Never be afraid to doublecheck if you have locked the door when you are using the toilet
Always wear a helmet on a bike
Always be careful around roads, water, weights, heights, fast things, hot things, and sharp things. Remember: scratches and bruises on skin heal, if you lose an eye or a finger, those don’t grow back.
Never drink alcohol & drive a vehicle
Always where your seatbelt
As much as possible, own your mistakes
The keys to self-improvement are: to listen well, to learn from experience, and to read good books
Remember to floss
Wear earplugs to loud concerts (tinnitus later on in life sucks)
Note down the dates of when you started and left jobs, and when you moved house. You always seem to need these things for filling out forms.
Don’t let fear of non-conforming put you off being into the things you are into
Don’t live to please your parents
If you are feeling stuck on a problem, try going for a walk in the fresh air
Make your bed in the morning when you get up, it sets you up for the day
Unless absolutely necessary, be anonymous online and use an alias
Clean around the toilet after you use it and put the seat back down
If you don’t feel safe somewhere, just leave. No matter what anyone says, if you want to leave then leave.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions. If you don’t ask, you don’t know.
Be kind
Respect & look after your body
Learn to swim well
You are not a tree, you can leave a job if you want and that isn’t a defeat – sometimes walking away is the strongest thing
Make a triple effort to remember the names of people when you meet them. It’s hard to do but worth it. It matters to people.
Look after your teeth. See a dentist regularly.
Wash your hands & wrists before you eat
Don’t leave leftover tuna in the tin in the fridge, the tin can leach into the tuna and cause it to become poisonous. Don’t eat leftover rice after it has been in the fridge for more than two days, it becomes unsafe to eat. Also, you can only reheat leftover rice once, after that it is unsafe to eat & you need to throw it away.
I am contacting you in advance of the “Parliamentary motions on a referendum” amendment expected to be voted on in the House of Lords around April 30th.
I am a British citizen who came to the United Kingdom 7 years ago. I met my wife here, got married, had our first child and call this great island nation my home.
I am writing to ask you for your support for the amendment proposed by Lord Newby, Viscount Hailsham and Lord Wigley. I think that the British public has a right to vote on the exit from the European Union that they are getting. I think that the lack of information about the ramifications of leaving the European Union (e.g. risks to the Good Friday Agreement) and misinformation & collusion by pro-Leave campaigners (e.g. false information about how much money the NHS would get if the UK left the European Union, reported use of discredited consulting firm Cambridge Analytica) means the British public are now more informed about what leaving the European Union really means.
I am also concerned about the rise of power-grabbing leadership in places like Hungary, Poland and Turkey. In Hungary the last newspaper that isn’t owned by the state has had to close down. I think the European Union has a crucial role in promoting unity & peace and guarding against international conflicts much in the same way the United Nations does. I think in a time when anti-immigration nativist movements are emerging across Europe, now is the time to bolster unity not to pull up the drawbridge.
Thank you for your time and thank you for reading my email. Thank you for your service to this country.
As someone with M.E. it has been frustrating wrestling with a disease that is hard to understand, destroys the lives of people suffering with it and seems to be underrepresented in terms of research funding despite the millions of people affected by it.
The film ‘Unrest’ is an important step towards awareness and funding. The makers of the film are asking people to support a Kickstarter campaign to help fund a publicity effort so as many people as possible see the film. The hope for people like me is that awareness will drive research funding and one day we will see drugs and cures for this disease.
It is this willingness to hand over our lives that fascinates and appalls me. There’s such a lovely perversity to it; it’s so wonderfully counterintuitive, so very Christian: You must empty your pockets, turn them inside out, and spill out your wife and your son, the pets you hardly knew, and the days you simply missed altogether watching the sunlight fade on the bricks across the way. You must hand over the rainy afternoons, the light on the grass, the moments of play and of simply being. You must give it up, all of it, and by your example teach your children to do the same, and then – because even this is not enough – you must train yourself to believe that this outsourcing of your life is both natural and good. But even so, your soul will not be saved.
The new man, Marinetti wrote – and this deserves my italics – would communicate by “brutally destroying the syntax of his speech. He wastes no time in building sentences. Punctuation and the right adjectives will mean nothing to him. He will despise subtleties and nuances of language.” All of his thinking, moreover, would be marked by a “dread of slowness, pettiness, analysis, and detailed explanations. Love of speed, abbreviation, and the summary. ‘Quick, give me the whole thing in two words!’“
About once a month my brain will ask me “Hey, remember that time Obama dropped the mic?”. And it’s not like he did it just once, I saw him do it twice: on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon and at his last White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
The first time I saw Obama drop the mic on Jimmy Fallon I remember thinking that it was a pretty cool thing for the leader of the most powerful nation in the world to do. It worked on me, at least. If you watch the clip Obama looks and sounds like a politician trying to do a bit on a late-night talk show, but that seems to make it more credible. And in the skit, there is a small jab at Donald Trump.
Looking back on this video now, it takes me back to a time when Donald Trump wasn’t a presidential contender but a punchline and we were fondly watching Obama take his bows as his presidency wound down.
(above) Donald Trump looking on as Obama mocks him at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner
So my first thought is to assume the mocking and positioning of Trump as a cartoonish character at the 2016 Dinner was highly strategic. And Obama was obviously committed to it, two days before the election he was still jeering at The Donald’s credentials rather than just flat-out seriously calling him unqualified for the job. And well, we all know how things turned out. And honestly? Retrospectively it just looks as though everyone, including Obama himself, underestimated Donald Trump’s appeal to the American voter. He treated Trump as a joke so we did too.
So there is something about the way he drops the mic that second time that frustrates me. It feels like here was this clever President, able to reference cultural memes while he, and presumably many others, misread the electorate and allowed Donald J. Trump to sneak in. And while the fault doesn’t lie solely with Obama, I think that some of it does.
The title of this post should be “The time I almost joined a multilevel marketing scheme” but that wouldn’t be nearly as exciting.
Back in 2005 or 2006 during my mid-twenties my girlfriend at the time was interested in signing up to sell something called American Communication Networks (ACN for short). She explained it to me like this: ACN was a telecommunications organisation that let you sell on behalf of them to friends and family to make some money on the side. The best part (so to speak) was the opportunity for passive income, if you recruited friends to sell ACN you got a slice of your friend’s sales, and if your friends recruited their friends, you got a slice of your friend’s friend’s sales, and so on. The dream from what I could tell was to sit at the top of a pyramid of people selling ACN’s product and creaming off a passive income without having to do any work.
Eventually it would come to light that my girlfriend was going to have to shell out NZD$500 for the starter kit or selling strategy materials or whatever it was you needed to get started with them. For my girlfriend this was a lot of money at the time and I told her to pause on spending it before I had the chance to find out more. I did a quick google and it turned out ACN was an American company that sold VoIP telephone services. VoIP wasn’t as common back then as it is now but it was a real product from a real company so I had to admit on face value it seemed legit. Something fell off though, it was something about the way ACN presented itself as this multi-million dollar telecommunications company that no one online seem to be talking about except ACN themselves. And then there was the way they were using people in little old New Zealand to sell their product. It just seemed weird but the next time I saw her and told her not to spend the money she told me it was too late, she had signed up.
I remember from this point on every time I was hearing about ACN it was always a bit off. For starters my girlfriend never signed up for the ACN VoIP service herself. The focus was always on that passive money gravy train; how could she sign up other people to sell ACN. The instructional material for selling ACN talked about approaching people like family members and close friends because they would be more likely to sign up because of the personal connection with you. The material even said that people who were negative or skeptical of ACN were “bad apples” and that people selling ACN should move on as fast as possible from them. I remember reading this and thinking “Ok according to this I am a Bad Apple, but I know I’m not, so what’s going on?…”
The crowning moment came when my girlfriend and a couple of people further up the pyramid from her were organising a pitch night at my girlfriend’s apartment to get people to sign up to selling ACN. I was invited and I thought I would go to support my girlfriend and I figured I would just hang out at the back and watch proceedings. So I show up and it is just me, my girlfriend and these two ACN guys. I can’t remember if I twigged immediately but at some point I realised it was only ever going to be just the four of us so they could put the pressure on me to join. The moment that stands out in my memory is how after a bit of talking they said to me “so [girlfriend’s name] tells us that you would like to be a writer one day, is that right?” And I said something along the lines of “yeah, one day maybe, that would be cool”and then they said “well why aren’t you signing up to sell ACN then? Don’t you want to achieve your dreams?”. In retrospect it seems kind of hammy that that approach would even work but I do remember that evening stumbling a little bit saying “well, um, yeah I do want to achieve my dreams…” Eventually I committed to “think about it” and since I was only with her for three months I imagine I broke up with her pretty soon after that.
What’s weird is in retrospect I realise I don’t remember ever saying to my girlfriend “Hey, what was with telling those guys I want to be a writer so they could use that on me?”. I just wasn’t that alert to things like that back then, like I could only see 16 colours or something and it was like I just couldn’t even see some of the more complex workings of life. Writing this story now I feel a lot of sympathy for people that get sucked in by those sort of schemes. I can remember how my girlfriend had been signed up by a friend of hers and you got the feeling he was kind of using her and then I got to see my girlfriend sign up one of her friends. You could tell her friend was a lovely bloke but just not the sharpest guy and trusted my girlfriend and was open to persuasion and wanted to believe that easy money was just out there, and in the end she was using him a little bit too.
