This doesn’t have to be an entire room of your own, but it does help to have a designated area just for you, just for writing. Depending on your preference, it might be a spot on the sofa in your apartment, a table in a studio in your backyard, or the café down the street. Maybe you work best in complete quiet, or while listening to music, or immersed in background noise. Wherever you choose, make a promise to yourself that when you’re in that space, you work on the book.
2. Carve out time.
This is a challenge for pretty much everyone, no matter your life circumstances. We’re all busy, and even if you actually have free time in your life, your mind will constantly try to distract you, suggesting you do anything but write, such as: post a photo on Instagram, throw in a load of laundry, catch up on Serial, text your friend, sit and stare at the wall. Your mind doesn’t really care what you do, as long as you’re not writing. So yeah, it’s hard. But you can control this, and you can start by setting realistic goals. Maybe you shoot for an hour every day, or ten pages, or 1,000 words. Do this for a month, and you’ll be amazed: The pages will begin to add up.
3. Turn off your inner censor.
We all want to write things that sound beautiful and intelligent; rivaling literary greats or authors we admire. And maybe the perfect words and images actually exist in your head. But when you try to put them on paper or your laptop, everything suddenly looks clunky. What happened to that great metaphor you just had? The bottom line is that if you worry about how every sentence sounds, or if you’ve spelled a word correctly, or if you might offend someone with your honesty, you’ll become consumed with self-doubt, shutting you down. Be easy on yourself (which is very hard). Commit to the task of putting words on a page without judgment. There’s plenty of time to go back and revise later.
4. Stop at an energetic place.
During each writing session, it might take you a while to get warmed up, but then words will begin to flow. Keep going with this, and then do something key: Stop writing for the day when you’re still feeling energized. Perhaps this is at the end of an action scene, or a hot sex scene, and you know exactly what’s going to happen next. This is a great time to stop and click “Save,” because it will set you up for success the next day. You’ll be able to stride into your writing space and dive in where you left off, continuing the momentum.
5. Join a writers’ group.
Critique groups are useful for several reasons. For starters, they provide accountability and camaraderie, which goes a long way when you’re immersed in a project that feels overwhelming. Group members can also help you troubleshoot when you run into problems in your story. For example, if you get stuck, you can explain the situation to other writers who aren’t immersed in your head, and you might be amazed at how much their ideas open doors you couldn’t see from your perspective. When you’re ready, your critique group can also help you with ideas for revision, so that you can polish the manuscript and get it ready to send to literary agents or publishing houses. Members might even have idea or connections in book publishing industry. If you don’t know of any critique groups in your area, try posting an ad in a coffee shop or café and see who replies.
6. Reward yourself.
Because the act of writing isn’t particularly glamorous — it might even be the hardest thing you’ve ever done — it’s important to celebrate. And not only when the manuscript is finished. Each milestone deserves a reward. Maybe you schedule a massage after completing a certain number of chapters, or you treat yourself to drinks after you manage to crank out a bunch of pages on a day you really didn’t want to write at all. You deserve it. And when you actually finish the manuscript, although you may want nothing more than a long nap, don’t forget to go big. It’s a major accomplishment, and the celebration should match it.
Obviously, if you are like most of us, your main New Year’s resolution is to get into better shape. Most resolutions don’t last very long, mainly because they are not fun to do and can be hard to learn. A popular way to put the fun back into exercise these days is to incorporate beginner or easy to learn dance moves into your workout regimen. Christian Hip-Hop dance workout videos from Shazzy Fitness offer simple aerobic and cardio dance moves that will help you lose weight, burn fat and best of all are loads of fun. But in addition to resolutions about physical health and wellness, it’s important to also have resolutions that are going to exercise the mind and spirit too. Here are a few resolution suggestions to add to this year’s list.
1. Commit to random acts of kindness
Every day, try to do at least one kind thing for someone else. Buy a stranger a cup of coffee, open the door for an elderly person, do dishes for a friend or maybe cook them a meal. Not only is this going to make you feel good about yourself, it is also going to make others feel good.
2. Get cultured
Take time to visit a museum, see a band, or walk through an art gallery. Enjoy the arts, alone or with a friend. Taking the time to expose your mind to new perspectives or new ideas can be invigorating to the soul. You might be surprised to learn just how much fun enjoying the arts can be.
3. Try something new
Never stop learning or trying new things. It doesn’t matter if you are learning a new hobby, language, exercise activity or maybe meeting new people. Whatever you do, just keep learning! There are loads of resources available many right in our communities and on the Internet. Learning new things helps to keep the mind and spirit stimulated and feeling alert and alive.
4. Enjoy being with yourself
Many people find that their mood changes when they are alone, even for a few hours. If this sounds like you, make a resolution to start finding ways to enjoy spending time alone. Think of some solo activities that you’ve always wanted to do, but have been putting off. These activities can be a great way to relax and rejuvenate.
5. Reinforce the positive
Receiving positive messages really does help to keep us motivated, inspired and more satisfied with life in general. You can get a lot of inspiration from listening to gospel music, reading scripture, or motivational quotes from spiritual leaders or self-help books that align with your religious beliefs. You can then use these phrases or sayings in all areas of your life. If you are struggling with anything, you also might find comfort in consistently feeding your spirit with supportive words of encouragement.
6. Call family
Make it a point to call (texting doesn’t count) your close friends, family and loved ones more often this year. Especially try to stay in touch with those who were there for you growing up, because more than anyone else they deserve to get special time and attention. You’d be surprised at how much parents and grandparents want to hear from us, even if we are only calling to talk for a few minutes.
7. Treat yourself
You deserve a treat once in a while. Make a resolution to occasionally treat yourself to little things that make you feel good. It doesn’t have to be an expensive treat either – it could be a long hot bath, a mocha latte, a new DVD or a frozen yogurt. Be intentional about taking time to do things for yourself and to celebrate the successes in your life.
8. Volunteer
It’s amazing how much volunteering and helping others can do for your soul. There are plenty of organizations that are always looking for volunteers. Check out your local church, charity organizations like the Salvation Army or neighborhood community center to find out how you can help and where you are needed the most.
9. Pray, often
It doesn’t matter how rushed we are, or how little time we think we have, there is always time to pray. We can pray in our car on our way to work, or we can pray while we’re at the gym or when we walk down the street or as we wash the dishes. God loves it when we talk to Him, and He is always ready to listen, no matter the time or place or what we want to talk about and often He is the only one with the answers we seek.
10. Spend time with friends
Sometimes we get so busy that we don’t appreciate the benefits of spending quality time with close friends. A healthy spirit needs to have time to connect with others. If you are too tired when a good friend asks you to go out, commit to making time to visit sometime within the same month. . Maintaining meaningful healthy relationships is important in the long run because it helps us to keep growing spiritually and mentally.
Altrusim is one of the highest forms of human consciousness. It is an intrinsic desire to contribute selflessly to the well-being of others and the society at large. It is hard to give selflessly when our giving takes from us and puts us in a situation of needing help ourselves. Altruism is not about depriving oneself, it’s about doing what we are realistically able to in order to bring others to where we are and where we believe they deserve to be because they are human.
Maybe for this reason, giving is valued, encouraged, and applauded. If we are reliant on the approval and appreciation that comes from our helping, however, things can take a dangerous turn. It can set the stage for codependency when our giving isn’t for the sake of adding value, but rather for buying love and approval. Dysfunctional helping and giving can be a huge power drain, and can quickly pull us into a disempowered victim state. Once that cycle starts, it is very hard to break out of, and can lead to high levels of codependency where we are no longer in charge of our own life and have no energy to attend to our own needs. That can lead to sickness, bankruptcy or even death.
As a woman who grew up in Turkey — who had been socialized to find my value in helping others — I have suffered greatly from my overgiving and have ended up in places where I needed rescuing to get back on my feet. I can now recognize signs of misuse and resentment in me and pop myself back out. If I get caught up in this cycle, that is.
When it comes to over-giving, there are a few signs and symptoms that jump out and are worth knowing about for us to have self-awareness when we are leaking too much energy out without allowing it to come back to us.
1. Your giving promotes dependence:
There is a big difference between helping and rescuing. It feels good to feel “useful”. It is aligned with the altruistic inclination in us. Yet, our giving should not replace the other person’s own genuine efforts to make their situation better. The way to know if you are fostering dependence on you (unconsciously) is to imagine the person you are helping winning $500K from the lottery and being completely independent of your help. If that makes you uncomfortable, then you are over-giving and giving with an agenda. This robs the person off of their ability to reach their potential. In the long-run, they will hate you for it. Because deep inside people actually want to be self-sufficient, and reach their life goals on their own.
2. The person you are helping uses your help to escape responsibility:
Someone who does not want to take responsibility for their own life and happiness will abuse your help and maybe even emotionally manipulate you to continue rescuing them. This will leave you bitter, resentful and angry. Definitely not the feelings you were going for when you helped them out initially.Maybe what they need is life skills and a new perspective. Yet, you see no motivation to gain these skills or look for ways to change their perspective.
3. Your helping causes you to compromise your integrity:
If you find yourself making up fake excuses and lying to get out of helping them, lending them money (again) or letting them stay over another week, you are leaking immense amount of personal power. Lack of integrity will wear down your soul and cause you to self-sabotage your own happiness.
4. You feel guilty when you feel reluctant to help them:
Either they are causing you to feel guilty or have implanted the seed fear of rejecting you if you don’t continue giving. If you begin to think, “I should want to help my friend. She is really struggling” but can’t shake the feeling of guilt for not wanting to help any longer, pay attention to that. It means that you are letting your kindness get taken for granted and even expected, when kindness should only be offered from the heart.
5. Your help is putting you in a difficult place financially, emotionally or physically:
We can’t give what we don’t have. If you are putting their groceries or phone bill on your credit card and it causes you to tap into your savings to pay off next month’s bill, that’s clearly not a good sign. Know your limits and communicate them. When I was going through my divorce, I reached out to a friend for support and she stated that she has way too much going on to be present and consistent with me. Her mother was in the hospital and she had just gotten a promotion that required her to work overtime. She knew that she would’ve been tapped out if she allowed me to put her on my “people to call instead of the crisis line” list. I respected that and appreciated her openness greatly.
6. Helping them has changed the texture of your relationship in a negative way:
Now, there is room for resentment, guilt and exhaustion, and no place for a way to relate equally. You are put in a one-up position without really wanting that. When the need for helping is gone, the possibility of the relationship going back to where it was is slim. In fact, a bad ending may be in sight where you no longer can be friends who trust each other.
7. You are in denial of the negative effects of your over-giving:
If you find yourself finding excuses for them and justifying your help, you may be in knee-deep into this cycle. Your need to be “the good person” who helps others in need has begun compromising your ability to take care of yourself and set the boundaries you need for your own well-being. You have become blinded to your own needs and have gotten caught up in their drama. You are no longer in charge of your own life. This is a very bad place to be because soon, you will be in need of help and it is a very difficult cycle to get out of.
Our giving has to feel good for both parties and should not replace our needto feel safe, respected, and appreciated.
If you resonated with any of the above seven signs, it may be a good time inquire about your intentions for helping and getting honest with yourself. You may have innocently learned to base your self-worth on how useful or helpful you are to others. Altruism is wonderful, but it should never come with a price tag that marks down our happiness, joy, independence, and self-respect. We all have equal responsibility on this planet and if our helping disempowers us and the other person, it is worth reviewing the price we are paying.
L-O-V-E. Everyone has their own opinions on the four-letter word, and everyone uses it differently, but for those of you who have only used it with family, friends, or pets, and never with a significant other, it is not the end of the world and life will go on even without those four letters.
What is love? Baby, don’t hurt me.
If you’ve never had it, you don’t really know what you’re missing. You’ve most likely been witness to it, may have helped some heart broken friends in your lifetime, and seen your fair share of romantic comedies, but every love is unique. Your love is not the same as your heart broken friend’s love, and it is definitely not the same as the love in “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days,” or any other rom-com starring Matthew McConaughey. You won’t know what kind of love you are capable of giving if you have never given it before, and that’s not always a bad thing.
L-O-V-E involves a lot of R-I-S-K
Even though the word is only four letters long, it can leave you with what feels like a lifetime of heartbreak. There’s so much at risk when you “love” your significant other and that risk may not always work in your favor. You risk the chance of getting hurt or hurting someone else, and if you have never loved someone than you don’t know what that hurt feels like.
Hopeful – Not Hopeless
Just because you never have doesn’t mean you never will. Why do we call ourselves hopeLESS romantics to indicate that we love…to be in love? We should call those types of people hopeFUL romantics. If you have never “loved” a significant other, don’t feel hopeless. Feel hopeful that one day you will feel that way. Some people realize they love someone in one single moment, and for others it happens gradually over time. Whenever and however the epiphany hits you, when you haven’t had it yet you should look forward to the day when you finally will.
We accept the love we think we deserve
For all of you “Perks of Being a Wallflower” fans, if Stephen Chbosky’s saying has any truth to it, and we truly “accept the love we think we deserve,” then we better start believing in ourselves and our “loving” capablities. If you have never loved or accepted love from a significant other, it doesn’t mean you don’t deserve it, it just means it hasn’t happened. Everyone deserves love in their life, and we all have experienced it in some way. Appreciate the type of love you do have in your life rather than focusing on the type of love you don’t.
You haven’t settled
Maybe you have never loved a significant other because you aren’t willing to settle on the meaning of the word. If you have been choosy about who you are willing to share the four letters with, it shows how important you think the word is. You know the word isn’t a baseball and you’re not willing to toss it around like so.
If you search “Kai Greene” and “grapefruit” on Google, the first thing you’ll see is a link with “the reason Kai Greene will never be Mr. Olympia” in body text. The next thing you’ll see is a video of this guy fucking a grapefruit.
I am not going to link a picture of it.
If you are unfamiliar with this drama, Kai Greene has consistently placed 2nd in the Mr. Olympia bodybuilding competition despite how competitive his physique has been. A subset of Olympia followers suggest Kai Greene will not be Mr. Olympia because, apparently, fucking a grapefruit is just beneath the stature of a sport where competitors must not only dose steroids at grams per week year-round but also supplement with insulin and growth hormone to reach levels of lean muscle mass that dwarf Arnold Schwarzenegger at his prime. Merely using steroids alone and looking like Dwayne Johnson in Hercules would be unacceptable to the dignity of IGF-1-induced intestinal growth.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that left-ventricular hypertrophy and ultra-supraphysiological body mass are much more deleterious to your health and organ function than sticking your dick in citric acid. When you talk about things that debase or degrade a person, the only actual damage that can occur is physiological, and this includes any mental or emotional damage since the brain is an organ and emotions are part of the body’s physiology. To refer to something as non-physically damaging is to invoke some non-empirical and immeasurable value that doesn’t have any base in the real world external to your perception; people who talk about being ‘impure’ from promiscuity are invoking an imaginary metric that exists only with respect to how belief in this metric influences human behavior, and it only influences human behavior because you believe it exists. It’s not totally superstition, but it’s close.
In other words, the only downside to grapefruit-fucking is that you might perceive it to be low-status, but this is arbitrary as the act of grapefruit-fucking isn’t deleterious to health, and you can change your perception of status to fit a more empirical standard. I haven’t ever eaten hemp protein powder in my life, and I think hemp protein powder is dinky, but if I woke up tomorrow and a study indicated that hemp protein was thoroughly more ideal for protein synthesis than any other protein, I’d immediately buy 10lb of hemp protein powder and figure out a way to like it. You perceptions are simultaneously biased, subjective, and malleable; extraordinarily few people actively adjust their beliefs in light of conflicting evidence, so your perceptions are probably not based on facts. When your perception clashes with some kind of fact, the onus is on you to update your perception into concord with that fact. If you don’t like the taste of something even if you know it’s great for your health, or if you feel uncomfortable about something even if you know there’s nothing wrong with it, that’s your fault and your responsibility to fix your biases.
Here is another empirical and descriptive metric everyone seems to ignore: the amount of work relative to the dollars per hour earned. If you can earn $300 for an hour’s work and this doesn’t significantly interfere with your ability to work more hours in the week, then this is a great proposition and you should do it. In general, being able to earn $2,000/week working 20 hours is better than being able to earn $2,000/week working 80 hours. That is 60 hours weekly that you’ve gained, which by the way is double the cumulative lecture time of Yale OpenCourseWare’s Freshman Organic Chemistry I course, so assuming a generous three hours of work for every class hour you’d have enough free time to learn Organic Chemistry I to Yale’s standard in two weeks of this workload change. Over the course of a whole semester you’d have enough free time to learn 10 classes of material. (This might seem impossible, but colleges are time-inefficient due to lecture length, transportation time, and time spent trying to get laid or fuck around with people you won’t talk to after college.) If your job is intellectually stimulating on par with or exceeding college, then good for you, but for most people I doubt it is, and my doubt increases alongside your yearly salary amount.
Most people will work really shitty jobs for spare cash and find some kind of bizarre dignity in doing this, but find sex work distasteful. I have no idea why, and by “I have no idea” I don’t mean this in the “I would like to ~understand~ you” way; I mean this in the “I have no idea what stupid shit is going on in your brain but I’m going to think you’re even dumber than I thought when I figure out what it is” way. If you think this way, reflect on your belief: you are willing to work 40 hours/week at WalMart or two jobs at fast food chains and find it distasteful that a prostitute or stripper or porn star works two hours weekly and makes the same amount as you? Maybe you need that kind of rationalization, but if this were any other kind of work, you’d feel like your job is a colossal waste of time, and some kind of social perception about the job doesn’t change its financial sensibility.
Oh, and then there’s this kind of guy:
“I wouldn’t take it up the ass for a MILLION dollars homie.”
Bullshit. Yes you fucking would.
There is nothing that indicates a man has thought less about the value of his time than a man who says he wouldn’t take a dick up his ass for some obscene amount of money. You are downplaying the equivalent of thousands of dollars and months of work at WalMart for a few hours of work. Any guy who says this sort of thing is lying on a scale comparable to “muscular guys are gross :(“ or “I find you more attractive without makeup :)”, and perhaps lying harder than both of those statements combined. Then again, maybe he’s not actually lying and in fact just stupid, but either way this kind of financial incompetence isn’t something you want pumping sperm into you.
I used to have these conversations at work. I thought I was in the “I wouldn’t do something weird and sexual for money” school of thought, then this happened:
“Alfred, let me ask you a question.”
“What?”
“Would you let someone stick a finger up your ass?”
“It depends on the person.”
“Just a random person.”
“Probably not.”
“What about for $500?”
“Still probably not.”
“Really? I would. I think if someone came up to me with $500, cold, and put it in my hand, I’d drop my pants and make them stick it in.”
Seeing tangible money enables your thought process to appreciate the triviality or significance of what you have to do for it. Knowing the quantity of money and having a visual of that money or an understanding of what that money can do are very different things, because the human brain is bad at grasping large numbers. Bad to a point where people quote Joseph Stalin in a defeated acceptance of how bad it is. Bad to a point where xkcd had to make a chart for already smart people to grasp how much a trillion dollars actually is. If humanity was good at grasping numbers above 10,000, genocides would receive far more attention from the general public than individual murders. They don’t, because humanity sucks at this.
From experience, I think most guys would let someone fuck their ass for $1,000 or less. $500 if they work at a shit job and maybe even less than that if they’re okay with sex work, but I think $1,000 would cover the majority of guys across most income ranges. If you came up with ten wadded hundreds and stuck it in front of an average guy in a hotel room, their mind would change rapidly. They’d figure out ways to be comfortable with a dick in their ass, and figure out ways to maintain an erection while someone they found unattractive was pounding their rectum. People find ways to enjoy work at the most mundane places, so it’s certainly not out of the spectrum of possibility that you could find a way to think positively about a demonstrably good offer for your time, though huge demographics of men work as hard as they can to act like this isn’t financially amazing.
I remember reading a thread on a steroid forum that epitomized this level of serial bullshitting. Someone was approached about stripping at a gay club for a median of $600/night, and every post that followed showed the homophobia typical to a message board frequented by men in their late 30s who have traditional ideals of masculinity.
The responses were absurd. One poster said that he declined an offer of $25,000 for a blowjob. Not $25,000 payment to him for a blowjob he’d give, but $25,000 payment to him for letting someone give him a blowjob. In the halls of shit that didn’t happen this is definitely in the throne room, but the principle of the matter is outrageous — someone felt the need to communicate this idea with other people as if he was communicating a virtue. Thankfully, a lone light of reason glimmered toward the end of page 1 to tell this guy how fucking stupid he was if that offer was even remotely real, but several people thought rejecting the work was legitimately principled.
“Once you go down this road, where does it stop? First it’s grinding ass on penis for $400-500/night, next it’s sucking off some guy for $2,000, next it’s getting ass-rammed for $5,000…”
If I could average even $450 nightly with $5,000 ass-rammings on weekends I’m looking at about $8,000 weekly, which is $32,000 monthly which is $384,000 yearly, which over four years is 1.5 million dollars. You can buy a house, fund your college education, get a handful of master’s and professional degrees after that, pay for your girlfriend’s tuition and set up a trust fund for your future kids with money left over. People graduate top 10% at Harvard Law to make that kind of money. People get Ph.D.s in engineering from MIT to make that kind of money. People study quantitative finance from Carnegie Mellon to make that kind of money. People spend four years in medical school and four years in residency and some uncertain amount of years in fellowship training to make that kind of money.
And you’re telling me I can do it by stripping and taking a dick up my butt? It took me three months working 55 hours weekly at a low-level service job to save $5,000, and there is ostensibly a way to do this for a few hours of work, and you’re telling me I should be repulsed by this?
Let me go on record as saying that if all I have to do for $5,000 is take a dick up my ass, you can obliterate my rectum no questions asked.
But probably part of the high price of assfucking originates from its risk, and more specifically the perception of its risk, because the actual risk is not that high. While it’s true that the risk of HIV from receptive anal sex is higher than any other sex act, this is like saying the risk of diabetes from sweet onions is higher than any other bulb vegetable, because the risk wasn’t that high to begin with. We can know this because actual probabilities are available that trump whatever anecdotal probability someone might want you to believe.
The National AIDS Manual’s Aidsmap website and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention actually break down risk scenarios for various sex acts. Aidsmap in particular gives insight to transmission rate, which assumes that the partner already has HIV, and distinguishes between receptive (in your butt) and insertive (in someone else’s butt) sex. From “HIV risk levels for the insertive and receptive partner in different types of sexual intercourse”, there are a buttload of ways to estimate risk.
In a high income country (if you are reading this you are probably in a high income country) the risk of transmission for a female having sex with an HIV-positive male is 1 in 1250. But if you are the target reader for this article you are not a female; you are a male who is disputing the value of fucking a grapefruit and taking a dick up your butt for $5,000.
In the event that your worst-case scenario is unprotected sex, these figures account for that event and assume you are fucking someone who already has HIV and that neither of you are using a condom or some other form of protection:
“The most widely cited study of per-act anal-transmission risk was published in 1999. (Vittinghoff E. et al). It found that amongst men in high-income countries, unprotected anal intercourse with an HIV-positive insertive partner carried an estimated 0.82% risk of infection for the receptive partner per sexual act, or a 1-in-122 risk of transmission. It estimated the risk for the insertive partner as 0.06% per sexual act, or a 1-in-1666 risk of transmission.”
A second study by Jin F et al. used data from Sydney which “support a recent meta-analysis of all previous studies of the per-act risk of receptive anal intercourse to ejaculation for both heterosexuals and sex between men, which was estimated to be 1.4%.”
“To ejaculation” is an important phrase here, because ejaculation doubles the risk. Here are some figures from the study, paraphrased in ways that I’m sure register more clearly to you. Again, they assume unprotected sex with a person who already has HIV.
If you fuck someone with HIV in the ass unprotected and you’re circumcised, your risk of HIV transmission is 1 in 909.
If you fuck someone with HIV in the ass unprotected and you’re uncircumcised, your risk of transmission is 1 in 161.
If someone with HIV fucks you in your ass and pulls out, your risk of transmission is 1 in 154.
If someone with HIV fucks you in your ass and jizzes in your rectum, your risk of transmission is 1 in 70. And for the record:
If you fuck a grapefruit, your risk of any STD transmission is 0.
Let’s suppose you simply refuse to take a dick up your butt but are willing to stick your dick in other people’s butts, or if you are willing to take a dick up your butt but only with a condom, CDC and Aidsmap have probabilities for that too.
CDC: “…consistent use of condoms reduces the risk of getting or transmitting HIV by about 80%. Using both condoms and antiretroviral therapy reduces the risk of HIV acquisition from sexual exposure by 99.2%.”
Aidsmap: “The per-contact risk of acquiring HIV from unprotected insertive anal intercourse with any partner (HIV status unknown) was more than ten times lower (0.06%, one in 1666).”
Per CDC, reduce any of the above probabilities by 80% to get your risk with a condom, or by 60% if you want to be conservative. Your risk of transmission when fucking someone’s ass with a condom, HIV status unknown, could be as low as 1 in 8300 or less; the risk of transmission via receptive anal sex, HIV status unknown, could be about 1 in 1850 or less given Vittenhoff’s data. This factor also changes based on demographics, e.g. college-educated people have less HIV in general so if you only fuck people with a college degree your chance of HIV infection is even lower than the above numbers, and if someone is willing to pay you $5,000 to fuck your ass then they’re obviously not dumb about making money.
But most people are bad at grasping large numbers and this applies especially to probability. To fix this, you can consult figures from the Bureau of Labor statistics for normal things people do for money that you probably don’t consider that dangerous, but which are far more dangerous and far less lucrative than taking a dick up your butt with a condom for $5,000.
The annual fatality rate of fishermen is 127.3 per 100,000 or 1 in 785. The median annual salary is $25,590, or five dicks up your butt.
The annual fatality rate of logging workers is 104 per 100,000 or 1 in 961. The median annual salary is $32,870, or 6.5 dicks up your butt.
The annual fatality rate of airline pilots and flight engineers is 51.6 per 100,000 or 1 in 1782. The average of median annual salaries for both airline and commercial flights is $105,065, or 21 dicks up your butt.
The rate of fatality from BASE jumping as determined by Bandolierwas 1 in 2,317. Slightly better rate than taking it up the ass with a condom indiscriminately, but zero return on your time, and yet your career will not be negatively affected if someone knows you have BASE jumped.
Oh, and the fatality rate of fucking a grapefruit is 0.
You probably don’t know many people who BASE jump or have jobs like fishing, but I bet you know someone who is a trucker or have at least met one. Check this out: Truck drivers? 25.9 fatalities per 100,000, or 1 in 3861. Median salary $38,200 or 7.6 dicks. Less risk than taking it up the butt with a condom, but half the risk of fucking other people with condoms. If the risk was proportional to pay, that would still mean you could make $1,000 from fucking a person in their ass, which is phenomenal value for your time.
This data hopefully establishes a good sense of return on investment based on activity, and the risks of gay sex are important because they provide a frame of reference for not only the ROI on paid gay sex but the ROI on risk-free sex work, like fucking a grapefruit. Though when you get to this point where every other objection a person can make to sex work has been defeated, the remaining cries of objection are always the same: “but it’s still weird.” This is exclusively comes from people who can’t overcome their kneejerk feelings, and therefore can’t update their beliefs in light of new evidence. If they could, they would have gotten over the weirdness a long time ago.
But yes, it is weird. No shit. “Weird” means abnormal which means statistically deviant which means anyone who deviates from some kind of average is weird. People who make $500,000/year are weird. People who have IQs of 160 are weird. People who bench press 400lb are weird. People with abs like Ryan Reynolds or asses like Nicki Minaj are weird. But I’m sure someone is going to make the argument that when they object to something “weird” they mean statistically deviant in a way they dislike or are made uncomfortable by, which is subjective and no suitable basis for an objection and by the way was the same argument traditionalists of the past gave against interracial marriage and homosexuality.
You know what’s weird? Fucking bodybuilding. Using insulin and growth hormone and tolerating distended guts just to have a fat-free mass index in the 99.99999th percentile of humanity; shaving your entire body; regularly tanning to the point where your skin at 40 looks like you’re pushing 60. Drugs do not influence every sport to the same degree, and drugs matter much more in the NFL than they do in soccer. Surely you’d think powerlifters would take tremendous amounts of drugs, right? Not compared to bodybuilders. No one takes more drugs than bodybuilders. Bodybuilding competitions are won and lost by drug intake.
But hey, a guy fucked a grapefruit.
If something is ‘weird’ and that’s a barrier to you accepting it, you need to update your perceptions and feelings to be in line with what the thing you’re finding difficult to accept actually is. Society does not stigmatize people who are deep sea fisherman, even though they do something considerably riskier than taking a dick up their ass for $5,000 and for far less money, yet perceptions of gay prostitution are far worse than those of deep sea fisherman. This is why the men who say something like “you wouldn’t catch me taking a dick up my ass for a MILLION dollars” are either full of shit or horrible at understanding return on investment, and I bet that if you asked these same men whether they’d be willing to enter the logging industry they’d have far less reservation, which demonstrates that their only objection to gay sex for money is not risk but in fact a quasi-superstitious perception about sex’s effect on imaginary virtues.
Taking a dick up your ass would be a good time investment. But Kai Greene did not take a dick up his ass. He didn’t even stick his dick in anyone else’s ass. He stuck his dick in a grapefruit, which is a plant that could not possibly transmit HIV, and he was paid for it. He was paid considerably for something that was effectively risk-free and at most a few hours of work, which is an excellent time investment. Yet for understanding how to get the most value out of his time, his actual worthiness of victory in Earth’s most notable bodybuilding competition is downplayed by homophobic camps of the bodybuilding scene who object to his sex work on unempirical, subjective grounds.
Someone who does sex work is doing something not that much more dangerous than trucking, and getting tremendously more value out of their time. If you find out that someone has gotten good value out of their time by doing sex work, you should be encouraging them, because they are far smarter with their time management than most people.
That Kai Greene is stigmatized based on his sex work is not just a flaw in the bodybuilding scene, but the result of an absurd perception about sex that doesn’t withstand scrutiny. This perception extends to societal beliefs about sex as a whole. When society can collectively update its beliefs about sex to a more descriptive and objective view, we will be more in line with reality and therefore better off.
So if you can get paid well for an extremely simple task like sticking your penis in a fruit, I don’t know what’s stopping you from doing that, but I know it’s irrational.
Growing up in South Texas. Fishing in the Gulf. We all have a story about the Big One. Mine’s always been about the one that got away.
“[A]fter forty days without a fish … the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky.”
And so to close out 2014.
“Unforgettable” remains an unforgivable understatement. And this year too I’ve been perpetually reminded of my categorical failure at most everything I’ve ever tried. These last seven years I’ve been: Kicked out of law school. Released from a hedge fund. “Phased out” of a soybean trading company. Fired from a currency trading operation.
I lost some world-class fish. And have long been unable to countenance the gravity of my failings.
“I may not be as strong as I think, but I know many tricks and I have resolution.”
My talent? That you never knew. That I could spin these humiliating drubbings into a positive narrative. In my favor. And cast the line again. And so ends my first full year hustling as an entrepreneur. I cannot count the times folks found my pursuit of independent and totally natural tobacco comical. Like, they thought I must be joking. Or crazy. Or worse.
“’Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman,’ he thought. ‘But that was the thing that I was born for.’”
I did this for some badass farmers I befriended south of the Mason-Dixon. For that quintessentially American way of artisan tobacco. For sticking it to the man of Big Tobacco. And chiefly, for my own gratification.
To forge a thriving business against these headwinds is to have Santiago’s fish always on the line. Weary arms always throbbing. Losing yards of line while always cranking on the reel. Sharks waiting for their bite of my prize catch. And a shitless fear that a shifting wind or swell will swiftly vault me into the everlasting ocean.
“’But man is not made for defeat,’ he said. ‘A man can be destroyed but not defeated.’”
I’m sitting this morning in a café in San Francisco. I look around and I’m struck that almost everything I see is not only man made but is either for sale or in the service of selling. Yes, I can see some trees on the street but they have a funny effect: they block the sky. Which is what I suddenly understand buildings are for: to block view of the infinite sky and keep us focused on human commerce in every sense.
In his exquisite essay, The Intertwining, Merleau-Ponty argues that we don’t see the world from afar: we don’t stand here and see a world over there. On the contrary, the very fact that we can and do perceive the world is precisely because we are not at a remove. I am stuff and the world is stuff; perception is an interaction between stuffs. When I look at the chairs and people and croissants in the café, they come to me as I go to them. We interact; we intertwine.
Think about it for a minute. Is vision active or passive? When you read these words are you seeing them — you as subject, the words as object? Or do the words go to you and have you see them — they become the subject and you become their object? Or is vision an act of a different nature altogether, taking place between and among both subject and object, in fact effacing the very distinction between subject and object to make everything part of the same, continuous fabric?
What we see enters us, literally. We are packed full of images. Everything we’ve ever seen is folded into us — into our blood and dreams, into our tissue and memory, into our sense and organs. This is why it’s important to be careful what you witness. It becomes part of you. I was at the Louvre 15 years ago and I still can’t shake all those awful Renaissance rape paintings. I feel the same way about the Kentucky Fried Chicken I ate three days in a row, 20 years ago. Both the paintings and that chicken are clogs in the flow of my metabolism, my thinking, my digestion. They both left me dyspeptic, perhaps permanently (or at least until a merciful death).
I find looking at the sky — at the clouds but also the open expanse that exceeds but includes the clouds — exhilarating. To participate in a line of sight that goes and goes and goes can’t help but extend internally, as well. I feel my body, with its seeming skin limit, filling with the infinite universe. If when I see a chair, that chair folds into me, when I see the sky, the sky folds into me. Suddenly, I have the infinite blue and black and grey and glowing ether pulsing through my veins. Often, it is the only thing that can clear the dyspeptic onslaught of images that is my life, that is life today.
Now, cities are complex mechanisms of control. Many have written about the gridded streets forming a gridded body politic, everyone and everything in its place, organized and numbered. What’s your address? The city tags and hedges us, literally steering us this way and that.
I am not saying this is bad per se. Everything is a mechanism of control, hedging the flows of desire and need, of capital and dreams. There is no neutral space. In this sense, a city is no different than a ranch. But a city and a ranch are quite different in that they hedge and steer bodies, desires, capital, dreams, and infinity in very different ways. I’ve not spent much time on ranches so I can’t speak to them; cities are another matter.
Cities construct tall buildings, which have an interesting double effect. They block the sky for pedestrians and those on the lower floors. Living in Manhattan, I often felt like I was living in a dome — no sky, no infinite horizon, just buildings densely looming. Even the views of the sky are bound by the buildings. And yet for those who get to live and work on the higher floors, the tall buildings offer the infinite horizon of space (‘views’ are a commodity, after all).
But why block out the sky? There are, of course, ideological reasons. People who are looking into the infinite sky, folding it into their being, tend not to get caught up in the finite human-all-to-human work-mortgage-romance-anxiety complex. After all, if you understand yourself as continuous with the infinite cosmos, if you’ve swallowed the infinite horizon of deep space, the chances are you’re not really going to be so eager to crawl out of bed every morning at 6:30, wrestle traffic, only to sit behind a desk for the next nine hours navigating fluctuating streams of idiocy, banality, and cruelty.
Such is the way of capital. As William Burroughs points out, if money can be counted, summed up, it’s not infinite (I realize mathematicians are bristling at that). Infinity doesn’t breed more capital. Making sure people keep working and spending is what generates more capital. And to keep them doing that, you have to keep them looking down, literally, onto the human world.
But to pin it on capital or capitalism is meaningless. Sure, there is a power structure and ideology at work when we build these walls just as there’s always power and ideology at work. So whence this particular will to blot out the sky. Why build walls?
Doesn’t every stoner who’s ever listened to Pink Floyd know the answer? Fear. We build walls because we’re afraid. Fear of the infinite is fear of being out of control, which is fear of death. To enclose the infinite within ourselves, we must abandon our egos and all the bullshit that supports it — a sense of self-worth that comes from the words of a boss, the eyes of others, from family and lovers both actual and would-be. We prefer the safety of endless anxiety to the joy of infinite becoming. The walls of fear keep us looking down, walking the city grid, sweating our asinine jobs and spouses. We hinge our very selves along with our entire economic and cultural edifice to these fickle things as we ricochet between malaise, depression, boredom, and happiness.
This fear exceeds material construction. It works diligently and relentlessly at the level of cultural production, as well. Consider the fear that drives the medical complex and Big Pharma in particular. Why is Abilify the number one selling drug? Because it keeps people from looking at the sky, keeps them functioning in their tiny, enclosed, idiotic bourgeois lives of rent, phone bills, work, vacations, dentists, health insurance, kids, homework, traffic. Keep people looking down and you keep them depressed, annoyed, dyspeptic, grumpy, deranged because you keep them searching the finite for a peace that will never come — but you keep them feeling safe. Needless to say, this is insane. But so it goes.
This is not to say there aren’t other opportunities for real life, for infinite life, within the city walls. Art, for one, offers these moments of infinity within finitude as entire universes flourish within discrete frames. Music, dance, humor: they all open up the finite closures of life to the infinite play of the cosmos.
I want to say there’s love, as well. But love is rare. After all, love is the embrace that accepts everything — that is to say, an embrace that’s infinite, an embrace that says, And this, too, yes, yes, yes ad infinitum. Love doesn’t run into the walls of judgment. Most people, because they’re so enmeshed in the finite, can’t do that. They relentlessly judge themselves and their lovers — too fat, too lazy, too stupid, too poor, too stinky, too horny. They open their arms to love but run into the walls of the city. In order to feel other than dependent or lustful, in order to love, you have to contain infinity: you have to look at the sky.
It’s been about a year, since the last time i was able to lay in silence. With someone other then myself. Without my mind racing and my hands shaking. My head still my heart beating fast. I could nearly hear it over the subway rails and honking taxi’s outside the hotel window.
As i lay in silence reading the writing on his back, I ask myself, ‘why now?’ There was a comfort in being with him. But excitement too. An odd sense of being so comfortable yet so painfully shy all at once.
I sat listening our heart beats echoing off the walls. And suddenly all at once, my eyes shut, my mind stops, He turns his body. reaches back to grab my hand and i am still.
I used to think that the world couldn’t have enough Entrepreneurs. And then after going through my startup Novelsys for the past year, I realize it is not a lifestyle many people can stomach.
1. A day in a life
Worry, fear and uncertainty is the lifeblood of any entrepreneur, from the get go in the morning and it will follow you through decisions, finances, challenges both internally and externally of the organization. The pressure to deliver to stakeholders, employees and partners is the next big load on the shoulders of any founder, and the responsibility is the key reason behind all these. Again, it is to ensure that you keep your company, for one more day and another day. And the best part about this, when you go to sleep at night, that is the only ‘quiet’ part of the day that you actually get to think about what can be done better for the company, creative thoughts flow when nobody else is talking to you. That’s where you can’t sleep as you scramble for a pen to write down these thoughts. Its not healthy and you look older day by day as the body clock is reversed, but I guess this is what they coin ‘passion’. The next big thing is that you go through this everyday with no end in sight. No exam or tests to clear at any date like in School or in Work, you just have to keep moving.
2. Social life
The above will transit into one heck of a social life. You will start to have two types of friends. The first type thinks that you are creating the next Facebook and start to think you are some superstar entrepreneur who is “lucky.” The other group is the negative one who always believe you are bound to fail as the success rate of startups currently stand at 99% failure. You start to distance yourself from your friends, as you want to move away from negative people or you start to think these people don’t understand what you are going through. With a poor work-life balance, you can’t sleep well and do not have much time to spend on thinking about anything else. Your girlfriend starts to get disgruntled at you every time you share about a new idea or new challenge at work.
3. The saving grace
Logically speaking, as a normal human being, it is human nature to move away from fear, uncertainty and sadness. That is exactly what you go through each day.
That, in fact is the best part.
An entrepreneur to me, is a state of mind – a zone that is not troubled by stepping on acid and eating glass. That, I believe is the hallmark of any amazing entrepreneur, if you really reverse engineer the top founders, Jobs, Gates, Musk, Bezos, Ellison, etc. That is one thing common across all of them. You know you are in the top 20% contributing to the world’s solutions and creating opportunities for billions of people when you can withstand that mental state of mind. To the supreme highs, and the horrific lows – the life and times of an entrepreneur.
And that is also why I am striving towards work-life balance with Novelsys and looking to grow a sustainable and scalable startup with my partners, launching our first product Novelsys ampere: The world’s first wireless charging sleeve on Kickstarter in Jan 2015. Yin Yang in our balanced living, one step at a time, a marathon not a sprint.
I provide therapy for people with dependence issues. Commonly, they’re known as “addicts.” But I’ve got a real problem with that word. Not only does it categorize a person in terms of the addiction, but it takes away their agency. If someone’s actually addicted to something, then they can’t stop. Given my job is to help people gain freedom from a dependence, it would be hypocritical to say that my patients are addicts. In actual fact, they’re people suffering from a temporary dependence.
Does this point of view oppose the current accepted definition of “addict”? Yes. Are you going to be able to point to literature that says an addict is someone in a temporary state of dependence? Yes. But in my experience, the status quo doesn’t help a whole lot. What does help, is having people acknowledge that they feel dependant on something, getting to bottom of why they’ve developed this habit and having them feel like they are not reliant on it.
If I’m told by someone that they’re an addict, my response is to look at them sadly, tell them how sorry I am and then ask, “so if you’re completely addicted, what can I do?” Usually, they’re a bit surprised and say they want help to stop being an addict.
The thing is, if they’re coming to me for help, there’s a part of them that thinks they can stop being dependant on their drug of choice. My response is then to have them acknowledge that they believe that they can change their actions: they’re not completely dependent on anything – they’re just dependent-for-now.
And this isn’t just a word game. My argument is that once you enter a state of being completely dependent on something, then you can’t be free of it. But the case with 99% of people with substance dependence is that they can stop. This means that in actual fact, there was never an uncontrollable compulsion or dependence in the first place – that at some level, it’s a choice that’s being made making.
The central problem with believing you’re an addict is that the reasoning is circular.
“What’s the problem?” “I’m addicted to _______.” “How do you know you’re addicted?” “Because I can’t stop.” “Why can’t you stop?” “Because… I’m addicted.”
This circularity betrays the fact that 99% of the time, “addiction” is a way we excuse ourselves from making another choice.
Why 99%? Because sometimes – very, very rarely – people are actually completely dependent on something – completely meaning that if they don’t get that thing and only that thing, they’ll die. For everyone else, there’s a very difficult choice that can be made.
Now, I certainly don’t want to minimize the experience of feeling addicted to something, or, that acknowledging you have a problem is critical. I know first-hand how hard it is to recognize that something is going on that’s out of your control and then to work at ways to find out how to make another choice (not engaging in the thing you feel a compulsion to do or dependence on). The fact that you feel addicted to something means something very serious is going on.
But I want to highlight that while this experience is at the forefront of your mind, in the background is the belief that it might be possible to make different choice. This is something very powerful to acknowledge and it’s related to the awareness that people can and do get help to overcome their temporary dependence. Yes, it seems impossible, but people try and people succeed.
Still clinging to the idea that addiction is common? I’m sure you are – it means you can ignore the fact that you’re responsible for your actions. Not only your actions right now, but your actions while you’ve been a slave to your dependence.
And that’s one of the sinkholes in this landscape.
Throughout your journey to this point, you’ve made decisions that have brought you here. Sometimes coming to accept the things you did while under the yolk of a compulsion/dependence can be harder than actually escaping your dependence. And that’s one of the reasons why regaining your freedom is so hard – you have to take ownership of the things you’ve done.
Looking forward though, it’s not just tough love. I know just how powerless you are in the face of a deeply rooted dependence. The fact is, whether you call it addiction or temporary dependence, you probably can’t overcome it by yourself. Why? Because your mind works against itself in order to try to make you feel better.
So if alcohol has made you feel better or meth has numbed you, then your mind will find a way to convince yourself to keep going back. By yourself, your mind will slowly destroy itself (via the chemicals you’re dependent on) instead of choosing to acknowledge the terrible pain it contains: the terrible pain that would be released if you were sober.
More often than not, you’ve probably convinced yourself that you’ve been taking or doing something out of choice. That you were free to stop. But freedom isn’t doing the same thing you’ve always done – that’s just your mind tricking you into not making another choice.
Choose to struggle or choose dependence.
I don’t presume to know which one of those choices is right for you – there are positives and negatives in both – but don’t convince yourself that you don’t have a choice. Don’t convince yourself you’re an addict.
Sig Nordal 