Here are a collection of posts that I consider some of my best and most meaningful posts of the past year. This also includes posts where I discovered something new about myself or posts that marked a big event in my life. I decided this is a better way of reviewing the year than repeating everything in a single, gigantic post.
I’ve added snippets from each post to give you an idea what each one is about. If there are other posts you thought should be on this list, I’d love to hear about them!
Why I’m a Vegetarian
01/10
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Actually, sometime during the year (around April) I started keeping a vegan diet (no dairy or any product that comes from an animal). Starting 2008, I will be sticking to a 100% vegan diet.
My Naked Body and Money
02/20
At the end of the day, I don’t take any money with me to bed. I don’t go to sleep with my car, computer, food, auto gas, or for that matter my house. I sleep in my house, but might I might as well be sleeping in a cardboard box. When I wake up, I wake up with nothing but the skin on my bones. I need a safe shelter to sleep in, yes, but even shelter is a lifestyle item we’ve grown accustomed to having.
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The Impersonalization of Blogs
02/27
How can someone be personal on a blog when the information is bound to be made public? That would make the personal information public information — so whats the point? If you want to create a blog, go ahead. Just don’t expect to express yourself, especially your personal self, without letting everyone know about it.
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The Ice Gods are Angry
03/08
Then at 5:20pm, I get another call — this time from the first floor tenant at my Bowers St property. He says water is pouring out from his kitchen and bathroom ceiling. My stomach drops as I recall the last time this happen and the damage cost me $16k to repair. I told the tenant over the phone, how to turn off the water main, so the water would stop coming out of the broken pipe. After driving through rush hour traffic, I finally arrived around 6:30pm.
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Note: There were many others posts about leaky pipes throughout the year, but this post seemed to sum up the experience quite well.
The Echo of an Alternative Path
03/27
So, do I like the path my life has taken thus far? I won’t say that I don’t like it, but I can’t help but wonder and imagine how things could be different right now. Would I be in Baghdad, Iraq instead of Cambridge, Massachusetts? Would I be sleeping in a tent in the middle of the desert with gun shots echoing in the distance, instead of dealing with leaky water pipes and worrying about waking up late for work in the morning? Would I be driving a humvee, praying I don’t hit an IED, instead of trying to find a parking spot close to my apartment?
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Completed 16.6% of my Life
04/12
The human mind is a very powerful thing — so powerful in fact that I believe we assist nature in making us old by reminding ourselves of our age. We have this preconceived idea of how old we’re expected to live — how many people truly believe, and I mean as much as they believe they will die without air, that they will live to 150 years old?
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Finding the Synergy Between Control and Chaos
05/20
Mistakes are limits. They are dead end roads. When you discover a dead end road you don’t park your car and wait for the road to suddenly lead somewhere interesting. You turn around and find another route! Life teaches us lessons. We have the choice to learn from those lessons and use them to make more educated decisions, or to forget the lesson and make our journey that more difficult.
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Less is More
05/28
My solution to this is to live life expecting nothing. Without expectation there will be no disappointment. Attachment creates waste and drains life. Ownership creates unnecessary work. Expect less. Own less. Attach to less. My Dad has always said “Less is more”. I’ve never understood this more fully than I do now.
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Thea & Meera’s Wedding
06/01
My sister Meera was married today, to Thea Bou. It was a long day, with three different traditional weddings all rolled into one: A Vedic wedding, a Khmer wedding, and the standard American wedding.
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Repetitive Immobility is Killing Me!
07/11
I crave the outdoors and yet I spend my days in the office, my evenings in a basement apartment with very little natural light and no ability to see the sky, and my weekends working inside on my rental properties or driving in the car. When I’m indoors I feel compelled to be sitting at my computer, whether for work or entertainment, because I refuse to hook up a television.
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Dirty Air
07/18
I can’t help but wonder how much of an effect living in the city has on a persons health. I spent the majority of the first 14 years of my life in a rural area with a lot more trees than houses, the following 10 years in a semi-rural area with more houses than trees, and the past 7 months in the city, where there are more dogs than there are trees!
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Man vs Wild and Survivorman
08/08
Entertainment is about risk and excitement, which is why Man vs Wild is more popular. Survivorman is more realistic, but who watches TV for realistic things? Anyone who believes a reality show, no matter what kind, is entirely unscripted really needs to get their head out of the dark area its in.
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I’m still adjusting… but is that bad?
08/09
Yesterday while I was in the kitchen cooking dinner, I realized that after having such a positive experience living in a “normal” apartment, I probably won’t want to go back to living in a basement or attic ever again. When that thought came to me, I suddenly realized why the rich never feel rich. Once you become accustomed to a certain lifestyle, its difficult to revert to anything less. I can already catch myself wishing I had a two bedroom apartment with more space and rooms that receive more sunlight throughout the day (my apartment only gets a little sunlight before 9am)!
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The amazing thing is, I’m moving into a two bedroom apartment starting January 1st, 2008!
Labor Day Weekend
09/04
Another major thing that happened early this past weekend was my firm decision about what I’m going to do with my properties. I’ve decided I will get rid of all of my properties, even if that means going bankrupt. I simply feel the time and energy I will spend maintaining even one property is not worth it. I would much rather have the freedom and clarity of mind that goes with knowing I don’t owe hundreds of thousands of dollars on a property while still being responsible for maintaining it. Owning a property will greatly restrict my options for travel and the financial freedom to do what I want with my life.
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This post was added here because it marks my decision to sell all of my rental properties.
Learning not to become discouraged
09/21
When we are in the competitive mind we often forget those we are competing with are directly responsible for our success, and not realizing this greatly inhibits our quality of life. Selfishness is the opposite of gratitude and to be discouraged about doing something is to be selfish and therefore ungrateful.
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How I started programming
10/01
I learned about programming when I was 12, three years after I began building computers. I asked my Dad one day (at the time he was working at Digital as a technical writer) how the games and programs on the computer were created. He didn’t know a whole lot about programming, but he knew of the BASIC programming language and told me I should get a book and learn it.
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Rejecting Limitations
10/10
Don’t accept your limitations, reject them. Treat every limitation like the rung on a ladder — if you don’t pull yourself above each one, you’re never going to get anywhere!
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Believe in Possibility
11/08
Believing we have limits, and doubting the possibility of that which we cannot even imagine, greatly limits the extent to what we can accomplish. After all, believing something is possible is the first step in making it a reality. Christopher Columbus sailed across the ocean, Thomas Edison created the light bulb, and the Wright Brothers successfully proved manned flight was possible, by having strong belief in their possibility.
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Time is Relative
12/11
What if we could stage a giant experiment on human civilization in which we gradually slowed, over say a period of a hundred years, the mechanical timing of all clocks to a point where 1 second actually took 2 seconds to pass? Would we suddenly start living longer? (As far as we would know, we’d be living to 80 – 100 years, but in reality it would be 160 – 200 years!)
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The Warrior Elite – The Forging of SEAL Class 228 by Dick Couch follows a class of students as they go through Basic Underwater Demolition School (BUD/S). BUD/S is only one of the many steps it takes to become a Navy SEAL and it is considered to be one of, if not the toughest military training in the world. The drop out rate for BUD/S is extremely high; only about 20% make it through. Physical and mental endurance are pushed to the extreme.
