Catching Up... Again

Here are some very short catch up posts. I may edit this as I remember more of what I've been forgetting to post.

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I went to two events hosted by Xenii in Hollywood. It is an interesting concept. Apparently private parties have far fewer restrictions on them in the United States, and outfits like Xenii have become popular with the Hollywood crowd. It was still typical Hollywood, though.

While I was in LA I visited a very nice room salon called Garam with some business associates. It's a strictly no hanky panky place, but it is popular with Korean actors and singers. The girls there aren't as high end as the nicest places in Asia, but it is in the United States. Some of them even speak English fluently. Unfortunately in LA everything closes by 2 AM. More about this will appear in a future Temptation Avoided posting.

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Jenny and I have been training with her sex trainer for several months off and on. It is fascinating and deserves a more complete post. So far I would say the main point to it all is focus. By having focus around a few things, certain rhythms and patterns, breathing, and different kinds of touch (pressures, strokes, taps, tugs), things can become very erotic. Having several hour long sessions focused on just one thing at a time is a kind of practice that creates a palette of sexual synergies. Then much of sex becomes a mutual recognition of these colors on the palette with which you can express yourself and work with the expression of your partner. It is very interesting and creative. I don't know why we do not study the sex act more. The feeling is something that really does require incredible intimacy and is difficult to imagine working well with intermittently-met sex providers. We think we have at least another year of regular training to go.

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I have been to China several times, both meeting with government officials and corporate officials. I found a pocket of North Koreans there. Apparently they are vetted by the government, permitted to work in China, and forced to give a percentage of their wages back to the North Korean government. I met some academics and a former North Korean ambassador to China, and we went to a North Korean drinking establishment. There were many women there, and at the end of the night you had the option to take any number of them back to your hotel. I did not take this option, but it makes me wonder why this would be interesting when the men are usually so drunk they can hardly walk.

In China sex is amazingly easy to find. In fact there are listings of thousands of women on the Internet, complete with standardized details with which you can search to your heart's delight.

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Jenny and I had another Christmas from hell, over forty relatives on a boat cruising in Mexico for about two weeks. I was ready to chew my leg off and swim for shore. In the westerly direction!

To make up for that trip, Jenny and I had an amazing adventure in Remota Patagonia and Torres del Paine National Park. I have a half-finished post on this. There are bonsai forests, mountains, lakes, glaciers... the diversity of the land was breathtaking. It was very romantic in a wild, untamed sort of way.

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I recently purchased enormous amounts of lingerie and sexy clubwear. Although I have always made some investment in high end lingerie, this is more trashy stuff. Jenny and I are going through a fantasy phase, I think. I will always remember our crew trying to stuff Andiamo's largest suitcase, which is very very large, into a relatively small helicopter flying to an island where we were going to spend four days. The suitcase was full of nothing but sexy outfits and toys. About 40 hours later I found myself tied to a chair, straining mightily while watching Jenny demonstrate certain things to me, but that's another story...

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You should read this book on rational thinking. Really.

Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking, by Thomas E. Kida, at Amazon.

And this book on irrational behaviors published in 1841!

Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay, at Amazon.

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Jenny and my conversations have been dominated by the following topics:

1. Human inability to deal with surplus. Related to "how to make money a tool rather than a burden."
   
2. Monogamy, and what does "forever" mean? With our Talmudic approach to love, an on-going topic of study.
   
3. Building versus Salvage in relationships. When do we go from one to the other, and how to remain excited about that.
   
4. Death, divorce, depression and disillusionment. We have had several divorces and deaths in the extended family.

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We did our first quarterly distribution from our Marriage Fund, which is a kind of structured finance trust we call "Peau". We originally were not going to distribute until after year five of marriage, but decided to start the clock January 2007.

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And I think that's most of the catch up stuff. Longer posts are still in the queue, but you're probably tired of hearing that by now.

Amy Returns

Although I have other topics about which I should post, a few recent events have elbowed their way to the head of the queue. The return of Amy is one such event.

You may recall that Amy was a recent experience that battered my resolve with short term temptations. One of the key issues with Amy was that she appeared to be a more conventionally ideal mate for me than Jenny: her language skills, intellectual interests, social circles, experiences, and business acumen were more compatible to my world. At twenty-four her youth and beauty, her self-actualized accomplishments, and her aggressive rationality were impressive by any standard, and frankly beyond Jenny's attributes in those particular areas.

Amy had received a job offer from the fantastically accomplished Clovis, who was clearly impressed with her. And she had turned him down flat, electing instead to continue to travel as a free spirit and build upon her real estate holdings. I'm afraid that Clovis and her grandfather "Duke" viewed Amy's refusal to be bridled in a steady position as an unfavorable side effect of my poor treatment of her at Clovis' estate. They might be correct, but more likely they were giving me too much credit.

Although I had rejected Amy in a most heinous and ungentlemanly manner, Amy continued to try to make contact, to try to unravel the rationale behind my behavior. Emails and messages went unanswered. From time to time Amy sent me unsolicited photographs of herself in various locales with short, innocuous messages such as "Hi", and "I'm still here!" After about a dozen such unanswered messages I asked her to stop and there was no possibility nor desire for a relationship. The text messages, thankfully, ended.

After a recent tour of Eastern Europe, Amy sent me a message noting that she would be stopping in the US on her way to her first solo trip to Asia. She was generally unfamiliar with Asia and was asking for suggestions for places to go, stay, eat, and see. Jenny advised me not to answer. I took this advice and did not.

Not too much later I attended a private client services dinner event for a major US bank, to listen to the global wisdom of a former government and private industry economist. Little did I know that that her grandfather and I were both clients of the same bank though not the same private banker. Yes, sometimes the privacy in private client services can be inconvenient!

Lo and behold, Duke had brought Amy to introduce her to the bankers because she had just signed up as a client! While I was certain that her self-created net worth was insufficient to qualify, I assume that some combination of her relationship to Duke and the likelihood of a future inheritance gave some flexibility to otherwise stiff private client service rules.

I ignominiously tried to escape by way of a back door, but Amy saw me first. Her greetings were attention getting and crystal clear, making it difficult for me to depart in a dignified manner. My banker, Ana, learned that Amy and I had met in London, and then earned my undying enmity by rearranging seating so we shared a table.

During dinner Amy was forced to brief the entire table on her new life plan, although she was clearly aiming her narrative at me. She was planning to monetize her real estate holdings, aggregating them with some of her father's holdings and using structured finance for slight leverage, and then invest in REIT's and natural resource MLP's. Her move to more passive management would enable her to go to law school. She had taken the LSAT a month or so ago and scored 173 (which, judging from the response at the table, must be a very good score), and now was strongly focused on adding business law to her engineering background. Her top choice was Stanford. Of course the table was highly complimentary of her entrepreneurship and independence, and not a few comments were made about how similar we were.

Unlike the last meeting with Amy, I felt very little temptation over dinner. I must have been, as they say in the United States, over her. I truly did admire Amy and her accomplishments, though. I was thinking about how she would make somebody an amazing mate -- grace, beauty, drive, intellect, and rationality.

And these thoughts made me wonder about why Jenny and I were a good couple, especially when so many people around us thought we were ill-matched. But more on that later... here's where the story starts to get interesting.

After dinner Amy tried to corner me alone. Ultimately she suggested we share a ride to her hotel, after she cleverly got rid of her grandfather and was therefore without a ride. I suggested that Ana obtain a car for her, which she gladly did. Amy then dropped all pretense and, quite bluntly, told me that she wanted to have a conversation with me, and she would hound me to the ends of the Earth if I did not agree to meet for at least a half hour. So I agreed to have tea at a small cafe nearby.

Wow, did it go downhill from there.

Amy started talking about how lonely her life was. How her life was without love, and how even sex was an act of only temporary joy and no meaning. Over and over her theme was her solitude, her need for affection, and her feelings of loneliness.

And then she said that she wanted to be with me. She told me that she loved me.

Whoa. We hardly knew each other!

And then it became clear. Unlike the last time, there was no slow motion moment. There was no deep life implications to be evaluated and no directions chosen. In an instant Amy had turned herself into a portrait of a sad, lost, self-actualized soul, no longer the target of my lust, but the object of my pity.

I know Amy's solitude: much of my life was alone, without parents or mentors, without love or guidance. I know Amy's self-made loneliness: the nights I would cry out for love I would follow with days where I would arrogantly reject it as a weakness.

And I know the danger of Amy's iconoclastic pride. When I was young I fancied myself an unchained element, a whirlwind of force that was unbridled and unbroken. But this was a youthful deception, defining myself through opposition to measurable societal norms, an act which only empowered society to control my actions even more by defining the very boundaries outside of which I made my life. Which of us was fenced in and fenced out?

No, I understood this loneliness and the pride-driven manic-depression that could drive one to excessive achievement or to the final ruin. But I also understood that this was something every person has to solve within themselves.

And thus it ends. I left Amy composing herself after crying again. I left her as alone as when I met her. But I also left her with one piece of advice for people like her, and people like me:

Never love somebody until you are strong.

I hope it will help her.

It is not intended as a message of cruelty. Nor is it a sophomoric Ayn Rand-ism. There are certain personalities that by their nature will be a foundation upon which people will build their lives. Such people have a responsibility to become strong before they invite people to build upon their foundation. Some will make themselves strong. Many will fail and will be forever broken. But I believe it is an intensely personal journey. It is the nature of the beast that drives such people that taking help at their moment of weakness forever undermines the strength of their foundation, because most of that strength comes from that most wicked of the deadly sins: Pride.

Amy has enormous potential, if she can make it. I hope she can.

But it will be without me.

Events

We all know that marketing is a huge business. The focus on raising our base instincts for competition, material ownership, and desire into economic transactions is the most successful marriage of science and art in history.

I watch almost no television. Like smoking, all my exposure is second hand, seeing it out of the corner of my eye in a public venue or at somebody else's home. Display surfaces I have in plenty, but they carry content that I control.

High end goods are rarely marketed on television anyhow. Perhaps recognizing that the distribution channel caters to a lower common denominator, high end marketing happens in different ways.

One of them is The Event.

Events are over the top affairs designed to attract a high end crowd and their hangers-on. Sometimes they are public events, but more often these days they are private events with a semi-public face. The key is to create buzz and an envious desire for affiliation with a new product and its fans. Whether it is to introduce a new champagne, a new fashion line, a new face, or a new car, high end marketing concentrates its dollars on events.

And why not? For a few million you can buy a broad demographic ad campaign, or a tiring spectrum of narrow channels such as specialty magazines where you must compete with hundreds of other ad pages. Or you can throw one hell of a party. Celebrities, a famous band, high end food and wine, over the top decor, beautiful wait staff and, of course, exclusivity... all are possible at a well-managed event.

I wrote earlier about the RED Armani event during London's Fashion Week. NYC Fashion Week followed, more of the same. Ferrari had the roll out of their 599 GTB, a throwback to their elegant Pininfarina designs but with definitely modern underpinnings. (We attended it for a brief half hour, just enough time to cruise through the aperitif menu and avoid any car crazy people I knew.) There was even an exclusive event for swim suits earlier in the year where they built an indoor tropical beach. It is very clear Jenny or I could spend our entire lifetimes going from event to event, maybe two or three times a week, collecting freebies, avoiding cameras, and wolfing down wines, champagne and canapes. And then partying afterwards.

What a life. It makes me feel sorry for Paris Hilton. She never had a chance to build a moral resistance, did she?

No, cancel that. I don't feel sorry for her at all.

This reminds me that the best event Jenny and I attended in the past twelve months was the Adult Video News (AVN) exposition which generally runs concurrently with the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). My theory is that the two shows run together to cater to the Asian businessmen who can use CES to justify a visit to Las Vegas and then fill their digital cameras with photographs of mostly naked women from AVN. I kid you not, at least 75% of the people lined up for snapshots with porn stars were Asian males in business suits.

Yes, I understand that AVN is not really a high end event. But it is a niche event of sorts. It has a public side where fans come to worship their starlet of choice, and an industry side where starlets come to talk shop and redistribute genetic material.

Fortunately while I was with Jenny no starlet recognized me from my previous Las Vegas escapade and there were no personal offers for genetic exchange. (Jenny, of course, knows about that event, but it wouldn't help to be dramatically reminded of it.)

There were a few exhibits relevant to our Xanadu pleasure room, but for the most part it was ogling the starlets and the crowds around them. I had scored tickets to the actual awards ceremony which was a fun event. Our table had a high silicone to brains ratio and a low signal to noise ratio.

Interestingly, something about the show atmosphere made Jenny partly excited and partly jealous. There is no polite way to say it, so pardon my language when I say, Jenny fucked my brains out that night and through the next morning. Well, she did.

Like I said: the best event we attended in the past year.