I did something really scary and dangerous today. I let myself quit.

It’s the second day of my Month-of-Pickup, an intensive course correction aimed towards making myself extraverted and social again.

Yesterday was the first day. My friend and I set a goal of doing eight approaches each. We did it just as the mall closed, running around frantically looking for girls to approach. I was scared going in, but left feeling good.

Today we set the goal of approaching ten girls in two hours. I knocked out the first two quickly, then shuffled around for an hour making excuses. When it became obvious that I wasn’t going to do the full ten, I let myself off easily and only did one more.

Three measly approaches in three hours. I’m just reacclimatizing myself to approaching, so I leave shortly after opening. That means that in a two hour "pick up session", I was actually talking to girls for about fifteen minutes, and making excuses for an hour and forty-five.

I should have risen to the challenge and started running around racking up the tally. I didn’t. I let myself quit.

I’ve quit relationships because it was the right thing to do. I quit school because I didn’t want what it promised. I quit a job.

That’s all fine, because I was living up to my own standards, but when I quit something that I deliberately design for myself, that’s a problem. Usually when I say I’m going to do something, I do it. Today I weaseled out.

I’m writing about this today because it’s the only thing I can think about, because it’s a useful idea to chew on, but also as punishment to myself. When there’s a breach of internal trust, there needs to be consequences. One of them is publicly exposing my failure.

Beyond building a negative association to prevent similar action in the future, I don’t believe in dwelling on mistakes, so I’m going to let this one go. The important thing is ensuring that it won’t happen again.

Tomorrow, I will hand $500 to my friend, with instructions to keep it if I don’t meet my goal for the day. He’s a good enough friend that he would do it, too. I’ll continue to do this every single day this month that we have goals entirely under my own control.

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Between pickup and working on SETT, I’m probably not going to have much time or headspace for anything else. Apologies in advance if you aren’t interested in pickup, because it’s probably all I’ll be writing about this month.

Photo is some broken glass in an abandoned building in Berlin.

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It didn’t occur to me until about a week ago that I am a mutant.

When genes duplicate, the overwhelming majority of them are copied with perfect fidelity, with only the occasional rogue gene mutating into something unexpected. Most of these mutations, called neutral mutations, have no real effect.

Once in a while, though, a gene mutates, and happens to produce a significant difference in its host, and that difference affects the host’s survivability.

I’ve been isolated lately. I wake up in the RV, start working, and take breaks only to go to the spa to shower, or to eat. Sometimes I read at night. I see my friends a couple times a week, but mostly I’m by myself. I have almost no interaction with strangers.

I used to go to a spa in the mall, but I switched to one across the street in a hotel, so I hadn’t been going to the mall. I found out that a Chipotle opened in the mall, though, so I went in for the first time in a while.

The mall is a bit of a magical place for me, because it’s this immersive experience of what life is like for most people. There’s offensively condescending advertising, trendy clothes, crappy food, and, most importantly, a lot of fairly normal people. As weird as it sounds, I feel like I’m at the zoo, observing another species.

Something about seeing the mall– this intense expression of everything I don’t participate in– and having been separated from it for so long, really made me think. I realized that I’m not a normal person who’s a little bit weird. I’m actually a weird person who’s a little bit normal. I’m a mutant.

Somewhere along the line, for some reason, I went astray of the path that most people follow. I mutated. The variance from the norm was small at first, but a trajectory away from a straight line will only bring you farther as you continue to drift. Now I’m way out there.

Lives are complex things that don’t neatly fit into categories, but if I try to get to the root of how I’m different, I’d say that somewhere along the line, I just decided to start doing whatever I wanted to do. That’s my mutation.

If genetic mutation is the building block of evolution, maybe social mutation is the building block of culture. Normal cells, and normal people, are absolutely necessary in the quantities they come in. But mutations are important, too; they’re the ones that push things forward.

Just another good reason to keep being weird.

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Photo is me swinging off an abandoned tower in a WWII NSA listening base in Berlin.

Posted from the side of the road a few hours outside of Portland. Funny road trip story:

I ran out of gas in the middle of the night, four miles before the gas station. I always run out of gas on road trips. I did the natural thing-hopped onto my folding gas-powered scooter that I store inside the RV, and blasted down the side of the freeway to the gas station. Bought a gas can, filled it up, and began to head back. I realized that my only option was to drive back on the same shoulder I came on, because the highway was divided and I wouldn’t be able to get across the ditch in the middle. Lots of confused drivers flashing their lights at me.

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I had a discussion about book pricing recently with one of my favorite bloggers, Sebastian Marshall. His new book, Ikigai, is being sold for $7.77. He doesn’t really care how much money he makes off it (his portion goes to charity, anyway), but he didn’t want to lower the price because he thinks that it would signal that the book isn’t high quality. I said that I’d accept that possibility for a chance of reaching a larger audience.

And due to lowering the price of Life Nomadic to 2.99, I’ve been able to reach an incredibly wide audience. In the past month I’ve sold far more copies of Life Nomadic than all other months combined. Reviews have been coming in, and lives have been changed. Despite much thinner margins, I’m even making more money from it.  I couldn’t be more happy about all this.

Make Her Chase You and Life Nomadic

So, one good experiment deserves another. Make Her Chase You is now only $2.99 for Kindle and $9.99 for paperback (as I write this, the price hasn’t updated for paperback, but I imagine it will soon). Life Nomadic is still $2.99 for Kindle, but is now also only $9.99 for paperback. You can buy Life Nomadic here.

In addition, both books can be “borrowed” for free if you’re an Amazon Prime member (I actually get almost as much money if you do this).

The Tiniest Mansion

EDIT: In an effort to get this book out quickly, I accidentally uploaded a file that doesn’t have the last chapter (Rialta stuff) or the wrap-up. I’ve uploaded it now, so after 12 hours or so, delete the book from your Kindle and re-download it. Very sorry about that! Thanks to reader Kaila, there will also be a bunch of typos fixed!

The one book people constantly ask me to write is a book on RV living. It makes a lot of sense-there are only a few topics I’m really an expert on, and RV living is one of them. What has always held me back, though, was that I have my doubts about whether enough people would buy it to make it worth the time to write it.

I’ve been working very hard on SETT in the past 6-12 months, too, and now feel like any time I spend doing anything besides SETT is stealing time away from it. Between possibly being financially unviable and not really having the time to spare, the RV book got put on the backburner.

Two weeks ago I was preparing to board a plane from San Francisco to Boston. Flights are sacred to me, because there’s no environment in which I’m more productive. I couldn’t really work on SETT, though, because the next steps required an internet connection. What could I do instead?

Maybe I can write this entire RV book on a round-trip flight, I thought. Boarding had already begun, so I didn’t really have time to think about whether or not it was actually possible. Instead, I just decided to do it. I would write as much as possible from SFO->BOS and EWR->SFO, and then format it and publish it when I was done.

As I waited for other passengers to board, I wrote an outline on my phone. Once we hit 10,000 feet, I started typing like a maniac. The nice thing about writing about a topic you know inside and out is that you don’t actually need that much time to think; it’s almost conversational. By the time the flight landed, I had written 8000 words, which is the equivalent of about a dozen blog posts.

On the flight back to San Francisco, I wrote the rest, clocking in at over 14,000 words, and had an extra hour to revise and edit the book. Yesterday I published it to Kindle, under the title The Tiniest Mansion.

As you can probably guess, it’s $2.99, like my other books.

Unlike my other books, The Tiniest Mansion is probably only interesting to people who actually have an interest in living in RVs. It doesn’t have many stories or tangents, and not much of the knowledge is useful outside RV dwelling.

However, if you ARE thinking about living in an RV or live in one already, I expect that the book will be indispensible. I’ve lived in an RV 100% of the time that I’ve been in the US for almost five years now. I’ve been through pretty much everything, and done every RV modification conceivable. Despite only being around 75 pages or so, the book comprehensively covers every area of RV living from modifications to security, including a section dedicated to Rialta living. I think you’ll really like it.

You can buy the Kindle version of The Tiniest Mansion here.

Thanks

Wrapping it all up, I want to again say thanks for supporting my work. I’m incredibly fortunate to be able to make enough money to live from a few self-published books. If it wasn’t for my awesome readers buying them and leaving reviews, I’d have to spend a lot more time playing poker!

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Sorry about not posting last week. I spent the time getting The Tiniest Mansion ready to be published. Incidentally, this is either the last or second last post I’ll ever write on WordPress! SETT is coming SOON!

Shout out to my friend Maneesh (who, as far as I can tell, has no interest in living in an RV) for buying the first copy of my new book. And a holler at Todd for taking the cover picture (shown up top).

As always, please leave me a review if you buy any of my books. People click books with lots of good reviews, and Amazon uses that information to recommend my book to other users. A good review is worth more to me than the money I get for a sale.

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The average employee does somewhere between 1.5 to 5 hours af actual work per day, depending on whose survey you trust. Let’s say people do three hours of actual focused work. That’s sixty hours of actual work per month.

If you’re in a boring job and you’re content to dick around and waste time, that’s fine. But if your future actually depends on your output, you need to do better.

For the past six weeks I’ve averaged over ten hours a day of quality work, seven days a week. This is the longest period of time I’ve sustained this high a level of productivity, and I’ve found that the method of achieving it is extremely simple. Here’s my method.

1. Clear every possible distraction.

Put your cell phone into airplane mode and put it behind you somewhere, out of reach. Close your email program, IM program, and anything else that can possibly give you a notification.

Remove everything from your field of vision that is not work related, except for a glass of water or tea. That means that all non-work windows on your laptop should be closed, and that there shouldn’t be anything on your desk.

If you want to listen to music, put on classical.

You can probably do most of your work without an internet connection, so disconnect it. I’m working on a web site, and I can do almost everything offline, so I imagine you can too. I have downloaded local copies of php / javascript / jquery documentation to refer to if I need to look something up.

2. Plan Properly

Make a list of work that should take you about 20 hours to do. I’ve found that one of the biggest things that derails me is trying to figure out what I should do next. I end up surfing around my project trying to find little things to tweak. Instead, spend fifteen or twenty minutes outlining everything you can think of that could be done. Ten hours isn’t enough, because you will be working very efficiently and will probably get way more done than you’re expecting.

Eat one meal right before working. You’ll need to eat another meal during the ten hours, so prepare it beforehand. This might sound stupid, but I’m always amazed at how much time it takes for me to figure out what to eat, go buy it or prepare it, consume it, and then clean up. Now I try to have a couple sandwiches ready and I eat them while I work. When I’m done I put the plate out of sight and keep working.

3. Work

Work hard for ten hours. I actually think that ten hours is conservative and a low amount of time to work. There are many days where I work 12 or 14 hours. If you have a project that can benefit from lots of work and you aren’t putting that work in, then you aren’t actually serious about your project.

If you need a break, sit back, close your eyes, and think about your project. Or sit and listen to your classical music for a song or two. Or just be hardcore about things and push yourself to keep working.

When I take breaks, I do other work. I’ve been programming for seven hours now, so I took a break to write this post. In a minute I’m going to save it and get back to programming.

Wrap Up

The more experience I build and the more work I actually put in, the more drawn I am to the conclusion that it’s stupid to be anything but hard core about your work. Nothing is going to become a big success without a huge amount of work. Either put it in and give yourself a shot at success, or stop kidding yourself and go have fun. The middle route of working in a haphhazard fashion deprives you of any real chance at success as well as the chance to have fun.

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Photo is a cool wall in Shanghai. I can never figure out what to use for the picture for posts like this.

I’m hoping to have SETT running on this blog within a month or so.

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I may be blind towards the future but hindsight is 20/20, so I’m going to a quick summary of the year.

Travel

When asked where I live, I always respond that I’m in San Francisco for half of the year and out of the country for about a third. I never actually knew how accurate that was until an hour ago when I went through all of my credit card reciepts and Tripit account to make a detailed list of everywhere I was this year. It turns out I was right on the money. Here are some stats:

Cities visited: 42

Countries visited: 18 (Portugal, Spain, Monaco, France, Italy, UK, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, China, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Germany, St Maarten, Antigua, Barbados, Panama, US)

New countries visited: 8 (Monaco, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Germany, Antigua, Barbados)

169 days in San Francisco (46%)
116 days out of the country (32%)
80 days in the country, out of San Francisco (22%)

31 days on a cruise ship (8%, overlaps with the above)
35+ flights

Overall, a pretty good year for travel. I did some good trips, saw some awesome new places (Berlin, Stockholm, Shanghai, and Iceland topping the list), and had adventures. At times it felt like I was rushing around a bit too much, but counter-intuitively, I got way more work done while traveling than when in SF.

 Work

During the first half of the year my work habits were subpar. The best way to explain is to say that I simply wasn’t taking things seriously.

Some time during the year I experienced a mental shift, where all of a sudden it seemed idiotic to be wasting time with entertainment or useless crap when I have big goals that I’m not on track to reach. Let’s say that there are four categories of things to do:

1. Things I want to do
2. Things I REALLY want to do

3. Things that are productive
4. Things that are REALLY productive

The first category is stuff like IM chatting with an acquaintance or watching TV or a movie or going to a party. The second category is stuff like camping in Japan or playing poker in the World Series.

The third category is stuff like redesigning my blog or making new business cards. The fourth category is things like building new features for SETT or writing blog posts.

I don’t know what my time expenditure breakdown was before the shift, but afterwards I’ve almost completely cut out the first category. To a lesser extent, I’ve also cut out the third category. Now I spend about 20% of my time doing stuff I REALLY want to do, 65% on REALLY productive stuff, and the last 15% on the others.

Shifting so much of my attention and time towards REALLY productive stuff is by far the biggest change I made this year. My guess is that I used to spend about 15% of my time on this kind of work, based on feel as well as lines of code committed per week.

Firsts

I did a lot of cool first things this year:

Created SETT
We technically started in December of last year, but everything substantial was built since then. SETT has taken more of my time and effort than anything else, and I’m more excited about it than anything else.

Learned to drive a motorcycle
I took my first motorcycle driving class on January 1, 2011, so I’ve been riding for just about a year (I didn’t actually buy a motorcycle for a couple months). Biking has actually become a significant part of my life– it’s an enjoyable part of every day.

Flew a helicopter
I had always wanted to fly a helicopter, and finally got the chance to do it with a quick first lesson. Flying around is pretty easy; hovering is insanely difficult.

Played in the Word Series of Poker
Another long term dream was to play in the World Series of Poker. I played the $1500 buy-in Limit event and came in #100, one place above Jennifer Harman. Over the past year I’ve gone from being a losing poker player to a winning one, which is pretty cool.

Duing the portion of the year before I got serious about SETT, poker took up a lot of my time. It’s nowhere near as important as SETT, but it’s a really positive skill for the mind as well as the wallet.

Rapped for 1000+ people
In Mauerpark in Berlin, I had the chance to rap for over 1000 people in the Best Karaoke Ever. Video below.

 Book hit the top 1000 kindle books
Thanks to the advice of Karol Gajda and the support of you guys, Life Nomadic was in the top 1000 Kindle books (out of over a million). That’s the top .1%!

Fed a baby leopard and pet a bunch of tigers
I really like animals, and while I was in Thailand this year I had the chance to get close to a bunch of them. I fed a baby leopard who sat in my lap, pet a bunch of tigers (and walked a small one), and swam with sharks.

Rode the fastest train in the world and a private jet for the first time
I’m a sucker for superlatives, especially when it comes to trains, it seems. I’ve now ridden the slowest train (although it’s decommissioned now) as well as the fastest, which is the Mag-Lev in Shanghai.

Thanks to JetSuite, I got to ride in a private jet not once, but twice! And, inspired by Kanye, I wore my PJs in the PJ.

Spoke at SXSW
Thanks to Jason Boehle, I got to speak at SXSW in Austin this year. That was another item on my must-do-before-I-die list, so I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity. Even better than getting to speak was getting a really great reception from a standing-room-only audience.

What could be better

I’m really happy with and proud of the things I did this year, but I think I could have done a lot more, especially in the beginning of the year. Too much time was spent just loafing around in San Francisco.

My dating life this year was abyssmal. I broke up with a long term girlfriend in March and have barely dated since then. I’m happy that I put work over dating (or productivity over pleasure, speaking more abstractly), but there’s time for both. In February I’ll be going out for 30 days in a row, so this should be fixed soon enough.

If I was going to grade my year, I’d give it a B+, penalizing myself primarily for not hustling a bit more, especially in the beginning of the year. I think that the biggest thing I need to focus on is not becoming complacent. I’m happy and have everything I need, so sometimes I have to prod myself to fire on all cylinders and really hustle.

Right now I’m working really hard, have several really exciting trips floating around as possibilities, and will be getting back into the dating scene, so 2012 will be started with some good momentum. I hope you had a great 2011 and are also going to crush it in 2012.

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For the last year or so I’ve been working on something big, which I’ve been stubbornly keeping a secret. I know that this has been annoying to readers, but I felt that skirting around the issue was slightly better than avoiding it altogether. Of course, it’s also been hard for me to keep it a secret, since I really love talking about what I’m working on.

We’re not done yet, but the light at the end of the tunnel is in view, so I figure it’s probably a good time to introduce what we’ve been building.
The project is called SETT, and it’s a new blogging platform. Over the next few weeks I’m going to talk more about what specifically we’re doing, but first I want to talk about the problems we’re solving.

Bloggers care about one thing: audience. We want to reach as many people as possible, and we want to connect with them in a meaningful way. None of the current blogging platforms are optimized for either of these goals.

There are two methods of interaction between a blogger and his audience. First, he can stand on his pedestal, as I am now, and speak to his audience. But let’s not kid ourselves– this isn’t a conversation. It’s a lecture.

The second method of communication is through blog comments, which are universally understood to be a disaster (hence the sprouting up of better-but-still-bad solutions like DISQUS).

I don’t know how many active readers I have, but I know that when I ask for feedback in a yearly survey, I get several hundred responses. Most of the responses are quite detailed and clearly the product of considerable thought. This says to me that my readers care about my message and want to be part of a community, not just a mass of passive readers. If that’s true, why does every post average only 20 comments or so?

I think the reason so few people comment is the same reason I rarely comment on blogs, including my own: there’s essentially no point. We all know that as soon as the newest post becomes the second-newest post, no one is reading the comments anymore.

If a post gets more than 30 comments (let alone 100), blog readers usually won’t even skim the comments, because it’s just too daunting. I actually read every comment on my blog (I probably have about the biggest blog possible where that’s still an option), and I’d actually like to respond to comments, but there’s really no guarantee (or even likelihood) that the person I’m responding to will see my reply.

Beyond blogger-to-audience blog posts and comments, there’s a critical method of communication that’s absent from every current blogging platform: user to user communication.

The internet has a huge number of strong cohesive communities that we’re all familiar with, like Reddit, Hacker News, Fatwallet, Slashdot, Something Awful, and OfftTopic. None of these are centered around blogs. This is because blogging doesn’t allow user to user communication. Forums, although hindered by a number of inherent problems in the platform, are the quintessential community sites. Their only tool is user-to-user communication, which speaks to its utility as a community builder.

Our process in building SETT was to approach every decision with the mentality of “in an ideal world, how SHOULD this work?” As a result, we’ve improved blogging in almost every aspect. Even for bloggers who don’t care about community, SETT is probably the best choice.

These many improvements, though, are secondary to our primary goal of enabling conversations and communities to thrive on blogs. Our overriding belief is that the nature of the blogger has changed over the past ten years, but that his tools haven’t.

It’s time to build a revolutionary blogging platform that retains enough of the old to be comfortable and familiar, but pushes the envelope forward a sufficient distance to fundamentally change what it means to be an active blog reader.

When I first came up with this idea and we brainstormed what it might look like, we had only a foggy idea. We knew we wanted to integrate certain concepts, but we weren’t sure exactly what the end product would look like. Over the past year, as we’ve carefully crafted and molded each part of the platform, our vision has slowly come into focus. We’re not done yet, but it’s finished enough for me to now see what the future of blogging could look like, and I’m excited by it.

If my account of what’s wrong with blogging resonates with you, you’re going to be very excited about SETT when it’s released, whether you’re a blogger or a reader.

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Short version: TaskSmash no longer requires an invitation code to use. Just go to www.tasksmash.com and put in a user name and password.

Long version: Todd and I used to send each other an email every day with a list of two or three tasks that we absolutely had to get done that day. Then, at the end of the day, we’d check in to see if the tasks actually got done.

The problem with that was that sometimes we’d forget what we said we’d do, so we’d have to dig through the sent box on our phones, and there was no real historical tracking.

I’m a stubborn person, so after looking around and being unable to find a task management system that had provisions for keeping your friends accountable, I created TaskSmash. The idea is that it’s a lightweight and fun to use task program that allows you to add friends. They can see your calendar and your stats, and leave notes of encouragement on your calendar. TaskSmash also keeps track of your longest streak, all time stats, and various other statistics.

It’s just a beta, and could use some more features, but when I use it I definitely get more done. So do the current beta users.

One note: you MUST add a friend immediately. Literally 100% of my beta users who did not add a friend stopped using it within 21 days.

For some reason, people think that this is the big project that I’m working on. It’s not-it’s just a fun little project that I’m releasing for free so that others can benefit from it.

Sign up for free at http://www.tasksmash.com. I will probably close registrations back down in the next week or so, so if you want an account, definitely make it now.

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Thanks again for buying Life Nomadic since I’ve dropped the price to $2.99. The sale has been a big success, so I’m going to leave it at $2.99 for now. If you’re an Amazon Prime user, you can now read it for FREE through the lending feature. You can see it here on Amazon.

PLEASE leave a review of Life Nomadic. Reviews help me get into the Amazon recommendation system, which helps me make money.

There’s also an API for TaskSmash. If you want to make something for it. Just email.

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The other day, Karol Gajda sent me an email saying that I ought to sell Life Nomadic for $2.99, and that if I did, the volume would make up for the lower sale price. Worth a try, right?

So, for a while at least, the Kindle version of Life Nomadic is $2.99 on Amazon. If you take at least one trip a year, the money-saving tips alone will pay for the book many times over. Of course, there’s a lot more to the book than that, evidenced by the emails I get all the time from people saying the book changed their lives.

Speaking of which, if you have read Life Nomadic, PLEASE leave a review on Amazon. This helps Amazon circulate it in its recommendations engine, which helps me get sales.

The link for reviewing or purchasing is here.

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If you’ve bought any of my products: thank you. Most of my income comes from those sales.

Some time next week I’m going to open up TaskSmash up until another 100 people sign up. To make sure you know when it’s open, make sure you’re subscribed to the blog or twitter.

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My mom once joked that I make her look like my enemy on my blog. The force that I rebelled against as a youngster was my parents, so they get painted as the opposition sometimes. I’m proud of this rebellious streak, and attribute some of my success to it, but also know that I  would have none of what I have if it wasn’t for them.

Even ignoring the all-trumping donation of their genetic material, my parents, along with the rest of my family, are unquestionably the biggest positive force in my life. Although it doesn’t usually make it into sappy blog posts like this one, the truth is that every single day, I think about how incredibly lucky I am to have such incredible parents. If I dwell on the thought too long, I find myself fighting back tears of gratitude.

As someone who enjoys a huge degree of personal freedom, I am only now beginning to be able to comprehend the sacrifices that my parents have made for me. I was a difficult child even before I was born, giving my mother 36 hours of labor before finally popping out into the world. From that time until long after I left the house, she and my father put my needs above their own. It’s fair to say that for most or all of that time, I didn’t realize how profound this sacrifice was, let alone acknowledge it.

My mother taught me to eat healthily long before I would accept it or even entertain the idea. Despite my immature ridiculing of it and the high cost, she continued to buy organic vegetables to feed my siblings and I. Until seeing what was in other people’s fridges, and actually grocery shopping for myself, I didn’t realize how much more difficult and expensive it was to feed us healthy food.

She also prohibited us from watching TV, other than educational shows. I hated this and fought it, only to be told that I would some day be glad. She was right– the productive time I have now for programming and writing, which otherwise may have been spent on a TV addiction, I owe to her.

Mom also taught me to be stubborn and independent. I’m sure that she regretted passing this particular trait down during our frequent arguments about school, but I’m glad to have the ability to stand my ground now.

My father always did everything around the house by himself. He knocked down walls, rewired houses, fixed appliances, and plumbed things. I doubt we ever called a service man of any type. More than the technical skills and hand-me-down tools my father gave me, he taught me that it was okay to tackle a project without quite knowing how I’d be able to finish it. It took me a while to fully appreciate it, but he also taught me that it was important to do things well. With him, nothing was ever slapped together haphazardly.

He also has an amazing ability to put aside his own biases and be unconditionally supportive. Before my friends and I bought our school bus, he told me not to do it and warned that it was a big mistake. But once I defied him and bought it anyway, he helped make sure it wasn’t a mistake by showing up with snacks and a trunk full of tools. Once we’d finish one part of the project, he would be the first one to say, "Okay, what’s next?" and keep things moving.

Together, my parents created a household full of love and almost devoid of conflict. Indeed, any conflict I can think of was created by myself. I never saw my parents fight until close to the end of their marriage, well into my adulthood. Even that separation was done amicably.

My parents have always encouraged me to be independent and allowed me to follow my own path. When I was invited to go to Taiwan for the summer with my friend Charlie, they let me go. When I began to be interested in computers, my mom bought me a stack of computer books that I read cover-to-cover, and my dad built a wall-to-wall counter in my room to hold the four computers I bought at neighborhood yard sales.

Even though my parents were upset when I dropped out of school and became a professional gambler, they eventually accepted my decision and even allowed me to gamble under their names. With no condescension or resentment, they gave me the rest of my college money, knowing I would invest it in gambling. They always allowed me to make my own decisions.

When, at twenty, and funded only through gambling money, I wanted to buy a house, they let me get a home equity loan on their house, since I didn’t have the credit for a mortgage. I don’t think I’ve ever received such an unequivocal display of faith.

I can share little anecdotes, but I’m finding it impossible to articulate the immense gratitude I have for my parents, for the perfect childhood they gave me, and for the amazing siblings I shared it with. I’ve seen so many people whose lives seem to be spent reconciling events that took place in their childhood, an obstacle I’ve been spared. I know that whatever I’ve done with my life has only been possible thanks to the foundation put in place by my parents, and that only a small part of my happiness is truly due to my own effort.

Thanks, Mom and Dad.

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Also due a tremendous amount of thanks is the rest of my family: my grandparents, aunts and uncles, siblings, and cousins.

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On the last day of my last trip to Thailand, I learned about two things that I could have done if I had more time: pet a tiger and swim in a shark tank. Ever since then, I’ve been looking for an excuse to go back.

My excuse came this year when I discovered that flying from Tokyo to Berlin would cost about $600 one way, but that a one way ticket from Tokyo to Bangkok and another one from Bangkok to Berlin would cost $500 combined. I wasn’t getting a free trip to Bangkok– I was getting paid to stop there.

Bangkok has some amazing malls- the apparent king of them being Siam Paragon, at the Siam skytrain station. Besides a movie theater with fold-nearly-flat leather recliners complete with pillows and duvets, a Lamborghini dealership stocked with cars, and one of the best food courts I’ve ever seen, it also has an aquarium. A big aquarium.

Central to the aquarium is a shark tank that holds nurse sharks, reef tip sharks, and leopard sharks. If you pay between $150 and $225 (depending on whether you’re a certified diver or not), you can scuba in the tank with a guide, and get extremely close to the sharks, rays, and other sea critters.

It may not be wild like the ocean, but there’s something to be said for being in such a small body of water so highly concentrated with interesting things to see.

It’s amazing to get to see sharks so close, with no barriers between you. Not sixty seconds after descending to the bottom, a one swam two feet in front of my face. For the first time I got a real sense of their size and presence.

For the most part it wasn’t scary, although they do have a habit of swimming straight at you and then turning at the last second. At another point (visible in the video), I looked around and realized that three of them were circling me. Another time one of them hit my head with its tail.

I highly recommend the experience, even (especially) if you’re scared of sharks. It’s a great opportunity to see live sharks from inches away.

The next day we joined a tour to visit the Tiger Temple. I normally stay away from tours, but it was far cheaper than organizing the trip ourselves, and had an extra stop at the bridge over the River Kwai. The bridge was actually built under the conditions described in the movie, but looks completely different.

The most interesting part of the River Kwai stop, though, was right around the corner from our bus. Sitting on top of a table in a food stall area were two baby leopards. Live baby leopards.

Would I like to feed one for $3? Of course.

Next thing I know, I’m sitting on the edge of a table, and a baby leopard has climbed on my lap and is pawing at me to get the bottle that I’ve been handed. Incredible! Because it’s a baby it’s very active, so I have to restrain it a bit with one hand while I pet it with the other. After it gulps down the first bottle, I’m handed a second. Possibly the best three dollars I’ve ever spent.

After that we went to ride Elephants, which was really touristy and cheesy. Afterwards I bought a bucket of elephant food (bananas) and hand fed one of them. For some reason no one else was excited about this option, so I did it alone.

Also falling under the category of "why is no one else doing this?" was jumping in the River Kwai. After eating a really good lunch that I didn’t know was included, they took us on a raft up the river. I was a little annoyed at myself for signing up for something so touristy, so I decided to liven things up by stripping down and jumping into the muddy water. The water felt great, so I floated next to the raft all the way back down to the restaurant.

Finally, after a somewhat awkward bus ride where everyone else was fully clothed and I’m not wearing anything besides soaking wet underwear, we get to Tiger Temple.

Tiger Temple was a normal monastery until, some years ago, an abandoned tiger was left with the monks there. They took care of it, and were given another tiger. Now the’ve got a couple dozen of them, and visitors can come and interact with them. I had no idea what to expect, but I figured I’d be satisfied even if I just got to pet one once, and that I’d push for more if possible.

I wasn’t disappointed. At the back of the grounds is a canyon that has about a dozen or so tigers lying around in it. Some critics accuse the monks of drugging the tigers, but I read everything I could about it and was convinced that this isn’t the case. One by one a guide takes you from one tiger to the next to pet them and have your picture taken.

It’s crazy, really. These are beautiful animals that you can usually only see through thick glass, and at the Tiger Temple you’re actually laying down next to them and petting them. One of them laid on his back and let me rub his belly like a dog.

After all that, which only lasts five or ten minutes, we wandered off around the grounds until we found a monk walking a baby tiger. I asked him if I could walk the tiger, and he handed me the leash. For the next ten minutes or so, it was as if I had my own pet tiger. When we stopped, the tiger turned back towards me and licked my shin with his prickly toungue. I sat down in front of him, held his paw, and put my face near his. It sounds trivial in the retelling, but it was really an incredible experience.

Thailand is great country for a whole host of reasons, but the ability to get up close and personal with normally forbidden animals is at the top of my list. Next time I go I want to swim with the elephants near Chang Mai and do the four hour morning program at Tiger Temple where you get to hang out one on one with a tiger for hours.

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