Archive for January, 2012
Little Miracles #2: Polypropylene Underwear
Although it’s 81°F here in Singapore, back home in New York it’s 20°F. The days are falling from the calendar, and when I return to the USA, New York will be in its worst month, my birthday month, February. The bitch of winter. I’m not worried, though, because I have a secret weapon to fight the cold.
It’s called polypropylene. That link goes to the Amazon search for fabrics made of the stuff, but unless you’re itching to give me affiliate money (and why wouldn’t you be?), you don’t need to be overly concerned with clicking there. You can find polypropylene underwear at any Army Navy Surplus store in America.
I first learned about polypropylene when I was serving in the Marines. The winter of 2000 was a cold one, and the recruits were shown a rare mercy by the command (which the drill instructor staff, of course, took credit for) by being issued polypropylene underwear, a top and a bottom set for each recruit. At least that’s how it was for 1st Battalion. 3rd Battalion would probably tell you they were issued barbed wire underwear for training during the same period. What seemed horrific to us recruits was that we were not allowed to wear the stuff when we were undergoing the most strenuous outdoor training. This was true after recruit training as well, when our NCOs would check to see whether or not we were wearing the polypros because there was a risk of passing out from heat stroke in the winter weather because of how warm the things kept us.
I grew up in Florida and attended high school in New Hampshire. Some of my most vivid memories from boarding school are of trudging to class late in the morning as my body, especially my face, was pelted by miniature spears of ice. I remember sneering angrily at nature as my bike slipped and slided through snow on my way to a criminally early swim meet. Although I have lived through some cold winters, I was not born into it, and I have always hated it. I had worn long underwear before, and it definitely helps, but nothing ever solved the damned problem. When I learned about polypropylene, it was a seminal moment. Granted, recruit training had a lot of seminal moments, but the impacts from some lasted longer than others. I still wear polypropylene underwear when it gets cold, but I rarely* march in formation.
New York, where I’ve lived since 2004, has been the ultimate test space for my enthusiastic praise of polypros. Daily life has its share of miserable cold experiences when February comes, but the stuff officially made the cut to Little Miracle when I started performing stand-up comedy. Beginning comics need time, and many of the people who run shows around New York make the new talent pass out flyers to strangers on the streets. If you live in New York and have been in Times Square, you’ve probably seen my people. Some of those guys and girls are just working for a company, but a lot of them are hard-working comics trying to make it. The job is unpleasant enough as it is. You stand outside and bark at strangers who, by and large, seem to hate you. The cold, though, can make it into a soul-searing nightmare. I have stood outside in 10°F weather cursing the wind between overtures to strangers. If you want to get on that stage, though, you do what you gotta do. But I haven’t hated that assignment for a long time. Sure, my face gets cold, but I have a great jacket with a thick hood. And I have polypropylene underwear. I can stand around the entire day in weather that’s as cold as the continental United States has to offer and smile at what the elements throw my way.
I’ve never been to Alaska or Antarctica, never tested my thermal underwear against the likes of Nova Scotia, even. I’m sure in more dramatic environments more dramatic measures are called for, though. This blog, though, assumes you’re someone with access to considerable numbers of beautiful women, and that necessarily excludes extreme climates. If you’re living somewhere that gets freezing, your life will change drastically when you first start wearing polypropylene underwear.
Caveat Emptor
Women, of course, have their vanity to think about. I don’t really have a solution for you guys, except when you are slogging in jeans and a long jacket anyway, and looking cute isn’t your first priority. Men, also, need to recognize that these things work well, and if you wear them in a warmer environment (i.e. anywhere above 70°F), you are going to start sweating. It’s rare, but there have even been some Chicago and New York workshops where I’ve been forced to strip that layer away and check it with my outer coat.
Stay warm, readers. Now I’m going to head out and try to figure out how to handle the opposite problem as I lug my camera equipment all around Singapore looking for the perfect shot.
*– never
Little Miracles #1: Meditation
Little Miracles
I’m going to call the articles in this series little miracles because they are tiny changes in my life that have yielded huge returns. These are changes that hugely affect the way I live, and if I can share them with you guys and help you, I wanna do that.
The first thing I want to talk about is meditation.
No, Seriously, Meditation
There are a lot of schools of meditation. If you’ve learned your way and you haven’t seen the results I talk about in this post, I highly, highly recommend Vedic meditation specifically. That link goes to the New York Meditation Center, but I assume Vedic meditation is Vedic meditation.
I’ll start by saying I’m not a crystal-rubbing, tree-fucking sissy-pants. I put The Power of Now down the very first sentence he mentioned people’s crystal vibrations. Fuck your crystal vibrations. I was on board all the way up through then, but when I hear people talking about crystal vibrations I turn off. Heck, I’m a Christian, but when I hear people talk about the healing power of prayer I want to hit them with a bag of dicks (and then recommend a fucking specialist for their sick person). If you’re reading my blog there’s a really good chance you feel the same way.
So I want to talk to you about cold, hard results from meditation and why I am selling it to you. I’m not going to talk to you about feeling better or having more clarity. I’m not going to talk about calming your mind or handling stress better. All those things seem to have come from meditation, but I don’t trust woo-woo stuff, so I’m not going to sell you with that stuff. If you’re looking for those things, meditation helps, but it won’t make up for a lack of money, shitty relationships, and a life with poor diet and exercise.
No, I’m just going to talk two things that are just simple math.
First, with Vedic meditation, I sleep less. If I lag on meditation, it takes me about two weeks of forty minutes a day (two twenty minute sessions), but once I do that, I sleep about five hours a night and emerge completely rested. For reference purposes, I used to sleep eight hours a night, and if I got any less (and sometimes any more), I would be a mess. Daily meditation has added two hours and twenty minutes to every day of my life. That’s about 35 and a half extra days a year if you were wondering. By sitting still for twenty minutes twice a day.
As cool as that is, the next benefit is, to me, the better one. There are a lot of things I do that counteract a longer life. I drink a lot of soda. I have unprotected sex. I sometimes go to the Bronx. But I get by. No, this next benefit is a concrete counter to misery.
If you meditate, jet lag will be a thing of the past. The effect is nothing short of miraculous.
Flying to London or Hong Kong, Moscow or Sydney, I’ve always had terrible jet lag. For my entire life, when planning international travel, I’ve always had to plan for a day or two of lying around useless, waiting for my mind and body to right themselves before taking part in whatever brought me to foreign soil to begin with (usually the hard labor of banging the locals). The last time I flew to Asia was a couple months after my class at the New York Meditation Center. Even though meditation had already been doing wonders for me, I still mapped out my sleep, stayed up the night before my flight, and carefully timed when I fell asleep (and strictly avoided sleep) on the plane. I also meditated at my normal East Coast times. If that sounds like a lot of stuff to keep track of, it’s because it’s a lot of fucking stuff to keep track of! Now, my meditation teacher had told me that jet lag would no longer affect me, but I was skeptical.
Neither when I hit the ground in Singapore, nor when I returned to New York did I have even a whiff of jet lag.
As I type this I’m sitting in Singapore. I’ve been meditating for nearly a year, and I’m very conscious of its power. I did no sleep prep or control whatsoever. In fact, I stayed up late playing a few last games of League of Legends with my girlfriend and my Teamspeak crew. I woke up like normal, meditated before I left, caught my plane, meditated four times during the flights over, and slept when I felt like it. No jet lag whatsoever.
Amazing. I’ve gone from truly fearing jet lag, planning around it and looking at it as a major imposition on my travel plans to scoffing at the very possibility.
How Does It Work?
I don’t really witness for meditation much. If people are interested I’ll tell them about it, but as a rule I don’t like to offer advice to people who aren’t asking. This is probably because a lot of people pay me for advice, and I appreciate the time off. But some of my friends clearly need meditation, so when they’ve mentioned how they’re panicked about work or feel overloaded, I mention that there are real, tangible benefits to meditation. Keep in mind, I don’t mention that it will actually help with their stress and ability to see the world with more clarity. I certainly feel like that, but I can’t measure it, and I don’t want to make a promise around something so nebulous.
Sadly, their responses are invariably along the lines of, “I could never sit still long enough to meditate,” or, “I could never get my heads clear.”
These are good friends of mine who know me, yet they act like I am not always sifting through a mental maelstrom.
If that’s what you’re thinking, I sympathize, but let me describe meditation and see if I can give you a clearer picture of how it works.
First of all, you don’t have to get your head clear.
As I understand it, Vedic meditation can be best summed up as “returning to the mantra.” When I went to the New York Meditation Center, my teacher, a really nice gay man named Michael, took me in a back room (NOW is the appropriate time for sophomoric jokes) and gave me a mantra. He always pronounced it with a flicker of Indian accent: “manth-ra.” It’s a two-syllable nonsense word that he apparently chose based on what he knew of me from the questionnaire I’d filled out.
Then we sat still and were told to repeat the mantra in our minds over and over again. If we started thinking about cheeseburgers or the effects of the beholder’s central eye,* no problem, just return to the mantra. Don’t focus on it. Don’t commit to it. No words that evoke the idea of effort. Just return to it. When (not if) you start thinking about other things, just return to the mantra. Do this for 20 minutes.
Sometimes I think of story ideas, sometimes I think about sex, and sometimes I think about writing blog entries about meditation. It still works. Sometimes I zone out, and the 20 minutes is gone like two minutes. It feels a little like falling asleep. You enter that hypnagogic state between sleeping and waking, but after a while you accept that you’re not napping, even though you might be concerned that you are at first. Take a two minute rest to settle back into normal thoughts, and go on with your life.
That’s it.
Maybe there’s some magic behind the mantra, but I doubt it. I think I just taught you how to meditate. It seems important to pick a thing that has no meaning, so the mantra is anchored only to the task of meditating. This is why you don’t tell your friends your mantra EVER. No one should ever, ever know what your mantra is, because it should be something solely for the purpose of meditation. Hence the nonsense word. I think it’s also helpful, probably, to blend consonants, because they get murky in the mind, and that’s a good thing. I’ll say that again: it’s all good in the hood if your syllables smear all over each other. As long as you return to the mantra, you’re meditating. So a word like “skarshlem” or “blorwem” would be good because their syllables are smeary. Swedes are probably badass meditators.
There’s more to it than that. A lot more. I have not yet reached the state of meditation where I’m conscious when I’m asleep, which sounds cool but a little scary, and I have not yet reached the state where I’m meditating all the time, even when I’m walking around. That sounds fucking awesome, though. If I hit those points, I’ll definitely write about them, but for the time being, I have real, hard, measurable results, and I wanted to share them with you.
And I’m not a professional. I’m just someone who has seen real results from meditation. The thing is, you can get these results VERY quickly. Try it! Make up a mantra with the rules above. If you start daydreaming, just go back to the mantra. If you persist in daydreaming, you’re just being idle, but as long as you return to the mantra, you’re meditating.
If you do this twice a day for 20 minutes each time, I predict you will see measurable results. Maybe then look for a more advanced teacher like Michael, the guy at New York Meditation Center who taught me.
*– save vs. death!
A Screed Against Boredom
There’s a lot I want to say about this, but I just landed in Singapore last night. The light is fading, the girls’ shorts are very short, and I have an itchy camera finger.
The flight here from New York is a long one. You probably know that. Mine was about 22 hours. 13 from NYC to Tokyo, 8 from Tokyo to Singapore. A lot of people hear that and blow through puffed lips before saying, “That’s a long flight.” And it is. Which is why I did the same thing* I do whenever I have a lot of time to kill: I read. I watched some movies. I meditated as long as I could (about three hours altogether). All in all, my flight was the same as any other time sitting around. Periodically I got up and did some stretches and some push-ups. Yes, on a plane.
That’s not the point, though. Periodically I walked around the plane and saw people just sitting there with their eyes open. They were bored. BORED!
If you are bored, it’s your fault. There is no getting around it. There is just too much to do. There’s NOTHING you can write? There’s NOTHING you can practice? There’s NO MOVIE you want to watch? There’s NO PERFORMANCE you want to see? There’s NO BOOK you’re interested in? There’s NO VIDEO GAME you want to play?
When people tell me they’ve been bored, it half confounds and half angers me. If you are bored, you are mocking your mortality. What do I mean? I’ve only typed it ten thousand times:
YOU ARE GOING TO DIE ONE DAY!
In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl says the sum of his teaching is: “Live as if you were living for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act.” Every moment is the meaning of life for you, reader. Every second you get to be the best you you can be. You’re bored? You’re not scared enough. Give away your money or jump out of a plane. If you’re bored, you’re naive.
There’s always something else to learn.
There’s always something else to win.
There’s always someone else to know.
When you shut down your options in any given moment it is because you have grown fat and happy on the satisfaction of an easy life.
If you’re bored, it’s your own damned fault.
Starlight and Future’s Excellent Asian Adventures
No bullshit: Starlight and I wrote a book on how to pick up women in Asia.
If you guys haven’t received word, Starlight and I put together a little promotional e-book for people living in and around Asia. There’s some new stuff and some old stuff, but overall we’re pretty proud of the final result. It’s got stories and tips from Starlight’s and my eponymous adventures in Asia as well as some good information from my boy Blue Mystery.
Excerpted:
“Her tattoo was a dragon that perched on her shoulder and trailed in a thin line down her back. It was audacious and feminine somehow, and it had stopped at the bar. I swooped in and shouldered her out of the way.
You’re hot enough to get served second,” I said into her ear without looking at her. She looked appalled. “I love your tattoo. What’s your name?”
“Mai,” she said.
“Why are girls in Hong Kong so grabby?” I scream-said into her ear.
“What do you mean?” she said with a laugh.
“Even just walking around, even dancing with other guys, I feel like every girl in here is trying to give me a massage with their asses,” I said, checking her with my hips. “Like you did just now.”
“Who are you?” she said. It’s the tone when they ask, emphasis on that second word. That’s when you know you’ve stood out…”
If you have any questions or comments about the book or about picking up women in Asia, by all means say something in the comments or send me an e-mail at future@lovesystems.com. We’re really excited for this tenth (or so) program across the Pacific, and we’ll need your help to make these the best ones we’ve ever run.
Starlight and Future’s Excellent Asian Adventures
No bullshit: Starlight and I wrote a book on how to pick up women in Asia.
If you guys haven’t received word, Starlight and I put together a little promotional e-book for people living in and around Asia. There’s some new stuff and some old stuff, but overall we’re pretty proud of the final result. It’s got stories and tips from Starlight’s and my eponymous adventures in Asia as well as some good information from my boy Blue Mystery.
Excerpted:
“Her tattoo was a dragon that perched on her shoulder and trailed in a thin line down her back. It was audacious and feminine somehow, and it had stopped at the bar. I swooped in and shouldered her out of the way.
You’re hot enough to get served second,” I said into her ear without looking at her. She looked appalled. “I love your tattoo. What’s your name?”
“Mai,” she said.
“Why are girls in Hong Kong so grabby?” I scream-said into her ear.
“What do you mean?” she said with a laugh.
“Even just walking around, even dancing with other guys, I feel like every girl in here is trying to give me a massage with their asses,” I said, checking her with my hips. “Like you did just now.”
“Who are you?” she said. It’s the tone when they ask, emphasis on that second word. That’s when you know you’ve stood out…”
If you have any questions or comments about the book or about picking up women in Asia, by all means say something in the comments or send me an e-mail at future@lovesystems.com. We’re really excited for this tenth (or so) program across the Pacific, and we’ll need your help to make these the best ones we’ve ever run.
WATCH! Asa Akira Goes Deep (SFW)
SFW until about two minutes before the end.
This guy has struck gold. I hope he does a thousand of these hilarious videos.
Now back to more articles on how to get women!
Soon in the LSi: The Price of Mastery
A Breakthrough Comfort student e-mailed me the other day to say he had found a really great girl, and he was really excited about it. I started to reply to him, then I started a blog post, then I realized it was universal enough to warrant an LSi. So that should be in your inbox soon. Looking forward to people’s reactions. Here’s a snippet.
“A simple truth of the human experience is that if you want to be master something, you must accept the equating the glory and satisfaction of achievement and improvement with the sacrifice it took to get there. If that sounds like medicine too bitter to swallow, you are beginning a conversation that ends with a life of mediocrity. You can get good at something by dabbling, but to rise above the hobbyists and the amateurs, you need to cut something out. Remember, if it doesn’t suck or doesn’t hurt or isn’t inconvenient, it’s not sacrifice.
In most areas of life, you pay this cost with your social life.“
Oh and Happy New Year!