Apparently some dedicated readers were thinking I had quit traveling because I hadn't written much about traveling lately. That is certainly not the case but my travels have not been too exciting. Bridge trips to gatlinburg and Augusta and day trips to Atlanta (mostly for chipotle) are not blog-worthy.

I guess the Charlottesville trip the first weekend of April could have been blog-worthy but I actually did hardly anything but eat and play bridge.

Perhaps my upcoming 4 day bridge trip to Richmond will have some excitement that's non-bridge-related.

If not, surely my Toronto/Montreal trip in Juky will be blogger about. Now that I'm definitely not in the GNT, I guess I can start actually making travel plans.

Sent from my iPhone

Dreams

While I was in Charlottesville last weekend, I had a couple of strange dreams. In the first one, I had taken up a second job as a bartender at a strip club. Apparently I had a girlfriend working there. And during the slow times, I would get out and dance on the pole some. After awhile, the club decided to have a role-reversal day – the male employees would be the strippers and the girls would be the bouncers, managers, bartenders. But as the time came, a bunch of the guys bailed and I woke up so I can’t complete the story.

In the second dream the following night, someone had recommended a car repair shop that was attached to a restaurant that was overlooking a river.  So I took my Solara there and it was really sketchy. I had to park on a shaky pier and they had to tie down the car to make sure it didn’t go rolling into the river. For some strange reason, I went along with this. Sure enough, while I’m in the restaurant, I see the car start to roll away so I run out of the restaurant to try to save the car but it drowns. However, I go buy a Prius on the spot and drive home happy.

Maybe I should buy a Prius and work at a strip club?

Business Cards

How do you feel about business cards? Would you rather someone hand you a business card with all of the person's contact info or just add the person's number in your phone on the spot? Is it different for guys and girls? I mean, is it appropriate for a guy to give a girl he is interested in his business card and say "call or text me when you're free so we can hang out" or is it still better to straight up ask for her phone number or to straight up ask her on a date (and then exchange phone numbers)? Or have we progressed even farther that the in thing to do is just add the girl on facebook and send her a facebook message the next day?

I think we all would rather the burden be on someone else to make the first move and it's not fair that in the traditional sense, guys have to make all the first moves and women have veto power. Giving out your business card has a sense of professionalism and class that might not otherwise get conveyed. Plus, it puts the ball in the girl's court. You made the first move and showed your interest, let her make the second and call you.

People hate being rejected, so this system of giving your number and asking them to call you later kind of masks the rejection. If she's interested, she'll call (one would think) and if she's not interested, she won't but you haven't totally be rejected because you never actually asked her out.

In this modern world, more and more communication is done through email and the number of couples that met through online dating is getting a bit ridiculous. But apparently some people still are not as attached to their phones and the internet and facebook as I am. That is hard for me to understand. What do people do at home without internet? However, everyone does have a phone. Nothing beats face to face interaction and asking someone out face to face. Calling on the phone is next best but do girls really still care about how they are asked out any more or would a facebook message saying "dinner tomorrow night at 7?" be adequate for asking you out for the first time?

Essential vs. non-essential personnel

Something seems backwards. A couple of days ago, people at work were finally talking about the potential government shutdown and the fact that it probably wouldn’t affect us because we are paid by the project and funding has already been allocated for our specific project while other government workers might get some unpaid vacation time because they are paid more directly.

Aside from that, the government shutdown should affect only non-essential personnel, meaning that essential personnel would still have to report for work, even if the federal budget expires. That would include police, fire fighters, air traffic controllers, and other jobs that directly impact public safety. I am clearly a non-essential employee and honestly, would not mind a few days of unpaid leave even though it is very unlikely to happen now.

Anyway, shouldn’t essential personnel be paid more than non-essential personnel? The simple distinction between essential and non-essential indicates that one group of people is more important than another group of people, and therefore should be compensated more generously for the work. I know fire fighters, EMT’s, and police officers don’t make near what most engineers make but it would be a major problem if they were to all stop working, even for a day, but society could live without engineers for awhile. Eventually, the lack of engineers would cause a problem but it wouldn’t be the disaster of going without police officers for a day.

Trust Issues

It’s hard to trust people. Unless it’s someone who has a proven track record of dozens of encounters with me, I have doubts in my mind about whether someone will flake out on me or forget about a plan we made or just not understand me clearly. I can count on one hand the number of people I never worry about being a bad friend. I try to trust people and accept that when they say they’ll do something that they will do it (or have a damn good excuse for not doing it). In the past, that has left me disappointed too many times and mentally unprepared to adapt to the situation well. But the truth is that most people are unreliable, except to their immediate family and a couple of their closest friends, and trusting people who haven’t proved to you that they are dependable only leads to more disappointment later on. I’ve found that a good attitude to have in situations like this (having a date or other plan with someone relatively new to you) is: “I don’t care much what happens. If the person does come through, great, but if not – well, I didn’t expect them to anyway and I’ll find something else to do.” I tend to think I am extremely reliable, even with people I barely know but I may be delusional.

Turning a Hobby Into a Job

Many times we say that we should do what we want and try to not be concerned about money but no matter how hard we try, money always winds up being a factor. Money is why many of us stay in jobs we have rather than search for something more satisfying or fulfilling. Some of us are able to pursue a passion while not having to worry about money or do mindless jobs to make ends meet but such people are in the minority. In theory, having a job where you essentially do what you love most should be the most ideal situation.

A lot times I hear that having a job you like is the most important thing in the world. It is what you spend most of your waking hours doing and theoretically should take priority over finding something enjoyable for your free time - maybe a hobby or girlfriend or family. If you enjoy playing sports, playing professionally would surely take some fun out of it but would becoming sports writer take the fun out of playing sports or would it just drive you crazy for being on the “wrong side” of things? Or would you be able to view the writing aspect as a job but still enjoy playing as much as when you had a job that had nothing to do with the sport and sort of get the best of both worlds? I don’t know. Everyone reacts differently and it is probably hard to predict how you’d react until you try.

But perhaps taking or keeping a less interesting but higher-paying job that allows you time and money to enjoy your hobbies is worth the sacrifice. Some of us try to turn our hobbies into work, thinking that it might help us to be happy all the time rather than just the time off from work. But what frequently happens is that when a hobby turns into a job, it no longer is fun and often results in a pay cut. Take a baseball player or actor or musician – they can make more money at the start doing other things and keeping sports or the arts as a weekend or night-time hobby and starting to work as an athlete or artist might make it be less enjoyable, so you lose out on income and on the hobby. Of course, there are people who make it big and get lots of money but such people are in the minority.

On another note, are journalists typically people who have a love for something but are not talented enough to be one of the participants or people that get written about but have a passion for that activity or are they people who are over the hill or are they more often people who have the passion and may have the talent but just prefer a more normal life to the touring or nomadic lifestyle that frequently is common among athletes, celebrities and artists? Can a person write a popular article about someone else’s accomplishments while also being the subject of another similar piece at the same time? I generally think of journalists as being experts in a certain field, and therefore people who actively engage in that activity. For sports journalism, that’s less frequently the case because the careers of athletes are much shorter than in other games or industries. But, most popular sports journalists are former athletes, right?

"Trusting anything – your family your instincts, the dimwitted anchor in the 10:00 news – is a gamble, with plenty of promises and no guarantees. But I’m finding that the longer I live, no matter how many times I fall on my face, folding is for losers, that winners take hits, call it going all in, call it rolling the dice. Screw hedging your bets – bluff, raise, call, stand, again and again and again." – Mary Shannon in season 3, episode 10 of "In Plain Sight."