Taking Stock

This blog has certainly been dominated by posts about girlfriends and escorts. In the words of one email I received on it:

You are just justifing (sic) your sick addiction to whores!

Well, thank you for writing.

Um, I don't think I'm addicted: I've gone a whole week without a skanky whore! :-) (of course, the first sign of addiction is denial, which neatly defuses any counterclaim against the accusation of addiction.)

But the part about justification may be true. I'd like to think it's something else (there's the denial again!)

I deal with so many interesting and diverse topics when I work. I have a great job. So I don't have to harp on a hobby topic, since I can do it as part of my work. I'm not in the situation of a closet baseball fan who posts a blog because all he does at work is optimize the assembly line for car manufacture. Or the person who posts a fan site because they can't discuss that at work. No, all the hobbies I enjoy I can talk about at work, so the only thing I can "vent" in a private forum are those that are socially stigmatized. And I really only have a couple of those:

1) Politically incorrect social opinions about my industry, which I will reserve until I write my blistering canto, the modern "Divine Comedy" of the business world. ;-)

2) Politically incorrect opinions about relationships, the core of which revolves around why anybody should feel stigmatized by finding sex and paying for it.

Well, at least that's my opinion.

I also thought it would be a good time to add more about myself, since I have gone a while without posting more background.

I have an advanced technical degree, but I started as a liberal arts major in the midwest before I regained some sense. Now those who have read the beginning of my blog might wonder why I went to a midwestern school if I were Asian. But I always loved a challenge!

I have started a dozen companies, my first when I was a teenager at home. I have been an entrepreneur since, although I have many politically incorrect thoughts on company formation. Some venture capitalists like to compare starting a company to having sex. Well, it takes more people and time than sex. But it's still quite a rush!

And financially I have done well for myself, well enough to have given away 90% of my assets and still have a comfortable living in several cities.

Although I started without any money, in fact scraping a living off government-subsidized bread and cheese from the food banks at one point, I still think I haven't changed all that much. I was watching the new Peter Pan movie with a former girlfriend earlier, and during the part where they talk about how everybody has to grow up, she turned to me and said, "Oh my God, you're Peter Pan! You haven't grown up, and you don't have to."

I thought that was a pretty cool thing to say. Growing old, well, I can't do anything about that. But I won't grow up.

The biggest change money has wrought in my life? I know a lot more lawyers. In fact, I pay more money to lawyers every year than to any other service provider. I see them as a kind of tax on any activity. Physicists talk about how friction is the universal force in their world, what will eventually cause the heat death of the universe as we dissolve into entropy. Well, lawyers serve exactly that role in the real world of human transactions, and I assert they will assuredly cause the heat death of the human universe some day. To this I add my obligatory disclosure: some of my best friends are lawyers.

Oh, and I continue to jettison real estate ownership, although I am seeking an apartment now. I had two residences (and a rental unit I discussed below), but taking care of it on my travel schedule really meant that I was paying a bunch of house staff to live in my homes. As far as the "Three's Company" scenario I mentioned in one of my first posts, it has degenerated since the gals adopted more consistently available (and age appropriate) boyfriends. The apartment was sold.

So it goes.