6 Degrees Of Me

I did this mainly for Ramya. She says that she’ll have my blog up and running and will click the refresh button on her browser every few minutes to see if I’ve posted something new. You can get some serious carpal with that approach. The email subscription should help her ° of me addiction. I do anticipate that a number of people who don’t use or have any idea what an RSS feed is (I’ll write about that in a few days) will probably use this service to get alerted and read my new posts in their email. So here it is:

Put your email address in the text field and hit submit. You get an email that you click to verify your email address. Every time I post, you receive the post in your email. Pretty simple stuff. I’ve also placed the field to the right because this current post will disappear from the front page of degrees within a few days.

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A couple of funny things have happened over the last few mornings this past weekend. On Saturday I woke up at about 4.45am. This morning I was up at 6.20. In my 30 years of existence, I have never, ever, ever, woken up before 9 am on the weekends. It would generally take a fire of some severe magnitude or an act of 7Lb 6oz baby Jesus to stir me out of my sleep. We’ll leave those Jesus type experiences for another post.

For those of you that read my blog regularly, you know that I was in the hospital getting surgery a couple of months ago. If you haven’t read that post, I would suggest that you go back and check it out. As Mike Tyson would say, my style is prolific to the point that it makes others want to fade into “Bolivian”.

Now that surgery’s over and the doctors have revealed that I have a sort of “Reverse Healing Factor” going on in my body, I’ve been relegated to consuming pills in all various forms.

As another side note (hey it’s 7 in the morning god damnit), I’ve been a student of the law of attraction for about 8 years now. It’s talked about a lot these days on some good sites like Steve Pavlina’s. I wouldn’t even bother clicking on law of attraction url above. I will explain the law of attraction to you in it’s simplest form in the following paragraph.

Every human being has a mind that is contains a good percentage of dominating thoughts. These thoughts control your universe and your experience of the universe. So check it. Most of Americans are capitalists or wanna be capitalists at heart. Within a lot of us is the desire for riches. We are flooded with those types of images all the time through advertisements in all forms of media and by just from admiring what other people have. The law of attraction is simple. Your mind is a magnet and will attract whatever your mind creates. So in terms of the desire to be rich most of us are given “THE DESIRE” for riches and not the actual riches.

Now how the hell does that work in terms of my Reverse Healing Factor? Well, I have a huge aversion to taking medication. I think that has to do with my third world upbringing. My parents never took meds for anything and would always talk about how America was riddled with self-medicators who would quickly resort to popping pills as a quick answer to feel better. Little headache? Pop a pill. Just had a fight with your wife and feel depressed? Pop a pill. Kid acting up in school? Pop a pill

So I read my last few sentences and thought to myself, that sounds kind of familiar and a little crazy and had to put that Tom Cruise clip up….it’s priceless.

Back to the law of attraction. So I have a huge aversion to meds. And guess what. My aversion has been fully realized. After my sarcoidosis diagnosis (that rhymes) I have been ordered to take Prednisone over the course of a full year to counter the effects of this disease. Prednisone is a bastard of a drug. It increases your appetite causing you to gain weight, depletes your calcium levels, and in my case makes me want to kill quite irritated sometimes. [LOAD THE ROCKETSHIP!!]

So to counter the effects I have to take Actonel once a week so that I’m not hunched over with osteoporosis in 10 years. The Aciphex is used to fight stomach lining depletion from the prednisone. Then there’s Lyrica for the electric tingling in my back and fingers when I bring my chin anywhere within a 4 mile radius of my chest. That was the actual symptom that started me on this whole rollercoaster ride. Tizanidine relaxes my neck and shoulder spasms and works better than the Lyrica overall.

Lastly I have Oxycodone which I got after my surgery, which is probably better than a lot of the stuff that they peddle in Washington Square Park. I took one of those suckers a few days after surgery and literally laid the rest out on my dining room table an hour later and counted each one to see how many I had left.

So I think the combination of all of the meds is the reason why I only need 4.5 hours of sleep right now. Which brings me to the first picture in this post. I sat down yesterday and this morning at my laptop to check email and such and realized that the only two sounds in the galaxy at the butt crack of dawn were the hum of my refrigerator and the constant HOO of an owl. I don’t know about the rest of you but I’ve seen an owl like once in my life. I just lied. I have never seen an owl. I thought they were imaginary like Ligers or something. For the past couple of mornings i have been going up to my window to see if I could just catch a glimpse of this freaking thing. No such luck. Life is a real bastard sometimes. I see that stupid squirrel pretty much once a week and I can’t see run of the mill owl. I feel the roid rage coming on…..

I just realized that I have seen an owl in my life —

[please leave me a comment. I like communicating through my blog -- it's like even more removed from direct communication than mobile messaging -- makes me feel all fuzzy and happy inside]

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A disco inferno. If only elevators were bigger, they would be great locations to party — or at least pre party. These guys have got it right though!

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So I was down in the Hotness for a conference this past week. Out of all of the cities that I traveled to in my consulting former life, I somehow completely missed Hotlanta. I gotta say, I had one hell of a time down there. Unfortunately I left my trusty 3.1 megapixel digiwonder at home so all I have are shots from my not so trusty Treo… which by the way I just figured out that I’ve been pronouncing wrong for the past 2 years (TRAY-oh no TREE-oh).

For this photo montage I’ve decided to take shots from my TRAAAAAAY-oh and intermingle them with shots that I’ve found on the net. See if you can tell the difference.

Here’s a night shot of the Westin. It’s by far the tallest building in the are at 73 stories, which isn’t a big deal for someone who lives right outside of NYC. But it’s just a huge phallic symbol in the middle of nothingness…

One night the guys and I went up to the sky bar on the top 3 floors of the building for some drinks. It’s kind of neat in that it offers the guest a true panoramic view by use of a rotating floor. If you are having a tough time picturing it just imagine a donut. Now imagine a quarter in the middle of that donut. The quarter represents the bar. The donut represents our seating. The donut rotates slowly at about 1 revolution every 20 minutes. The quarter doesn’t move. The donut is not edible.

Here’s an inside shot from the bar at night:

I’m not sure what building was located across the street but it had a really nice balcony that is captured in the high definition shot above.

On our last night we went to a John Mayer concert. I’ve been listening to raspy voiced pretty boys like him and Dave Matthews and Jack Johnson for a few years now but had never seen any of them in concert. The difference between this concert and any other one that I’ve been to is that this was a corporate sponsored event which meant that there were a good number of non-fans in the audience that just came for the free beer. So usually when an artist plays one of his hits and the chorus portion comes along, everyone in the audience will belt it out. This gives the artist a chance to give his vocal chords and a break and also revel in his own greatness.

John gave that a go a couple of times but it didn’t turn out as well as expected. Either way, it was a good freaking show. But alas, no Jessica sightings. Here’s a shot from the show…

The one thing I didn’t know was the wide assortment of faces that Johnny has in his arsenal. He’s a face making maven. He always looks like he’s on the verge of chewing a piece of his microphone out. One of my buddies from HS, Jeremy Pores is a drummer who has been a profilific face maker since we were 15 years old. I to this day am in complete awe of his drumming skill level as well as his constipation ridden faces. I swear his bowels must hurt for weeks after a gig.

Another pic from the show:

If you make the above picture your default desktop photo, then walk across the room you are in and squint, you can make out John Mayer’s Face…. or Jesus Christ’s.

I managed to make it back stage for a few minutes and got this great pic of John helping a band mate put on some makeup before the start of the show:

Hotlanta. Good Times.

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Today I chose two charities pretty randomly but I feel that the causes are just.

I came across President Clinton’s Foundation a few days ago, rather randomly, while browsing the web for new technology/gadgetry. After seeing Clinton in the city a few weeks ago, I was instantly a bit more curious about the foundation that I would have normally been.

The foundation’s work is split amongst different areas. There’s the healthy generation where the foundation teamed up with the American Heart Foundation to work towards keeping our kids fit and healthy. Then there’s the Global Climate initiate which looks to counter the proliferation of global warming.

I chose to donate to the HIV/AIDS initiative:

The Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative (CHAI) strives to make treatment for HIV/AIDS more affordable and to implement large-scale integrated care, treatment, and prevention programs. Since its inception, CHAI has helped bring AIDS care and treatment to over 415,000 people living with HIV/AIDS around the world.

As for my other charity I witnessed something that flashed me back to my elementary school days. I was being shuttled in ATL this past week by bus from the event to the hotel. I remember looking out of the window of the bus and seeing a young kid making his way across the street. The boy must have been about 15 years old or so and had a severe case of cerebral palsy.

Every time I see someone with Cerebral Palsy I think back Teresa Sichman. She was in my class in 2nd grade and had CP pretty bad. I can still picture her face in my head, running around the playground with the rest of us. Constantly picked on and ridiculed by the kids in the class for the way she moved and the way she spoke.

Kids are mean. That’s kind of elementary. But I remember how kind Teresa was… to everyone… no matter how poorly she was treated. And she also never showed how much her feelings were hurt by the various attacks even though I’m sure it ate her up inside.

So, in keeping with tradition, I’ve donated the other portion of my paycheck to United Cerebral Palsy:

United Cerebral Palsy (UCP) is the leading source of information on cerebral palsy and is a pivotal advocate for the rights of persons with any disability. As one of the largest health charities in America, the UCP mission is to advance the independence, productivity and full citizenship of people with disabilities

I encourage each of you to get into the spirit of giving. You can search through the past charities that I’ve discussed on this blog or just go out and find ones that resonate with you. Hearts

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