The Phone Crutch

One of the things I've noticed that people do when they're out at a bar / club / lounge / toga party setting is - use their phone as a crutch. This applies for:

1) Girls that aren't getting approached, and aren't in a group of friends
2) Guys that aren't approaching,
3) People by themselves, and
4) People in a group that is awkwardly put together and not really a group

So, the easiest way to make yourself seem less wallflower-ish, boring, and or loner-ish is to whip out your phone and start texting. If you're really desparate, you could shop for ringtones and play games as well. Don't get me wrong, if you're not in the mood to make something happen, then don't feel obliged to. On the other hand, you can text at home or on the subway and it's a lot cheaper. I'm also curious as to what would happen if people were forced to give up their cell phones when they entered said settings. Would there be more of those dancing lines, snaking around the room, picking up strangers as it goes?

Moderately Weaksauce

I'm talking about Ben and Jack's steakhouse (see list below), although their steak sauce is actually pretty good. I finally convinced a few other people to check this place out with me (after being deluged with CNBC commercials) and my conclusion is, I guess there was a reason they were advertising so much. It's funny when you see the commercials, because they show a bustling restaurant packed with classily dressed patrons calmly annihilating huge towers of seafood and platters of steak.

We arrived at around 6:30 PM saturday night and had the place completely to ourselves. By 8 PM, 4 more tables were being used. Guess it's the economy, or maybe the place is haunted and the commercials are based on a grotesque ghost gatherings that happen at midnight.

Being a Luger spin-off, the focus is on porterhouse, and the steak for 3 is surprisingly easy to finish and only around 40 bucks a person. Quality wise I'm going with Luger's and Wolfgang's over this place but it's not like it was sub-par or anything. Appetizers / sides were in line with what you would expect.

Word of the day: orcish taskmaster

Late Start

Today would be the latest I've woken up all year, putting me every so slightly behind on my now extended to-do list.

whatever number this is) ramp up dancing skills. And not just for the situations where you stumble into a Michael Jackson dance-off on the roof of the Empire Hotel and go head to head with people who turn out to be friends of your co-workers, but also for some more partner-centered stuff, like salsa dancing. Cross-training!

in addition to hand-gliding) hot air ballooning and dune buggying.

Darkness falls across the land

The midnight hour is close at hand.
Creatures crawl in search of blood, to terrorize your neighborhood.
And whosoever shall be found, without the soul for getting down.
Must stand and face the hounds of hell, and rot inside a corpse's shell.

The king is dead, long live the king.

Go forth and conquer

As a friendly piece of advice, if you ever complain about physical feature y to someone in your family (perhaps your mom, even) and she / he says, "oh don't worry, feature y makes you look distinguished," then you should make it a priority to get rid of feature y at all costs, if that is at all possible. For example, and this is just hypothetical, if you're a girl and you have a mustache. Just a thought.

Today's phrase: late to the kegger

A week in review, CNBC style

Pop: Cross-training. No amount of triathalon style training prepares you for playing a weekend game of touch football. And while you wouldn't expect running and swimming to improve your spiral, the muscle aches and pains you get from cutting back and running fly routes are a lot different from the ones you get from pushing for that last mile. Mix up your daily routine and boom, another wrinkle, another comfort zone pillaged. By the way, spending your friday afternoon at a football clinic with your boss in central park is priceless.

Drop: Appetite. My stomach got hit by one of those summertime Honey I Shrunk the Kid rays, or else beer has found a way to double in size after I drink it.

Pop: Spending money on clothes. A painful process for sure, but cost/benefit (both professionally and not) in a city like new york is pretty much a no-brainer at this point.

Drop: (off) everything that you can at goodwill, for a nice tax write-off.

Pop: Girls that play sports. 95% are in shape and 100% are fun to hang out with.

Drop: The over 27 female crowd, who sound a little less than convincing when they say "Oh yeah I'm not looking for anything serious either, I just wanna have fun." Right. That's what the scorpion told the frog.

Pop: Post-game drunken revelry. The highlight of a lot of people's week I'm sure.

Drop: Clutter at the Brooklyn public library kid's section. This project was a trip down memory lane, with classics like "Where the Wild Things Are", "In the Night Kitchen", "The Giving Tree", and "Goodnight Moon" as well as some newer ringers like "Dogzilla", "Saturday Night at the Dinosaur Stomp" and "Soccer Mom from Outer Space". The sweet thing about books like these? They fit in perfectly with my attention span, which as of late is around 30 secs long, and somewhat less if you're a girl and look like you weigh more than I do.

Pop: Living in the moment. There will always be stretches of days where you feel like "If x problem were fixed, I'd be set."

Drop: Worrying about the future. My advice - focus on the process, not the result. The idea is not that results don't matter. The best way to be competitive, though, is to play the macro statistics game and not micro-manage. You want to win in the long-run AND the short-run.

Immortal

What better way to proclaim your love for someone by sharpie-ing that you'll be together "4 LIFE" on the corrugated garage door in the back alley of the post office. Dottie and Mike, I'm talking to you.

It's a cliche that you learn something new every day. Like yesterday at a Birthright Israel Reunion, I learned that Stoli is kosher. Awesome.

Word combo of the day: sarcophagus / bludgeon

Long-winded

2) Sugiyama vs. Peter Luger's. When I was a kid, I had favorite types of food. That's not really the case anymore; I'll occassionally be in the mood for something but somewhere along the college trek I lost pretty much all of my strict, all-time preferences. So what this won't be is a "I like steak better than seafood/fusion, or vice-a-versa."


Sugiyama is the underdog here. Peter Luger's, the 800 lb gorilla of NY steak houses, the winner of best steakhouse from Zagat for 20 years in a row, fathering more spin-offs than a rooster in a henhouse, its reputation does all the work for it ahead of time, kind of like a celebrity at a bar picking up women. The food was delicious, the atmosphere and service were no-nonsense no frills. By the end of the meal, besides being the most full since I was last at Becco's, I ended up reaching the same conclusion about Luger's that two of my exceptionally discriminating foodie co-workers had reached separately: it's a pilgrimage you can't leave the city without making, but it's not worlds apart from other high-end steak houses in the city. And I'm not comparing Luger's to non-porterhouse powerhouses like Del Frisco's or BLT prime, I'm talking more about the spin-offs. All of the steakhouses on the Luger circuit are good, and you're not "settling" by going to Wolfgang's (where there's more selection for the sides) or one of the other "satellite locations" in Manhattan. I'd say it's a testament to the original Luger's more than anything else, and since the other stops on the circuit are easier for me to get to when I get the steak craving, I'm happy to give those places my business.

Then there's Sugiyama, a place that does kaiseki style dining, the only choice you get is how many courses you want. The meal is just as much about the experience and presentation as the amazing food, the journey through the food jungle with the chef leading the safari. That being said, you aren't paying for the scenery in the restaurant (as opposed to somewhere like Sushi Samba) - the place is very austere, small, and low key. There's certain meal features that catch you off guard, the mini-crabs, the hot stones, the crazy attention to detail. You'll end your journey pleasantly full but not stuffed.

With Luger's you know exactly what you're getting ahead of time, and it's exactly what you came for. With Sugiyama, the variety, twists and turns are never predictable. The contrast ends up being a metaphor for life in general.

I'd like to reaffirm my "conviction buy" rating on two places I went back to recently - Cantoon Garden in Chinatown and Ocean Jewel out in Flushing for dim-sum. If you haven't tried these places, you have no excuse because they're dirt cheap and top-notch at what they do.

Places I'd like to try (aka the "Ellis Island" Roster):
Mexican: Maya, Rosa Mexicana
BBQ: Blue Smoke
Steakhouses: Ben and Jack's, Dylan Prime
Japanese: Yasuda, Tomoe
American: Market Table
Fish and Chips: A Salt and Battery
Italian: Babbo's, Il Mulino

The corner blitz

1) The other day at around 1:20 am I got a totally random text from a 901 number (Shelby county area code) saying "I haven't seen you all summer what are you doin". It was pretty clear it was meant to be a booty call and that I wasn't the intended recipient. So naturally I responded back with, "Pretty bored, what have you been up to." And so begins the game to extract as much info as possible without letting the text cat out of the bag. So far I know that we know each other from Florida.

By the way: textsfromlastnight.com Not really work safe but really quite hilarious.

Quote-able

"Man this company's going to miss its interest payment on 6/30/2009. Liquidity sucks, no cash flow, business prospects are non-existent. Total disaster."

"Haha that's rough man. If I were the CFO of that company I'd hire a flock of pterodactyls to help me escape to the Bahamas."

"I love it when people send me e-mails that are just one word in all caps. I feel like Megatron is writing these. Like, check this one out, all it says is CONFIRMED."

The place you want to be

See post from a couple of days ago.

Today's word: Megatron
Today's phrase: flock of pterodactyls
Today's place you want to be: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4K9snqk7g4

(Pizza) Wheel of Fate

It was inevitable. And I'm only surprised it didn't happen sooner. Someone opened up a dollar a slice pizza place called "two bros pizza" to compete with the one across the street from me. They're a block away from the original on the other side of the bus station and serve the same cheese-lite pizza. There's one main difference though - this place is indoors with chairs and benches, a papaya dog-esqe style setup. I'm afraid these guys are going to clean house whenever it rains.

Pepperoni slices are an extra half dollar. I haven't gotten sick yet. I'll report back tomorrow to let prospective customers know if that holds up.

So, while I may regret not moving into that duplex 2400 square foot loft in Soho sometime later this year, right now it's advantage Hell's Kitchen.

You can't afford me

Title taken from the profile of a girl who I'll classify as a "professional flirt."

I'm finding that I'm alternately drawn to and repulsed by girls with expensive taste.

Trapped into watching the Suze Orman show yesterday on CNBC (let's admit, these things happen at times), I found myself glued to the segment called "can I afford it?" where Suze invites viewers to present something they want to buy and then says "show me the money" and tells them whether they can afford their dreams or not. Most of the time the answer is "no" and Suze proclaims "denied" in the same way that Donald Trump says "you're fired."

Pretty much all the viewers fit into one of two categories, people with no savings that want to spend $17 K on a diamond ring and make like $40 K a year, and people who make like $300 K and have enough to retire on at 30 who want to spend 500 bucks on a trip to see their grandmother in Iceland. You know what the answer's going to be before Suze even starts talking, and you wonder why these people called in. It's more like, the rich want everyone to know how well they're doing and the not-so-well off, well, they're probably going to be like "screw off Suze I'm doing it anyway. Just because you said I couldn't."

Game, set, match

One of my concerns about the career I've chosen is that it will turn me into a boring person. Even worse, that it might turn me into a boring, wealthy person. It doesn't have to be the case because I know a lot of well-grounded, cool people who work in the industry. Incidentally, most of them are traders.

It starts out with being at work all the time (full disclosure: I'm actually headed there in about an hour). I don't want work to define my life with work because 1) I'm not really a fan of people who do this and 2) if anything's been learned over the past month it's to not put all of your eggs in one basket unless you're going on a picnic. Vague enough yet? It's fun to make jokes about the (insert asset type here) market with co-workers, and it's fun to hear people talk about girls in terms of Sharpe Ratios (a friend has a theory that 6s and 7s aren't worth pursuing because "you have to work just as hard to get them as the 8s or 9s and so you might as well go for the bigger payoff"). But overall I don't think it's too dramatic to say that in certain situations your work can transform you into a one-sided, one-track person , and that's usually bad unless you're in the heat of battle or wild sex. In addition to the cool people, I know plenty of people who are completely uninteresting and unfun to hang out with because they're stuck in the mud. Actually, hanging out with them, you start to wonder if you're becoming like that, whether it's true or not.

So, in an effort to keep the creative juices flowing, I've started a game that I play pretty much every day now. In the morning, I come up with one (usually offbeat, very specific) word or phrase that I'm going to work into a normal conversation at some point in the day. The rules of the game are: you have to use the word in a sentence that makes sense in the context of an already established conversation about some other subject, the other person has to nod and accept it and not call you out on it or seem confused or break up the flow of the conversation to try and figure out what you meant, and you have to keep a straight face and not laugh while saying it (usually the hardest part). The best is when you don't see anyone till like 7 PM and then youre trying to figure out how to slide "hieroglyphics", "sucker punch", or "donkey kong's bananas" into a dialogue. Classic.

Hot Pursuit

The next objective, the next big trade, the next night out, the next trip, forward curve.

Most of the time that's what waking up at 5 a.m. is all about. But not every time.

I lost my phone in a cab, someone found it and I was able to get it back within 12 hours after scrambling around midtown, chinese fire drill style. Living off the grid is something people romanticize about, but it's not actually as cool as people want to believe. You'll be annoyed more times than you'll be proud of yourself, and phone numbers are one of the most annoying things to try and replace especially if you're just getting to know someone. There are no pursuits off the grid. Actually there is one, but only if youre Buddhist and you're pursuing nirvana/enlightenment.

Thoughts on "Exit the King" (the play); 1st half was entertaining and thought-provoking, 2nd half dragged it out way too long, characters became one-sided and the dialogue turned into drivel. The only thing the people I saw it with agreed on was that the last sequence would have been better viewed on acid.

Sanctum

With high yield issuance spiralling out of control, natural gas moving 10% a day, and the office seemingly constantly overrun by good-looking girls, it's hard to get work done especially when it's coming at you from all angles.

The solution is a good pair of ear-humping headphones (you know which ones I'm talking about, the ones that wrap around your ears e-frame style) and an easy to reach volume control switch. And the other key, the music.

Here's my selections from yesterday:

Trance, electronic, house, dance - need music without words for heavy-duty stuff. Also known to induce a hypnotic state which is good for focused assaults on deadlines and blocking out annoying comments from co-workers.

Kanye West - still schizophrenic and arrogant, still one of the most original, genius mainstream guys out there

T.I. - a little truth in these words for everyone, no matter who you are
That part of me left yesterday /the heart of me is strong today /No regrets im blessed to say /the old me dead and gone away.

Remix'd

I really like this remix (warning, there's a really angry guy at the beginning).

Sometime you get the feeling that the day is going to be an adventure in deja vu. Practice makes perfect right?

By the way, if you responded mentally to that question with "that's what she said", you're way behind the curve.

The medicine and the cure, part II

Walking down 57th street at 10:30 PM tonight, I had a surge of contentment and the sudden feeling that I was on home turf.

I walked into the subway and heard the guitarist there, a regular, spitting out some classics while a girl from Brooklyn (not sure why I assume that, but I'm positive she was) watched in awe. At the end, she gave him a dollar and a big hug before boarding the subway.

All of this after another crazy, chaotic day at work. One glass of ice cold water later, consider me cured. Consider me saved.