How to get a good night’s sleep

When I was a kid, my mom used to warn me about random things in life. Being an Asian mother, I think it was her duty to instill in me an unforgiving sense of irrational fear and to develop in me, a good set of neurotic tendencies which I still proudly maintain to this day.
I remember one time, I called my mom out on her cautious advices – I said to her “What makes you such an expert?” and this is what she said “There are some things in life that you just can’t learn until you get older”

Being young and arrogant, I brushed it off.
What kind of ridiculousness is this? I was in University and everything had an explanation. What’s so hard to study that I can’t learn in my early twenties?

Life.

I think Muhammad Ali said it best:

A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.

I found a cd of my old blogs when I was in University the other day so I decided to read through them – All i have to say is that when you’re young, you really don’t have a fucking clue what you’re talking about.

So today’s topic addresses the million dollar question that’s thrown countless singles into depression and muffin-top eating binges:

Why doesn’t he like me?

(or an alternative question which can also be used interchangeably: Why won’t he BBM me?)

This question rears its ugly head whenever we feel the pain of rejection (aka: the “let’s be friends” death knell)
I found myself asking the question “Why doesn’t she like me?” plenty of times in my life – from the hallways of my highschool all the way to the VIP booth of a strip club.

So today, I’m going to attempt to answer this million dollar question but before I do, I’m going to tell you another story of my youth:

When I was in grade 11, I participated in a Government program called “Encounters with Canada”
The program pretty much gathered kids from all over Canada to hang out for one week in Ottawa. I didn’t know there were people who lived in Manitoba until I got into that program.
So, one day we all got into a bus and they drove us to Parliament Hill where we walked in and did the touristy stuff. Then they brought in a hockey player who was now a backbencher in Parliament. Since he wasn’t a politician from the start, he was pretty entertaining and honest. He talked about this and that and how shit went down in parliament. Finally, when everything was done, he left us with a parting advice that I still remember to this day. He said:

“There are some things you just can’t explain in life. Things are just the way they’re supposed to be”
(note: this sounds eerily familiar to what my mom told me when I was a kid)

I’ve loved and hated that hockey player’s quote during various stages of my life. When he said that to us, I was in highschool so I liked it. Then I went to university and thought that everything demanded an explanation so I hated it. When I went to work, I liked it since it gave me justification as to why office politics bullshit happens. When I got back to do my MBA, I hated it again since people should be able to explain everything and charge a hefty price for doing so (i.e. Consultants). Today however…I’m back to loving it because I see it in the frustrated faces of my friends:

People left and right are not getting together to love each other.

As you know, I’ve always struggled hard to find explanations for this – I wrote a fucking book on it.
I’ve had many theories on this: from people being selfish to people being genetically wired to like certain traits. I had a conversation with my friend today about the Zodiac – maybe that astrology bullshit is true and we’re governed by the day we’re born in…maybe not.

So I spent these past few days reflecting on the answer to this question. The advice my mom and that nice hockey player kept lingering in my head but I was still 50/50 on it. Then came the deciding factor via a 90′s hip hop group: Naughty By Nature:

Guard your Grill.

For you young kids out there, when CD Players first came out , they were like $300. My brother was the first one in the family to ever get a cd player. He got it as a gift and to complement his new cd player, my uncle also bought him a cd – Naughty By Nature, which was hot shit back in the day. They’re still hot shit. Look at that cd cover and how badass they are. Anyway, being in grade 4, I wanted to listen to “CD quality” audio so I spent a lot of time listening to the only cd we had – Naughty by Nature. So Naughty by Nature has two popular songs from that cd: “OPP” and “Ghetto Bastard”

The first time I listened to “Ghetto Bastard”, I was shocked at what Treach says at the end of the song:

If you ain’t never been to the ghetto
Don’t ever come to the ghetto
‘Cause you wouldn’t understand the ghetto
So stay the fuck out of the ghetto

So now I want you to bring that back to what my mom and that hockey player said. They’re all pretty much saying the same thing in different ways.

So now we go back to the question we posed earlier:

Q: Why doesn’t he like me?

A: Who cares?