All men are terrible.

All women are manipulative.

There are no good guys out there.

Women don’t know what they want.

Etc.

It’s easier to be angry than sad.

• T produced by Leydig cells in the testes
• T decline = hypogonadism. Causes:
  1. Leydig cells impaired or
  2. Control glands in the brain are not informing Leydig cells to produce enough T
• For #1:
  • LH & FSH: hormones that exert influence over sex glands
  • When these levels are high, the pituitary is correctly trying to get T up, but it’s not happening, hence leydig failure. You would see low T and high FSH/LH in this situation
• For #2:
  • T is low AND LH/FSH are low. The message to produce more T isn’t being sent. (CG is something to do in this scenario)
• Aromatase converts T to estrogen and goes up w/ age. Too much estrogen can reduce production of T
• Free T is 2-3% of total T
• Estrogen high = SHBG high
• T high = SHBG low
• SHBG binds to T and limits free T
• Can run into issues where injections spike T, but a disproportionate share is converted to estrogen, so the T to E ratio actually worsens even though total T is high
• Patches/pellets may be superior because they don’t cause spikes

• Rust on rocker panels
• Did they already start the car before you showed up? A bit suspicious
• Check the date on the tires. Four digits. Week and year of manufacture
• Use penny for Lincoln head tire test
• Oil leaks under car
  • And then open car and see if there is oil splattered around the engine
• Are all the panels the same color? If not, maybe an accident.
• Check oil: not burnt or low
• Check transmission fluid (yellow pull): not burnt or low
• Low brake oil may mean the brakes are worn (but they could just top it off)
• Antifreeze: should be green or pink NOT oily
• Stitching coming off on soft top?
• Check trunk rust underneath cover panel
• Check windows
• Check stereo
• Check ac/heat

How did you arrive at this number?

It sounds like there’s no movement?

You’ve been very generous. It sounds like there’s nothing more you can do.

• Find out what you can do w/ assessed value for taxes. Is assessed value less than purchase price? If so, can you just fill $0 in for purchase price and pay the assessed value?
• Be careful with license plates. Probably won’t forget this lesson. It’s fine to leave them on, but make sure you 100% know what is required to transfer plates.

and be most frustrated when something that’s obvious to us is not obvious to another.

This is how we will spend disproportionate time on certain matters compared to their real-world effects. Someone will notice this disconnect and decry “too much focus” on something “not that important.” This someone won’t be technically wrong, but he also misses that everyone tends to agree on the most important things – like, you don’t have to convince someone the nuclear proliferation is dangerous – and so urgent rhetorical battles involve pushing for consensus in the still consequential areas where disagreement amazingly occurs. Though dropping the “consequential” moniker probably wouldn’t change much since the urge to stamp out absurdity (i.e., the person who misses the obvious) is so strong that even otherwise taciturn individuals can’t themselves.

At a moment when idiotic ideas about masculinity pass as wise, when pathologizing half the population is cheered, I see no good reason why I can’t offer my own definition into such a soft market. So here we go: to be a real man, you must be in touch with the part of yourself that connects with Metallica. Does this mean that dear xxxxxxxxx may not be a man? Indeed it does. Which is why I’m trying to prevent the same mistake from occurring in young xxxxxxxxx. I know his birthday isn’t until July, but we can’t wait that long, especially since he’s already showing some warning signs with his affection for pretty-boy-not-a-real-man Roger Federer. 

P.S. One reason parents may fail to support the masculinity I’ve espoused here is a laziness to read Metallica’s lyrics. They see skeletons and songs about death and figure it’s best to shelter kids from “brain rotting” content. But no, the song featured on xxxxxxxxx’s shirt – “Ride the Lightning”- is a treatise against the death penalty.

P.P.S. If you think this whole idea is dumb (it is), no worries. Someone gave me this too small shirt (because she knows I’m a real man but forgot how tall I am), and I needed to find a more suitable home. xxxxxxxxx was my first thought. I get that you can’t force a kid to do anything. I get that what seems cool to an adult is often not cool to a kid. 

P.P.P.S. As jokey as all this is, I’m dead serious that if a day comes when I don’t feel something after listening to only the first two tracks of “Master of Puppets,” life is no longer worth living.

Whenever I feel like crying, I turn on the Zero Dark Thirty trailer:

I want to make something absolutely clear. If you thought there was some working group coming to the rescue, I want you to know that you’re wrong. This is it. There’s nobody else hidden away on some other floor. There is just us. And we are failing. 

You may have spent much of your life unaware that nobody can save you but you. (Feel free to skip ahead to the next section if you were fully aware.) Perhaps you missed the message because Jesus’ promises of salvation drowned out all other voices. More likely, though, “failure” and “saving” were faraway thoughts when everything was going pretty well. And even when you were riding closer to valleys than peaks, minimal responsibility made Just getting through it the more common thought pattern than desperate pleas for a full-blown bailout.

But those innocent times are now gone; it’s probably pretty uncomfortable. One way to know you are in this dreaded place is a longing for tidy external solutions: Maybe this one person will … Maybe the trade will shift to … Maybe if I just get into this program … Go ahead and soothe yourself, sure, but don’t become tranquilized into forgetting that, no, sorry, it’s on you. Oh how you’ll want to forget. Oh how you’ll wish for simpler times. Oh how you’ll bargain that if you could be rescued this time you’ll never, never, never sin again. (more…)

So now everyone’s heard of that once “rare” or “stigmatized” thing you have. Maybe that’s nice. There’s probably more funding invested in solving it. The downside is that when it was unknown and rare, you were seen as an individual and were treated to minimally judgy curiosity. Post-awareness, however, you’re just some generic individual stripped of his personal battle and instead tossed into the nuance-free box constructed via the awareness campaign.

to reject someone’s vulnerability. And anything other than compassionate embrace will feel like rejection.

Instead of finding one reason to dislike someone and ruling him out, find one reason to like someone and rule him in.

You can’t stand CEOs making xxxx more than a janitor because your exposure to excellence it too limited. Do you know any pro athletes? If you did and you experienced “competing” against them, it would be impossible to deny the existence of galaxy-sized gaps between people’s abilities.

Now perhaps you scoff at this sports comparison and claim that business is less objective than vertical leaps and 40-yard dashes. But is it really? Think about how much smarter the smart kid in your school was compared to everyone else. Then consider he/she was only the best in one school within a state of thousands of schools. Consider how smart the state’s smartest kid must then be. Multiply again for the nation’s. The top CEOs are at that level of selectivity. A few dozen people among hundreds of millions. They all truly can mean the difference between success and failure for a business in a similar way to your school project going from a 73 to 99 if that top student joins your team.

That transformative ability, like Lebron’s basketball prowess, is truly worth xxxx more than the worst player’s/student’s contribution (to say nothing of the janitors within the organization).