1. “Your wife has got to understand that no matter how much you love her, you’re a hunter, and your hunting is no threat to her. But no wife will ever understand that. No, no woman will ever understand her man.”
—The Book Of Laughter & Forgetting by Milan Kundera

2. “Don’t you see that a man’s whole personality is bound up with his income? His personality is his income. How can you be attractive to a girl when you’ve got not money? You can’t wear decent clothes, you can’t take her out to dinner or to the theatre or away for weekends, you can’t carry a cheery, interesting atmosphere with you. And it’s rot to say that kind of thing doesn’t matter. It does.”
—Keep The Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell

3. “I am afriad that women appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts. We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters, all the same. They love being dominated.”
—The Picture Of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde

4. “The curious little talent that I happen to possess—the ability to hypnotize a woman with words—very seldom lets me down. It is not, of course, done only with words. The words themselves, the innocuous, superficial words, are spoken only by the mouth, whereas the real message, the improper and exciting promise, comes from all the limbs and organs of the body, and is transmitted through the eyes. More than that I cannot honestly tell you about how it is done. The point is that it works. It works like cantharides. I believe that I could sit down opposite the Pope’s wife, if he had one, and within fifteen minutes, were I to try hard enough, she would be leaning toward me over the table with her lips apart and her eyes glazed with desire. It is a minor talent, not a great one, but I am nonetheless thankful to have had it bestowed upon me, and I have done my best at all times to see that it has not been wasted.”
—The Visitor by Roald Dahl

5. “At the time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowering overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it. I would have waited for birds to fly by or clouds to mingle, just as here I waited to see my lawyer’s ties and just as, in another world, I used to wait patiently until Saturday to hold Marie’s body in my arms. Now, as I think back on it, I wasn’t in a hollow tree trunk. There were others worse off than me. Anyway, it is one of Maman’s ideas, and she often repeated it, that after a while you could get used to anything.”
—The Stranger by Albert Camus

6. “Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another.”
—Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

7. “It happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.”
—Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

8. “I am, as you may have gathered, a fairly resilient fellow. I explode when provoked, but I never brood about it afterwards. I scrub it out. There’s always another day. What’s more, nothing stimulates my mind so much as a whopping disaster. In the aftermath, in that period of deadly calm and absolute silence that follows the tempest, my brain becomes exceedingly active. As I sat drinking my whiskey during that terrible evening amidst the ruins, I was already beginning to ponder and plan my future all over again.”
—My Uncle Oswald by Roald Dahl

9. “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an Alp on the brains of the living.”
—Karl Marx

10. “The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.”
—The Picture Of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde

11. “And beneath his pessimism, his bleak conviction that all the machinery was rigged against him, at the bottom of his soul was a faith that he was going to outwit it, that by carefully watching the signs he was going to know when to dodge and be spared. It was fatalism with a loophole, and all you had to do to make it work was never miss a sign. Survival by coordination, as it were. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who can see it coming and jump aside. Like a frog evading a shillelagh in a midnight marsh.”
—The Rum Diaries by Hunter S. Thompson

12. “Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.”
—The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

13. “Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
—Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

I lose interest in a movie if a bumbling beta attracts a beautiful female (e.g. every Adam Sandler movie ever made). There has to be a chance that the relationship would happen in real life or else I’m watching a science-fiction flick that depicts a parallel universe where the immutable laws of attraction are suspended. This is why I like La Dolce Vita, Gloomy Sunday, When Harry Met Sally, movies by Pedro Almodovar (Broken Embraces, Talk To Her, Volver), and a couple by Woody Allen (Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Hannah & Her Sisters, and Annie Hall). A silly movie with cringe worthy dialogue like Before Sunset will get cut off after 10 minutes.

I recently saw Broken English, a movie centered around an American woman named Nora who is panicking because she’s in her 30′s and has no hope of finding a man. Even though her best friend is extremely unhappy in her relationship, Nora becomes desperate to settle down. (Fittingly, she had a chance at her friend’s man years ago but passed on him). Written by a woman, the movie nails a lot of the American female qualities which I have been beating here to death lately:

-plain clothing
-not sexy
-oversized sunglasses
-anxious
-overly logical
-not well-traveled
-slutty but unaffectionate
-neurotic and jittery
-snarky
-doped up on pharmaceuticals
-unable to control alcohol consumption
-distorted view of the relationship between sex and attraction

Nora reminds me of about 20 girls I’ve dated. She’s played by Parker Posey, your stereotypical pretty American girl (before the obesity epidemic). She’s reasonably cute, someone who you wouldn’t be ashamed walking down the street with. Wrinkles are starting to show on her face, but most men would sleep with her if given the chance (I would). With the right hairstyle and outfit she could be classified as extremely attractive.

As she wonders “What happened?” to the past ten years of her life, so does the viewer. How many guys did she pass on while in her physical prime? How many “actors” did she date until she realized they were no good for her? Why didn’t she take her mother’s advice sooner, who was at least successful enough in love to bear her? The movie doesn’t explore her past, just her current dating mishaps of getting pumped and dumped and going out with a man who has serious baggage. She becomes bitter and jaded, closing off her mind to potential suitors.

Approaching the depths of loneliness, she reluctantly attends a party thrown by a coworker. There she meets an artistic Frenchman who has classic direct game more common with his Spanish and Italian counterparts. American women are taken off-guard by this game at first (Nora calls his approach “intense”), but commonly break down to the persistent charm and affections of these men. (Sorry, a European accent or some otherwise exotic quality is needed to run this particular style of game. Trevor with the striped shirt would be laughed out the bar if he went around telling girls he wanted to kiss them.)

The Frenchman’s direct game is world class, and it doesn’t take him long to dismantle her bitter shield and get right down to business. We would expect a pump and dump in this case, but no—he’s smitten and spontaneously asks her to return to France with him. She says that she can’t because of her oh-so-important event planner job, among other logistical reasons, but we know it’s because she’s deathly afraid of being disappointed yet again.

The film falls apart after that, which is probably why you’ve never heard of it before. It could have been the spinster manifesto up there with Sex and the City, but instead gets tossed into the indie yarn stack behind Chasing Amy. Nonetheless, if you like my blog, you’ll like the movie. The game performance by the Frenchman is alone worth a viewing (note his body language, his devastating use of silence, and his tonality). Completely ignore the fact that in real life a handsome Frenchman wouldn’t fall for an aging spinster who, frankly, was a bitch to him for most of their time together, and enjoy a pretty accurate take on American hook-up culture from a woman’s perspective. It makes me almost feel bad for them.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Top 10 Most Important Books
• More Books
• More Books 2

Here are some brief thoughts on books I’ve read in the past year, from best to worst in fiction and nonfiction categories.

FICTION

Switch Bitch

A Roissy-recommended book of four short stories written by famous children’s author Roald Dahl, originally published long ago in Playboy magazine. The first and last story are about the wealthy Uncle Oswald and his womanizing ways. “The Great Switcheroo” is a story about two men who attempt to trade wives for a night, and “The Last Act” is about a suicidal woman who loses the love of her life. The stories are very well written and I found myself racing to the unpredictable climaxes.

The Running Man

With nonstop action this is like a summer Hollywood blockbuster in book form. If you don’t normally like books because they’re “boring,” you’ll like The Running Man, written by Stephen King under his pseudonym Richard Bachmann.

The government owns “the Network,” a broadcasting channel that takes reality television to a new level: on one show people with heart conditions are put on a speeding treadmill for prize money while another is called “Swim With Crocodiles.” Cheers erupt when contestants drop dead. These shows serve as an opiate of the masses to hide more serious problems with society.

Our hero eventually signs up for The Running Man show where contestants have to run from The Hunters for thirty days in order to win a billion dollars. Contestants get extra money for killing cops, but viewers get money as well if they report a sighting. The longest contestant survived for 8 days. I don’t want to give away the end (like the book’s introduction did), but it was quite satisfying.

A Clockwork Orange

A 15-year-old and his “droogs” go around town doing the “ultra-violence.” He eventually gets caught and is rehabilitated to be a puppy dog who cannot lay a finger on anyone, even to defend himself, raising the question of how important moral choice is to being human. The first 50 pages of this book is hard to understand because of the made-up language that Burgess uses, but eventually you pick up on it and enjoy parts 2 and 3, where the book becomes a page turner.

Siddhartha

A novelized introduction to Buddhism (with Hinduism thrown in) that chronicles one man’s search for wisdom and meaning. If you like Eastern philosophy you’ll enjoy it as many of the concepts will be familiar to you. It’s a quick, somber read that gets you thinking.

Fahrenheit 451

This book depicts a future dystopia where book ownership is outlawed, and those burning the books are firemen. The main character, Guy Montag, is a fireman who becomes curious of books and how things were like when firemen put out fires instead of starting them. To him, society has to be more than being constantly glued to the television, wanting to be entertained. This is an good book, but more like a warm-up to 1984 then something I’d say is on the same level.

Brave New World

Another dystopia book that shows how humans of the future will be chemically conditioned at birth to fit pre-determined casts (gammas, deltas, betas, and alphas). Conditioning continues in childhood with “sleep learning,” where a speaker near the bed teaches them an entire belief system that they will keep for the rest of their lives, all to maintain social order and stability, the ultimate goal of civilization.

All future humans know their place and are always happy, amused with constant distractions and soma, a pharmaceutical that causes blissful relaxation. A problem arises when a “savage” enters the picture and questions civil society. Some say we’ve more realized the vision spelled out in this book more than in 1984, as we’re drugged, always entertained, and trained to be apathetic through individualism. Brave New World is not quite a page turner but I did enjoy it.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying

This is one of George Orwell’s earliest works that he claimed to write solely for the paycheck. It’s about an English man who rebels against the “money God” and quits his corporate job for a meager life as a poet and bookshop assistant. He’s initially somewhat happy at his noble lifestyle, but money soon becomes an obsession that shapes his relationships and turns him into a neurotic mess, until a drunken escapade sends him into the abyss. The main theme of this book can best be described as “Being poor sucks,” and while I enjoyed reading it, I can’t help compare it to George’s more famous and interesting work, Down And Out In Paris and London.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

After Dorian’s friend paints a beautiful portrait of him, he prays to never age. His wish comes true and the painting ages while he remains young and flawless. He leads a dark life and the painting becomes a source of all his shame, driving him mad in the process. This book contains mostly flamboyant dialogue, but is somewhat enjoyable. The author had a lot of interesting thoughts on beauty and women.

The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting

This book has seven short stories that are loosely related and filled with Kundera’s real experience in Czech during the Soviet occupation. The halo around Kundera’s writing has faded a bit for me after my second reading of The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, due to fatigue from his constant explanations into the motivations and behaviors of his characters. Here’s his basic formula: present a difficult situation between individuals with symbolic references to innocence or sex and then explain it to death. His writing is excellent and he’s eminently quotable, but parts of this book was a slog to get through.

The Stranger

An emotionally detached man ends up killing an Arab. During the trial his thoughts on the meaningless of life becoming more evident. This very short book is an introduction to the philosophy of absurdism.

Lolita

An old man falls in love with a 12-year-old girl. I’ll admit I bought the book for the pedophilic sex scenes but there were none. Instead we have the main character drone on about his love for the little girl in language that was too flowery for my taste. The writing was fine, but by the end of the book I still didn’t understand why he was so deeply in love with her.

An American Dream

A distinguished war veteran and former Congressman faces problems with his marriage that he is unable to solve. He ends up killing his wife and then gets involved with the dark New York underworld. The book starts off strong with great writing but then falls apart in the second act.

NON-FICTION

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Very entertaining story of the most legendary trip to Las Vegas ever recorded. That’s all you need to know.

Angela’s Ashes

Well-written memoir of a boy growing up poor in Catholic Ireland around World War 2. Provides a good view of how fucked up Catholicism is. Book starts off slow but becomes more engaging as the narrator hits his teenage years. A little disorienting with the lack of quotation marks in dialogue.

What The Buddha Taught

The book teaches you the main concepts of Buddhism including The Four Noble Truths, Anatta (doctrine of no soul), and Meditation. I wrote detailed notes about the book here.

Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy

I read this book because I’m bombarded with so many different messages on what I should and shouldn’t eat that I was becoming confused. Basically I needed a manual on how to eat food. The book didn’t disappoint, using a scientific approach to push a natural, plant-based diet low in saturated and trans fat. The author skewered the USDA food pyramid and offered one of his own that limits dairy and meat intake. It was written a few years ago but is otherwise current with its conclusions.

Den Of Lions

A reporter for the AP based in Lebanon repeatedly ignores dire warnings to his own safety until he finally gets kidnapped by Islamic Jihad. He is held for over seven years in various apartments within Lebanon, often with other hostages. This book is a memoir of his time held captive, leading up to his eventual release. The narrative is not exactly gripping (hard to do so when you’re chained up against a wall most of the time), but it was an interesting read if you want to mentally prepare yourself for behind kidnapped and held for long periods of time. I have to give the author credit for holding up in a situation where most other humans would break down.

The Great Crash Of 1929

I was hoping for a more gritty account of how the commoners faced the depression, but instead I found a technical, month-by-month account of the events that led to the crash. The book offered some lessons for the future that were of course ignored.

Did I miss anything?

PREVIOUSLY: INTRODUCTION TO BUDDHISM

For my second trip to South America I put 30 books in a duffel bag. One of them was The Essential Epicurus, a collection of works by the Greek philosopher. From Epicurus.net:

Epicurus (341–270 B.C.) founded one of the major philosophies of ancient Greece, helping to lay the intellectual foundations for modern science and for secular individualism. Many aspects of his thought are still highly relevant some twenty-three centuries after they were first taught in his school in Athens, called “the Garden.”

Epicurus’s philosophy combines a physics based on an atomistic materialism with a rational hedonistic ethics that emphasizes moderation of desires and cultivation of friendships. His world-view is an optimistic one that stresses that philosophy can liberate one from fears of death and the supernatural, and can teach us how to find happiness in almost any situation. His practical insights into human psychology, as well as his science-friendly world-view, gives Epicureanism great contemporary significance as well as a venerable role in the intellectual development of Western Civilization.

While reading the book I’ll admit that I dozed off while going through his explanations on clouds…

Clouds may be produced and take shape as the result of the compression of air by the forcing together of winds and as the result of the interlacing of atoms that grip one another and are suitable to bringing about this result…

earthquakes…

Earthquakes may result both from the imprisonment of wind inside the earth, and from the earth’s shifting in small masses and its constant movement, which produces the quaking.

and falling stars…

What are called falling stars may be produced partly by the stars’ rubbing against each other and by the falling out of their fragments where a blast of wind occurs…

But I stuck in there and was rewarded in the end was very nice quotes that do provide a blueprint for living. Here are my favorites:

The man who alleges that he is not yet ready for philosophy or that the time for it has passed him by, is like the man who says that he is either too young or too old for happiness.

For there is nothing dreadful in life for the man who has truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living.

Becoming accustomed, therefore, to simple and not luxurious fare is productive of health and makes humankind resolved to perform the necessary business of life.

[The wise man] thinks that it is preferable to remain prudent and suffer ill fortune than to enjoy good luck while acting foolishly.

No pleasure is evil in itself; but the means of obtaining some pleasures bring in theire wake troubles many times greater than the pleasures.

If every pleasure were [maximized] and existed for a long time throughout the entire organism of its most important parts, pleasures would never differ from one another.

Of all the things that wisdom provides for living one’s entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.

We do not need the help of our friends so much as the confidence that our friends will help us.

Speaking frankly, I would prefer, when discoursing on nature, to utter useful things, like oracles, to humankind, even if no one should understand them, than to agree with popular opinion and enjoy the constant accolades offered by the crowd.

Some men spend their whole life furnishing for themselves the things proper to life without relaizing that at our birth each of us was poured a mortal brew to drink.

The voice of the flesh cries, “Keep me from hunger, thirst, and cold!” The man who has these sureties and who expects he always will would rival even Zeus for happiness.

The wise man who has accustomed himself to the bare necessities knows how to give rather than to receive. So great is the treasure house of self-sufficiency he has discovered.

There is also a limit to frugality. The man unable to consider this suffers a similar end as the man who indulges in excess.

You ought to do nothing in your life that will make you afraid if it becomes known to your neighbor.

The following method of inquiry must be applied to every desire: What will happen to me if what I long for is accomplished? What will happen if it is not accomplished?

If the gods listened to the prayer of men, all human-kind would quickly perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another.

No fool is satisfied with what he has, but instead grieves for what he does not possess.

He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing.

Know that what passes for good and evil among the throng if ephermeral, and that wisdom shares nothing in common with fortune.

Many men who acquire wealth do not find deliverance from evils but an exchange of their present evils for greater ones.

My take on his philosophy: peace of mind and confidence can only come from knowledge based on facts, and it’s the prudent application of knowledge that leads to a happy, social life where being poor but wise is preferable to being rich and lucky.

You can read his works for free at Epicurus.net.

When I had a job a couple years ago I was asked by my little cousins to give a speech at their career day:

I talked to 3rd graders first and was very impressed with their zombie-like state. Even though they probably didn’t care about what I was saying, they appeared to be paying close attention. They stared at the front of the class while remaining completely still. They obediently raised their hands when I asked for participation, and no one spoke unless I called on them. They read questions from a worksheet given out by the teacher.

The environment was robbing them of creativity and spontaneous excitement. Whenever a kid got distracted and started doodling or going through things in his desk, the teacher interrupted me to snap at him. This happened even more in the 1st grade class because they were not fully “trained.” I felt bad for them. They were being ordered around like soldiers.

I have overcome the brainwashing of public schooling and my mom’s constant nagging to do what I’m doing today, which if you’re reading this on Sunday afternoon is riding an eight-hour bus.

In the next post I share my tips for making it through a day at the office.

Put your back to your cubicle entrance and practice falling asleep with one hand on the keyboard and the other on the mouse. (Make sure you have a work-related document open on the screen.) This is easy to do if you have a chair that has a high back. There are two things to watch out for: (1) Your screensaver may activate while you nap, and (2) Your hand may smash some keys, making people who pass by you wonder why you have a screen full of G’s. When someone knocks on the frame of your cubicle entrance, waking you up, they will confuse your tired haze with deep and creative thought.

I respect people who are doing what they can to make a living, but that office shit was unbearable to me.

In Spring of 2009 I picked up What The Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula and after reading each chapter I went on the internet for more explanation on concepts mentioned in the book. I took notes on everything so that I could consult with them later, as the beliefs espoused by Buddhism matched very closely to my own.

Here is a sampling of the topics I took notes on:

• The Four Noble Truths
• The Five Aggregates
• The Noble Eightfold Path
• Anatta (Concept of No Soul)
• Meditation
• Five Hindrances to Clear Understanding
• Seven Factors Of Enlightenment

Download my notes in a PDF file (the nested lists would take forever to format for the blog). I reread them myself every month.

I want to start a new “feature” where I reach around back into the archives and pull out posts that are both interesting or useful today. It’s time to dust off some of the gold I’ve written in the past.

The first post is Womanly Advice. I offer reasons why you should never listen to a woman when it comes to getting laid.

When you ask a woman for advice, she doesn’t tell you what works in a world based on reality; instead, she tells you what would work in a perfect, harmonius world where attention is free and plentiful, where no one hurts each other and no one plays any games. She tells you what would work if no one got punished for expressing feelings and interest. She tells you advice that always seems to work in television and movies where the beta always gets the beautiful girl. (Not suprisingly, most mainstream movies are written by beta white guys.)

In the other post I lament about my failure to bed Russian Girls..

My Russian roommate, an expert on matters such as this, says the cold attitude of these non-Americanized Russians is not so much snobbiness as it is insecurity, “They are intimidated by Americans and don’t feel confident when having to talk in English.” It has to be cultural because I’ve spoken to many other girls where there was a language barrier and I didn’t get this feeling that hacking away at permafrost in Siberia would be more interesting.

Roissy was the most helpful with sharing tips in comments 23 and 32.

I’ve been learning idioms here in Colombia to seemlessly integrate myself with the locals. The challenge is using them properly in live conversation, and I’m happy to say that I did just that with one I’ve been dying to use for a while.

The English idiom “I need to sleep on it” translates to “Tengo que consultarlo con la almohada.” If you translate that back to English it means, “I have to consult with the pillow.” It’s a great idiom.

I went to a street market to buy some lemons, which in Colombia are green like limes and share the same name. To clarify: both lemons and limes in Colombia are green, and they are both called lemons, but different types of lemons. Lemons are called limon and limes are called limon tahiti, suggesting that they are both members of the same family. If you ask a vendor for a lima, what most gringos think of as the Spanish word for lime, you won’t be understood.

American lemons are larger than limes, but in Colombia the lemons are smaller and look almost exactly like American limes.

Yet there’s more…

Oranges in Colombia are green, like American limes. Again, the oranges are green. They’re still called naranja, which is Spanish for orange. What really fucks with your head is cutting open a Colombian lemon or orange to see bright yellow or orange pulp inside a green shell.

Back to the story. At the market the vendor knew I was gringo and quoted me $0.75 for two green lemons, an outrageous sum. In my plain clothing I don’t understand how he pegged me for a very wealthy man.

I got him down to $0.50, then said, “Tengo que consultarlo con la almohada” and walked away. Score! The look on his face said, “Who the fuck is this interesting gringo?”

Down the street I found a place that sold me four lemons for $0.20. This short series of events worked out really great for me.

Or so I thought, because when I went home I actually bought limes. Now if I come across a recipe that calls for a lemon or lime, I look for another recipe.