Category Archives: Miscellany

Life is Full

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     I guess a quick recap of my life so far would not be out of order.

     Running continues to be a boon in my life. Not so much running, as the excuse to get together with some buddies and chat while crunching miles. I’ll admit, I’m a social runner.

     Tricking is becoming a really big part of my week. With open gym available 4 days out of the week, conditioning Tuesdays, and open session on Fridays, there’s a lot of shit that I could be busy with. Not to mention trying to get the club to a point where I’m not afraid it will implode like ASA. Okay, ASA didn’t implode, but I don’t recognize it anymore.

     Dance remains as fickle as ever. But I think we’re drawing closer, she and I, in her own distant way.

     Working at the dining hall has taught me so many things. But chief among them is that, I don’t need to care about the job to work there, just the people. I LOVE my dining hall buddies!

     In the process of breaking my no-employment rule. I just suck and have not gotten around to it. I have very little time. The time usage transition will probably be very rough and I’ll need some solitude in order to get everything straight before I go for employment.

     I think I’m beginning to feel where I want to improve myself and where I’d be happy to let other people help me. I want to keep improving at dance, singing, spoken word, and being a better friend/person. Finding awesome people. What else? Writing. I’m on the fence about writing code, but I’ll probably go for it. In fact, I will. And let’s see…math up to DiffEQ and Linear Algebra. Other than that…I’m not entirely sure.

     People are always worth it. Taking more chances. Vulnerability. Courage. Stories.

     That’s my life.

Daniel Wrong

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     A couple of nights ago, my little sister and I were talking about middle school. As it so happens, middle school, specifically fourth grade in my case, was perhaps the most defining year of my life.

     My middle school, Daniel Wright, featured public humiliations by teachers, emotional abuse, betrayal by the people who were ostensibly there for our betterment. They even turned my own parents against us, so that the hell didn’t end once I got off of the bus. So I stayed home as much as possible. Played sick. I learned to hate everyone. I learned to disengage. I learned that trusting authority meant that authority could hurt you.

     Little did I know that my sister was going through a very similar experience at the same time, at the same school. We were almost unconscious of each other, I think because we were both very young and very focused on our own pain. Side by side, and both unknowingly going through the same things. But where my response was a middle finger to the sky, to anyone ontop, to God Himself, my sister’s response was probably a bit more constructive. Where I withdrew into myself and developed a deep rebellious streak, she became spiteful. She resolved to prove that, despite her teachers telling her she would amount to nothing, she would become successful instead. With the help of her relationship with God, she worked through it.

     I discovered only a core of Self, fueled by fury and hatred. But where do we stand today? My sister is a highly motivated and successful president of a club at UIC, a good student, and a devoted Christian. She has an ability to rally people. She has held a job for years and was offered a full time position there recently. I, on the other hand, have never held a job for longer than a year, if we’re being generous, and the number of organizations I’ve quit is about equivalent to the number of organizations I’ve joined.

     That’s one side of the coin. The other side is that I am dependent on no one for a sense of security. I am beholden to nobody except myself. If I fail, it’s because I set the bar myself. If I succeed, it’s solely because of myself. I could be a janitor and be happy, because I’d be doing my own thing. In many cases, I am interested in what I can do by myself, skillsets that I can improve on my own.

     But I’m beginning to think I’ve taken that “flip the bird” mentality as far as I can go and still be satisfied. Yes, it’s good that I am happy with who I am. But in order to develop further, I need to care about other people more.

     I was going to write “I need to care about other peoples’ opinions more,” but that’s farther than I’m willing to go right now.

Peace,
Brian Kung

PS, I’m no longer living in my car. Apartment living, woo!

Money

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     I have a problem. I don’t know what to think about money.

     On one hand, I believe that it is not necessary. There are many accounts of this, so I won’t go into detail. My basic hypothesis is something like this: The good that people can do for each other is incalculable in terms of economics. For example, a baker can make bread. He can either sell the bread for $2 a loaf, or he can give it to someone who is starving. For the person who is starving, the bread is worth infinitely more than $2. And the baker makes more than one loaf of bread per batch. Therefore, the baker regularly creates an infinite supply of value.

     If basic needs can be met this way, our wants can be met through time expense or bartering. We want what we can’t have. What we can’t have is that which is outside of our expertise to acquire. What we are paying for when we pay for a service is time – time spent learning, time spent executing said skill, time spent building or crafting. In this equation, time is almost literally equivalent to money. In an ideal world, bartering would work perfectly.

     Of course, I’m a dreamer. This shit doesn’t work. Just ask Communism. The root problem is that our needs and our wants are not entirely separable, as sad as that is to me, and those who won’t give up their wants for others needs jeopardize the entire system. But, as a dreamer, I would like to see the world progress toward the ideal. Someday, maybe, we can figure out how to get rid of this money business.

     On the other hand, if I am to follow the herd and begin to acquire currency, then I have to have justification for it. I have to have things that I want to spend money on, and this is primarily the reason that I’m awake and writing right now. What do I want money for? This is a basic question, but it conflicts with my other view that money isn’t necessary whatsoever. If I go with my usual answers, I will have to ignore that belief, which is a source of dissonance for me.

     Let’s do it anyway. What do I want money for?

  • My debts and my family members’ debts.
  • Basic needs
  • Food – because the appreciation of food is its own aesthetic
  • Creative ventures – cool, funny, or weird ideas I want to make reality and share with others
  • Among creative ventures we might as well place businesses and art.
  • Art – experiences that I appreciate.
  • Gifts – things or experiences that make people happy.

     A lot of those are almost interchangeable. Basically, in order of importance: basic needs, debt, and Art, though the latter two are arguable. Philosophically, I would prefer Art take precedence, but realistically, debt and repayment is more important to me. I can’t conscientiously ignore my debt to someone and continue on as if that extension of their faith meant nothing to me.

     On a side note, I like the definition of Art as an experience that is appreciated. With that definition, it makes a gift the natural expression of Art and Love, which, according to the Buddhist definition I subscribe to, is wanting others to be happy.

     That said, I estimate basic needs once I’m fully operational to be:

  • Rent (or equivalent): around $800 per month.
  • Food: Around $50 a month.
  • Water: Roughly $15 a month.
  • Annual total: $10,380

     Hypothetical debts for my entire family are probably…nearly incalculable. However, let’s just count my siblings. I’m going to assume $50,000 debts for college for all of them, excluding myself, because I will be at around $14,000 when I graduate. $164,000 for myself and all my siblings. And let’s say theoretically that my parents maxed out a business banking account for loans at $500,000. So, all in all, debts number around $664,000.

     In order to meet basic needs and debt, I would have to pull in $674,380 in a single year, or $2593.76923 per day, or $324.221154 an hour, assuming 8 hour work days and 260 work days in a year.

     I wonder how I could do that. Then again, assuming that all four of my siblings tackle it, it would be significantly easier. We’d only have to be fully employed at roughly $80 an hour.

     Anyway, once that debt is gone, I guess the rest of life begins.

     Suddenly, I am having doubts about my earlier prioritization.

The Art of Seduction

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     A few years ago, I was challenged by a friend to read Neil Strauss’s book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pick Up Artists. Basically, it followed the journey of the author, Neil Strauss, as he struggled to gain mastery over the art of picking up women. He made himself into a new person, with a new name: Style. No woman could resist Style.

     After reading through this tome and following the progression of Style from a zero to a pick up pro, I began to apply the concepts and strategies to my own life. It was difficult at first. It seemed like how to be rejected was the only thing I was learning. But slowly, I began to have minor successes, which snowballed into major successes and before I knew it, I had 9′s and 10′s fighting over me in clubs and making me eggs in the morning.

     Yeah, that was all bullshit. A nice story, though, right?

     I read the book, but what I took away from it was at once more and less than the Art of Seduction. What I took away from it was more like footnotes for something more important to me – the Art of Life. What had happened to change Neil Strauss was entirely his doing. The person he had become was completely himself, yet completely and thoroughly put together in a conscious way to attract women. This resonated with me on some level, but I wouldn’t know how to put the pieces together until I talked to a friend about it much later.

     Pickup made me uneasy. Pickup artists struck me as inauthentic, craven beasts who calculated every move. I would read someone’s opinion online that pickup artists viewed women as nothing more than masturbatory aids, and I agreed. It felt that it was demeaning to women and dehumanizing. There was a part of me that was tempted to try it out, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It didn’t fit with what I believed, it could end up hurting people, and I was too scared.

     Years later, I would meet a real pickup artist, though his days were behind him, at least for the moment. We became good friends. Finally, when the topic came about during a long drive, I asked my friend how pick up artists could be authentic, to which he responded that it was “about being yourself…about being your best self,” and furthermore that people only got hurt if you failed to communicate your intentions fully. He said he looked at it more as bringing adventure into girls’ lives. I began to realize that this was something I might be able to get behind. I began to realize that pickup and seduction could be a positive thing.

     But the biggest takeaway for me was that it was about becoming a better person by dint of your own hard work. “Better” was whatever you wanted better to mean…for pickup artists, that meant they attracted women. For me, while that may have played a part, the message was that wasn’t the best me that I could be…yet. And having a clearer idea of who that person was to me was a good first step. I figured if I was my best me, there’s no way I couldn’t also be attractive. Just live my life the best way I can think of, and everything else will fall in order. I still believe it.

     Recently, I began to delve into reddit’s seduction sub-community. After reading this guide and poking around the community for a bit, I found a post asking how pickup artists reconciled their seductive ways with long term relationships. There was a response about how everything was about power, which I didn’t think fully explained how an enlightened PUA viewed it. So I responded:

I’m responding to you because you seem to find this a place of darkness. Some things you should read up on:

Seduction – meaning “to lead astray,” or “to attract,” courtesy of quazzy.

Lifers v Gamers – Lifers use the game to better themselves, gamers use the game to take advantage of people.

With that out of the way, how I reconcile seduction with a real relationship very much so adheres to the definition of “to attract” and the goals of a “lifer.” The primary message of seduction, for me, is “to attract” by being yourself…not someone that you discover somewhere in the hinterlands of your soul, but someone who you create. It’s an uplifting message – that, whoever or whatever you consider yourself now, you can forge someone better out of it, better by standards that you set yourself.

I believe that you do not discover yourself. You create yourself. There’s a great book called “It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be,” and the same goes for your personality. It’s not who you are, it’s who you want to be. If you have that going for you, your confidence will be attractive by itself, and if you want to be even more attractive, you can be that as well.
As for how this works out for long term relationships, the more comfortable you are being yourself, the more agency you have in your personality, the more likely you are to click with the right person, because you are putting out 100% your own personality. The only thing left is to find the right person. And getting to know someone, getting them to open up, is an important part of that.

There is a positive, affirmative way to look at seduction. Just ignore the gamers and the gamer mentality and seddit won’t be as dark a place anymore. I strongly hope that makes you less depressed about this subreddit, especially if you’re going to stick around.

     Basically…the way I see seduction is that if you’re good at life, you’ll do just fine at love.

     Tweakin’ out because I haven’t slept in 25 hours, so I’ll just leave it at that.

The Sing Off (Season 2)

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     I watched the finale of the Sing Off, Season 2, and I couldn’t stop grinning. In fact, an hour and a half later, I still can’t help but grin a little bit when I think about it. As the season wrapped up, I became more and more convinced of a feeling that I’d had all throughout the show.

     Every competition should be like this.

     The artists were united by their craft, but they also weren’t pitted against each other. They were humble. They rooted for each other. The judges weren’t always completely professional, which is a good thing in my opinion, but they were completely honest and understandable. They had insightful things to say. They were supportive. The MC wasn’t an idiot.

     And at the end, there were only winners left. Career wise, all of the groups were set and could book shows just by being on the show, and each one made it by virtue of talent. But besides career and skill, what I really meant was that, in the end, with two groups left, they spent more time hugging each other after the winner was announced than they spent paying attention to the MC who was trying to give them their prize. And that’s what singing is about. That’s what dancing is about. That’s what art is about. It’s about reaching out and bringing people together.

     So, Sing Off Season 3…bring it on!

Rambling

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     Overall, I feel good, but if I were to put it into words, I would say, “well, fuck.” This weekend was something of a maladventure. Is that a word? It should be. First of all, I am forced to go home to pay off a speeding ticket. This is because I was too lazy to send it in the mail. Today I learned that laziness is stupid. Well, last Thursday. Anyway, it’s not so bad…I get to go home and grab stuff that will keep me from dying of exposure and do laundry and do a bunch of stuff that I can’t remember right now.

     I also take the two night opportunity to become nocturnal, somehow flipping my sleep schedule in a weekend. My incessant coughing helped with that, I suppose. So I do manage to get a lot of stuff done, I just can’t remember it. Finally, the drive home takes a record 6 hours in a snow storm, one hour of which was spent completely stopped. Finally I get to DK’s place and I feel like I have done absolutely nothing all day. All weekend, in fact.

     I did have a good conversation with Josh Ong while I drove. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t talk the whole ride though, because I probably would have died. These were some of the worst road conditions I’ve ever encountered. Crystallized, powdery slipsnow with zero visibility. I guided myself using the brake lights on the cars in front of me. I actually skidded off into the ditch once before I figured out that braking didn’t work quite the same way as before.

     I was thinking…and this is random, but…it’s so easy for McDonalds to dominate new markets due to economies of scale. If you have billions of dollars, it’s not too difficult to make millions more.

     The real challenge is taking $1…and making $2 from it.

It’s 2am

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     The Koreans playing Starcraft are too loud. The lights are too bright. I’m too tired. My friends need me tomorrow.

     I just read my NaNoWriMo 2009 entry and everything is strange. I’m remembering who I was and how I got here. Everything is perfect. Everything since then has been a smooth transition.

     Can I do this again? Not the 50,000 word count. I have no doubt I can do that. But the amount of personal growth I went through in this month last year…that is what I am excited for.

     Wish me luck. There are lots of people counting on me tomorrow. One of them is me.

Truth. Love. Hope.

What is Love?

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     …baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more

     Don Mach asked me last night what I thought love was. I didn’t realize until then that I had been struggling with that question for over 2, possibly 3 years, or even longer. It took Don, that amazing motherfucker, to get me to come back to it.

     I struggled with it all throughout my one and only real romantic relationship. The two competing themes were “capital L” Love for Real Romantic Love with one person, and “little L” love for friends, family, and community. I didn’t know if there was such a thing as Love, but I knew for sure that love existed. But if Love existed, then what was love? Some kind of less noble, less Loving love?

     I decided that Love was worth believing in, and if I was going to believe in it, I was damned if I wasn’t going to live it. When you are in Love with someone, I believed that we both held on to each other no matter what, that we worked to overcome everything, every emotion, every circumstance, even every thought that would keep us apart. When things didn’t work out, it became a matter of how could I change? What could I do? What part of me or my personality is wrong? I committed, completely, to my girl. Or so I told myself.

     I believed in Love until I could believe no longer. I committed myself to Love too soon, too idealistically. After fighting with my partner and twisting my very soul for too long, I snapped. The religious fanatic broke, his faith now smoke drifting in the air, the only thing left in the aftermath of an explosion.

     Picking up the pieces of my life, I found a little love here and there, pieces spattered on the walls, a little at the bottoms of deep wells, glinting like gold. A door held open, a friend calling just to call, a blanket placed around shoulders rising and falling with reassuring rhythm while half lidded eyes blink themselves to sleep.

     Something I could believe in. Because I saw it every day.

     I found love. It wasn’t hard. It was seeing it that was difficult. I found it in the parks, with old men playing chess and feeding pigeons. I found it in a brother’s over protective watch over his younger sister. I found it meeting up with friends and sharing jokes, sharing food, sharing words. I saw it everywhere. I felt it when I breathed in. I heard it playing on the radio. The whole fucking world ran on love, and that’s just the way I would have it run.

     ”What are your thoughts on love?” Don asked me. I thought about it for a while before I could answer. We finished eating our fast food and sat for a while before I could formulate an answer.

     Love, for me, is you reading this and knowing that I believe every word. Love is you closing this, going back to facebook and commenting on your crush’s status. Love is the sun coming up. Love is driving a friend a few blocks because he’s lazy and you both know it. Love is going running with people in the morning when everyone else is asleep or at night when everyone else is asleep. Love is finding a brother in mind and spirit that you never expected. Love is dancing in class. Love is singing in the streets. Love is letting you know that I love you. Love is listening.

     In a sentence, for me and I think for everyone, love is…

     …well, Don knows my answer. But I’m not happy with it. When it’s in a sentence, it’s just words strung together. I tried several times while writing this, but I just can’t bring myself to just say it. I’m not happy merely writing it here for you to read. I want to live it.

     But more and more importantly than that, I want you to live it with me. So ask me sometime. I’d be glad to hear your thoughts, and in the meantime we’ll keep dancing this crazy dance called Life.

TLH
Kung

Fall 2010 – Week 1

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     Week 1 of school has been remarkably difficult. Not for the reasons you would suspect, because it has nothing to do with academics. Life has been difficult because I’ve made it difficult. I’ve taken out the fluff and reduced it, I’ve boiled out the impurities and I’ve reduced it, I’ve hammered out all the air pockets and I’ve reduced it.

     So here I am and here I stand, just one man on a grandslam tour of freedom.

     Basically, I’m struggling with things at a survival level, such as food and places to sleep. I think I’m on the verge of solving them semi-permanently, until the seasons change at least. And then that’s a whole ‘nother level. I need boots and gear…my my. But Fall should be pretty nice.

     That said..I still have operational processes to carry out, such as sales for MoR Marketing, School, and my various profit initiatives. Because I need to start making a profit for this all to work out. Tuition is due in exactly four weeks.

     There’s also fun. Dance is fun. Exercise is fun. Friends are fun. But I would even go so far as to say that they’re more important than anything else.

     I feel caught between worlds. There is the drifter, the nomad. The car warrior. Then there is the wild child. Lost to the woods and loving it. The businessman. The entrepreneur. The Artist. Practicing the one art of dance, music, and motion.

     Nowhere in here does school fit. But then again, all of these need a place to sleep and some food. And preferably soon, on both counts.

     My shoes need to come off.

     LATER!

Top 25 Majors at UIUC by Enrollment

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     I recently found out about the Division of Management Information after calling the admissions office and decided to hunt around and see what kind of data I could pull up. As it turns out, you can grab the enrollment numbers by major quite handily, which is what I was looking for. Just for fun, here are the top 25 majors at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign for Spring 2010, graduate and undergraduate combined:

RANK	Code		Major				# Enrolled
1	NONE		Undeclared 	  		2574
2	BSLAS 		Psychology 	  		1210
3	BSLAS 		MCB			 	901
4	BS 		Electrical Engineering 		890
5	BS 		Accountancy 	  		843
6	BALAS 		Political Science 	  	792
7	NONE 		Curric Unassigned 	  	781
8	BS	 	Civil Engineering 	  	724
9	BS 		Mechanical Engineering 	  	705
10	BS 		Computer Science 	  	659
11	JD 		Law 	  			602
12	BALAS 		Communication 		  	587
13	BALAS 		Economics 	  		586
14	NONE 		Biology 	 		584
15	BALAS 		English 	 		582
16	BS 		Kinesiology 	  		520
17	BS 		Architectural Studies 	  	513
18	BS 		Finance 	  		505
19	BS 		Advertising 	  		499
20	DVM 		Veterinary Medicine 		453
21	BS 		Computer Engineering 	  	429
22	BS 		General Engineering 	 	428
23	BS 		Chemical Engineering 	 	415
24	BALAS 		History 	  		401
25	BALAS 		Sociology 	  		385

     I was somehow surprised by the fact that the highest number of students are undecided, and the #7 spot is taken up by “Curric Unassigned” which I assume is similar. Combine those and you have about 1/10th of the undergraduate student body deciding what they want to do.

     Also out of the blue in #11 is Law (JD). I didn’t know we had so many law students. Combined with Veterinary Sciences (DVM), about 1,000 enrolled students out of the top 25 majors are graduate students. Seeing as those 25 majors are comprised of 17,568 students, or a little under half of the entire enrolled population (40,038 students, grad and undergrad), that’s a pretty small fraction of the whole, but more than 1/10th of the graduate student population (9325).

     Here’s the data so you can poke around with the numbers yourself.

     And look, it’s just in time for Welcome Week!

     Have a good one, guys