced stupidity.

I grabbed my friends’ attention, took the cigarette out of my mouth, and uttered infamous words that every drunken male has uttered at one point in their lives.

“Oh yeah? Watch this!”

I inverted my left arm, pointing my palm skyward, and proceeded to rub out my cigarette in my wrist. Suddenly confused, due to the fact that the cigarette wasn’t going out, I pushed and twisted it further and further into my flesh, making the smell worsen, and digging the hole even deeper.

Apparently in my drunken stupor, I didn’t realize that the reason the cigars went out almost instantly on the tongue was because they were wet. Unfortunately, my wrist was as dry as a bone, and now had a 3/8-inch deep, cigarette sized hole in it.

After the flesh-searing incident, I was ready to go. All of us save Danny our DD and Abrams had a nice little buzz going on. Which would explain why the cauterized wound in my left arm hadn’t yet begun to hurt.

“Joe, you wanna go find Danny Abrams so we can get outta here?”

“Sure, Jake.”

Joe and Danny come out ten minutes later fairly panicked.

“Dude, he went home!” Joe stated with a shaky voice.

“What the hell do you mean he went home? You mean he took off with someone else?”

Danny looked at me as seriously as anyone has before and said something I never thought I would hear.

“He walked home.”

Now, if this was an on-campus party or a just-off-campus party, I wouldn’t be worried. He may have been a little rough around the edges, but he would walk a little while without getting himself hurt. It just so happens that this particular party was a seven-miles-away-from-campus party.

The five of us spent the next two hours traveling the route he would have most likely taken. We went back and forth, back and forth, three or four times, until we finally gave up.

The next afternoon I was awoken by a phone call and some of the worst pain I had ever experienced. Abrams had called to apologize for his actions the night before, and said that he would stick to the end of his deal, allowing the name. Stating emphatically that he never wanted to party with us again, he was ok being ‘Safety Boy.’

Some people just don’t be the round peg in the round hole, no matter how hard they try.

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Just My Luck

Some people believe in karma, some believe in kismet, or being born under a bad sign. I just think I have horrific luck, some of which is placed on me by none other than myself. I also seem to have the most atrocious sense of timing. The following are a slight modification of Murphy’s Laws to fit more appropriately to my life.

1a. Anytime that I must be somewhere and leave my apartment with more than adequate time, say 30 minutes when only 15 are needed to arrive at my destination, I will just barely get there on time. I will, without fail, hit every red light on the way, get pulled over, and be caught behind two trains at the same time.

1b. Anytime that I must be somewhere in 10 minutes, and leave my apartment 11 minutes before. I will just barely get there on time. I will hit no red lights, no cops, and no trains.

1c. With the exception of going to work, I will undoubtedly leave my apartment approximately 2 minutes before I have to be anywhere and arrive 10-15 minutes late, thus negating laws 1a and 1b.

2a. I consider myself fairly intelligent and the things I say when I converse have great meaning to me. Unfortunately, 94% of the people in my life either feign an interest or space out completely when I start talking about things that I find fascinating. My family and my girlfriend are the only exceptions to this rule.

2b. If I really need the other 94% of people to pay attention to something that I say, I must either interject a dick or fart joke every now and then, or wave something shiny in their face, such as a quarter or pocket watch.

2c. The only time I can guarantee 100% of people will remember anything I say to them is when I insult them.

3a. There is not one computer on the planet that I cannot get to work in tip top shape, as long as it is physically capable of doing so.

3b. The sole exception to rule 3a is my own personal computer. Which at times, will not cooperate for me after I have threatened its existence with a 20-pound sledgehammer.

4a. Anytime that I complain to anyone about how bad I am at a bar Olympics sport (pool, bowling, darts, etc.), I will without exception, beat everyone I gripe to.

4b. Anytime that I brag to anyone about how good I am at a bar Olympics sport, I will without exception, have my ass handed to me.

5a. Anytime I feel I have something important that I need to say in a crowded room I must shout over the crowd and I am unable to get everyone’s attention.

5b. Anytime I try to say something in a crowded room that was intended for the ears of one or zero persons, invariably the crowd will become silent approximately 1/100th of a second before the words are uttered, allowing all in the room to hear.

6. I will without a doubt, only realize how rude or condescending a statement is after I have heard it with my own ears, rather than hearing it in my head.

7a. My mom feels the need to call me the most in the following states: When I am asleep, when I am grumpy, when I am eating, when I need some time to myself, when I am in the shower or when I am otherwise ‘busy’.

7b. My mom constantly decides to be in the following states when I call her: asleep, grumpy, eating, needing time to herself, in the shower or otherwise ‘busy’.

8a. If I jump into a friend’s vehicle, and the stereo is turned up, I will be berated for not speaking to the driver of said vehicle.

8b. If I jump into a friend’s vehicle, and I turn down the stereo to speak to my friend, I will be berated for lowering the volume of the song because the driver wishes to hear it.

9a. The ease of falling asleep is directly proportional to the importance of the situation. For example, I am able to read out of the dictionary for hours, but as soon as I am in a classroom, I am unable to stay awake.

9b. The only exception to the previous rule is when the situation requires sleep. The ability to sleep is inversely proportional to the importance of required sleep.

10. Whenever I believe, unequivocally, that a situation cannot possibly get worse, I am proven wrong.

11a. All of my white friends love a good Mexican joke.

11b. All of my Mexican friends love a good white joke.

11c. All of my Mexican friends love a good Mexican joke.

11d. All of my good white friends HATE a good white joke.

12a. It is near impossible to put my friends in a good mood when they are feeling angry.

12b. It is fairly easy to put my friends in a bad mood or make them angry when they are feeling good.

13. It is impossible for me to tell how far is too far with a joke until I have already crossed the line.

14. It is impossible for me to tell how hard I have tossed an object until it smashes against someone’s head.

15. When I do get caught doing something I shouldn’t be doing, it will invariably be in the most embarrassing way possible.

16. The only thing stronger than my desire to avoid drama is my propensity for finding or creating it.

17. I have the ability to practice a skill until I am perfect at it, but when I put the skill into practice, it is far from perfect.

18. A situation will only go exactly as I expect, when I expect the situation to go badly.

And I Quote...

For a little bit of a lighter fare, some of my favorite quotes:

“Let me go ahead and share a little something special with you that I like to call Perry's perspective: one, if someone is standing in front of me in line at the coffee shop and can't decide what they want in the half hour it took to get to the register then I should be allowed to kill them; two, I am fairly sure that if they took porn off the internet, there would only be one website left and it would be called bring back the porn; three, and most importantly of all, the only way to be respected as a doctor and a man is to be an island, you are born alone, you damn sure die alone. Isn't that right spike? The point is, and you might want to jot this down, only the weak need help.”
-Dr. Cox, ‘Scrubs’

“The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Ecce Homo’

“Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.”
-Sir Winston Churchill

“Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet.”
-Dave Barry

“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”
-Niels Bohr

“Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.”
-Bill Watterson

“Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.”
-Voltaire

“Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.”
-Plato

“It is only necessary to make war with five things; with the maladies of the body, the ignorances of the mind, with the passions of the body, with the seditions of the city and the discords of families.”
-Pythagoras

“I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty.”
-Albert Einstein
“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
-George Orwell

“There is no substitute for victory.”
-General Douglas MacArthur

“There are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehend; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others; the first is the most excellent, the second is good, and the third is useless.”
-Niccolo Machiavelli, ‘The Prince’

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
-Groucho Marx

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”
-Carl Jung

“There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.”
-Richard Feynman

“If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say that the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.”
-George Carlin

“I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.”
-Woody Allen

“I rant, therefore I am.”
-Dennis Miller

“When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity.”
-Albert Einstein

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

A Sixth Sense

I believe that everyone, without exception, is born with the ability to perceive things outside of the realm of the ‘5 senses’ that we all grew up learning of. I believe that human beings were designed as receptors for information that we have yet to understand.

Over time, during our childhood development, one of two things happens to most people. The information received is miscomprehended and discounted as ‘junk’ by the perceiver; they therefore learn to deny themselves the perception. They fail to understand what their own mind is telling them, and in effect, learn to distrust themselves.

The other option is an attempt to adhere to normalcy. From the time we were small children, we have been taught that ESP does not exist. As far as we have been told, there is no such thing as a true psychic or oracle; anyone claiming to be so is a charlatan. We have been brainwashed into trying to fit into society’s standard of the truth, and never learn to hone the gifts that we have.

When I talk of ESP, or extra sensory perception, I am not speaking of crystal balls, palm readings, or tarot cards. You cannot teach someone to sense something that they were never designed to sense any more than you can teach a blind man to see. ESP shows itself in bits and pieces, not necessarily the flashes of clairvoyance that we have been accustom to seeing on our favorite TV shows.

If you have ever had a moment of instinctual discomfort that threw you off guard you might know what I mean. Let me explain.

As long as I can remember, I have had a seemingly randomly occurring feeling of distress. There is nothing in particular that triggers these feelings in me, no words, and no events. It can only be described as ‘bad vibes’, and places just one thought into my head… “Get Out.”

This flight response is something I consider to be extra sensory, not cause by what I see or hear but something that I feel. Something I cannot describe. At first, I discounted the feelings as irrational like most people would, that is, until I started to see things happening around me after I was feeling this way. The sensation has kept my friends and myself out of trouble, and has brought us trouble when we have denied it.

There was one instance in college when I was discounted as ‘just being paranoid’. I had just walked out of my friend’s apartment building on our way to a party with him and his girlfriend when a feeling of malaise hit me like a diesel train.

“You look like something’s bothering you Jake, what’s up?”

“I just got really bad vibes, maybe I should go home…”

“Don’t worry about it dude, just try to relax and stop being paranoid…”

Imagine my surprise when 20 minutes later when his girlfriend and I watched him being handcuffed and placed into the back of a squad car. That was the last time I ever felt weird for feeling that way, since then, it has kept me out of a lot of trouble.

Four times at college parties, with a ton of underage kids, I had this feeling sneak up on me. Four times, I left the events, with our without my friends. Four times, I drove past the parties as I was leaving to find 3-4 police cruisers in the driveway or the parking lot.

There was one specific instance when I was having a rather lighthearted conversation with a friend of mine, laughing and joking around. The flight response was triggered and a palpable unease set in.

“What’s wrong Jake?

“ I don’t know, I just got really bad vibes.”

No more than two minutes later, another friend of mine walks over, leans in, and whispers in my ear.

“We need to get out of here, RIGHT NOW…”

“Can you at least tell me what’s going on?”

“In the car, dude…”

I jump in the car and start driving, not knowing where or why I am going, just that I am.

“Can you explain what the problem is NOW?”

“Dude, they’re making crack in the kitchen!”

Sitting at a bar once, it hit me like lightning. I HAD to leave; my brain gave me no choice. The way my friend described it, it was like a scene from ‘Roadhouse’. About a minute after I left, people starting swinging pool cues, beer bottles, and bar stools at each other. The cops showed up only a few minutes later after some of the patrons subdued and held down the ones who started the brawl.

Call it ESP, call it intuition, or a subconscious ability to see things as they are going wrong. I believe that everyone has inherent abilities that we deny.

You know what they say about your first instinct.