[21:20] FifthTigerofAsia: so tell me about the trip details

[21:20] davechkjr: this thurs night (hopefully) i get back to NYC from Chicago. Friday / Saturday are packing / moving into storage / going away party.

[21:21] davechkjr: Monday morning I leave for my last week in Chicago, then I fly home to Cali.

[21:21] davechkjr: Spend a week or so there, then on 8/19 i get on a plane for Johannesburg

[21:21] davechkjr: where I will be til April

[21:21] davechkjr: maybe a trip back for Christmas / New Years

[21:21] davechkjr: i just need to copy/paste that to my blog so people know what's up

A question to ponder...

Are you a prostitute or are you a consultant?

1. You work very odd hours.

2. You are paid a lot of money to keep your client happy.

3. You are paid well but your pimp gets most of the money.

4. You spend a majority of your time in a hotel room.

5. You charge by the hour but your time can be extended.

6. You are not proud of what you do.

7. Creating fantasies for your clients is rewarded.

8. It's difficult to have a family.

9. You have no job satisfaction.

10. If a client beats you up, the pimp just sends you to another client.

11. You are embarrassed to tell people what you do for a living.

12. People ask you, "What do you do?" and you can't explain it.

13. Your client pays for your hotel room plus your hourly rate.

14. Your client always wants to know how much you charge and what they get for the money.

15. Your pimp drives nice cars like Mercedes or Jaguars.

16. Your pimp encourages drinking and you become addicted to drugs to ease the pain of it all.

17. You know the pimp is charging more than you are worth but if the client is foolish enough to pay it's not your problem.

18. When you leave to go see a client, you look great, but return looking like hell (compare your appearance on Monday AM to Friday PM).

19. You are rated on your "performance" in an excruciating ordeal.

20. Even though you get paid the big bucks, it's the client who walks away smiling.

21. The client always thinks your "cut" of your billing rate is higher than it actually is, and in turn, expects miracles from you.

22. When you deduct your "take" from your billing rate, you constantly wonder if you could get a better deal with another pimp.

23. Your pimp seams to often abuse you, forgetting that without you, he would not have a business.

24. You do all the real work, but the pimp has a higher stigma and more money, and really just has to "coordinate" the work for you. Sometimes, you wonder if you could just make more money pimping out yourself.

25. You get so brainwashed into the lifestyle, that you don't realize that life can be better, until it is too late.

26. Personal time, or a work/life balance, is meaningless to your pimp, all he cares about is satisfying the clients, despite how many times he tells you he loves you.

27. After a few years, you find that all your non-prostitute friends are no longer your friends, because you lost touch and your schedule and lifestyle was difficult to manage, and you find that you associate primarily with other prostitutes.

28. The turnover rate is ridiculously high. Everyone thinks they can do it for a few years, no problem, but after just a few clients railing you, many break under the pressure, or quit for a better life.

29. Most of the time, your job could be performed by a well-trained monkey.

30. You thought college was a waste of time.

(From a work email - I couldn't keep it together at my desk, reading this. If you haven't worked in the industry, I suppose most of the humor here will be lost on you. And I wish I was you.)

Links, yo. Links.

This Google goodness is a little older, but still interesting.

I can't wait to be one of the last living humans with nobody left to say "I told you so" to. (No, seriously.)

Still a few good summer mini courses left to check out via my church. Nice job, Justin.

South Africa time: lotsa safaris to plan, not to mention the shark diving. Also, South African culture (thanks Ang). Also I've been spending time researching my vaccinations and visas. Also, not SA specific, but I'm hoping I might be able to see Zimbabwe while I'm over there. So far its a strong chance I'll see at least Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, and Zambia. Also, Africa's potentially largest game park.

Saw Geni a number of months back but now it looks a little better.

Ocean's 13 writers doing Entourage for Wall Street (this should be like 10 times as good as the LA version).

My birthday is coming. I'm just saying. Please note that was 4 links, not 1.

How not to suck at socializing. Speaking of which, there's a couple places I'd like to check out before leaving the city.

Last, 33 things you didn't know had names, and some weird coincidences.

Had dinner with Christie last night and she semi-inspired the all but dead blogging flame in me to get back into the swing of things in preparation for the upcoming project in Africa. Which is a good thing, but one more thing on the stack of a million and two things to do between now and leaving for the opposite side of the planet. But I am going to give it a shot all the same.

One thing that I've been kicking around in my head is exactly how I'm going to blog when I am in fact there. I want to keep this blog going, but I'm seriously considering a different, trip-specific blog that can be its own entity, of sorts. Then I suppose I can just figure out how to RSS all my posts there onto this one, and add personal posts here that I don't want to share on my more at-large trip blog (which I'll be making known to colleagues, etc.). So I need to figure out how to jones that.

Also, I'm going to try to do a more feature style for that blog. Some of the features will certainly be places I go and things I see, but I also want to run features on the prominent characters I meet during my travels and what's unique about their lives / world-views / etc.. I'd also like to do regular features about how the trip is changing my pre-conceived notions and perhaps even my world-views. And lastly I'd like to of course feature my insight into the statistics and demographics and whatnot that make up the dark continent and the western (mis?)conceptions that we hold of it. I'd like to write about how I think change would be best pursued there and use it in a sense to work towards planning out my next steps after returning home.

The ADP program asks its participants to return to their home country and spend the year following the ADP project back in the paid practice, so that ADP won't be charged with your attrition should you decide to leave the company. I hope to find a local project in NYC for that year and use it to figure out whether I want to return to school or find another path into more long time international development work. Dave's got me thinking about the GRE's and a masters in International Economics. He's also got me thinking about constantly growing my stack of play chips in Full Tilt. I've pushed 500K recently. Once I hit my first mil, I'm going to throw a hundred bucks in there and see what I can do with it.

Project was down last week so I got to stay home and procrastinate training and packing that I really should have gotten done. I did get to some of the packing later in the week, and tied down a storage unit. Packing up boxes really helps the reality of things start to sink in. I am going to Africa. I am going in little over a month. It is going to happen. Wow.

Also, watched fireworks on RI with Dave and Jon and AM and Ang and Amber and Ben and other various friends. Saw Tim's fiancee's show Cigarettes and Chocolate on Tuesday and caught drinks with the kids after that. Hung out with Suin for the first time in like 4 years. Started Band of Brothers again. Read a lot. Played a lot of FT. Good week.