Yatta!

Talk about ironic. Within 24 hours of writing my tirade on lack of job success, I land one. I haven't formally accepted the offer, but it's with a team at Legg Mason, an asset management firm. I still do have to hear back from my old boss, Peter Laurelli at Hedgefund.net, and then decide from there. But I have a feeling he's going to tell me to go work with Legg Mason, considering I've spent the past two summers with him and have basically done everything I could in terms of intern work at HFN. He's an excellent boss, the best I've ever had out of all the jobs I've worked in my entire lifetime: a great guy to work with, and a ton of fun to be around. If I do decide to work with Legg, it will be a tough decision, simply because Peter was such a good boss to me. Very few people outside of my family have really cared about what happens to me or how much I enjoy myself on a day to day basis, but Peter always asked me how my weekend's were, how I was doing, or if I was enjoying my work. He truly cared about me much more than as simply an intern. That sort of thing I will never forget, and I will always be in his debt for his giving me my first "professional" level job.

Honestly, how many people can you name (outside of your family) who actually care about your day-to-day well-being? How many people do you know that genuinely care about your own interests, not just about how much you can benefit them? These sort of bonds are extremely tough to let go, and that's why my possibly leaving Peter and HFN is especially difficult. I have maybe a handful of friends at college, and a handful of friends from HS that genuinely care about me, and not just when I'm salient in their lives. But each and every one of those friendships is special to me, simply because it is so much easier to not care about someone than it is to care about them.

It's funny, because a lot of times the people we appreciate most, we often seem to appreciate the least. Those who know me personally know that I can be a big jerk sometimes, usually in jest, but I doubt that any of my friends would say that I'm the nicest friend they have. I remember one time my ex-girlfriend Sam asked me, "Why are you so mean to people?" Of course this was after we had broken up, and I was being mean to her at the time, so naturally I made up a bullshit answer to make her head spin and quickly moved on. I told her I was mean to people because everyone I had ever been nice to had taken advantage of me (not true at all). I then said that since nobody remembers nice people, nobody desires nice people, that I chose to be mean (again, completely false). Wanna know the truth? I act mean because that's how I've always acted around them. That's how I've always acted, that's how I've always wanted to act, and when we hang out, that's what I naturally become. It's not as if I'm unusually cruel to my friends, I simply say things that a lot people would construe as being mean. I think of it as friends being friends. Like calling Judd, "fat" or Matt, "bald." Or Nick, "black/Mexican/brown/(any other derogatory racial term associated with dark-skinned people except Italian)." And naturally they come back at me with some derivative of Chinese or small penis. Usually one or the other. Or both. Whatev. But, the point has always been that we act that way simply because that's how we act. There's never been an underlying cause, we've simply chosen to be like that over time. In short, I choose to be mean because frankly, that's what feels most natural. When I don't do so, my friends think something is wrong with me. And honestly, as long as it doesn't hurt them (meaning they don't tell me it hurts them), I'm gonna act however I want.

These friends, even though I may treat them like shit sometimes, they're still my good friends. I really wanted to post a video in tribute to my friends, but to be honest, it's proven to be quite a task to find the proper video. At first i wanted to put up another Coheed vid, but I've done a few too many of them. Then I was thinking perhaps Linkin Park, but their songs are too down. Then I thought maybe the Ataris, but too many Ataris songs are about love and girls, so yea, I love my friends, but not that much. Then I thought I'd do Backstreet Boys, just to see how many of them actually read this to see how many "WTF IS THAT?!" 's I would get. But, now I've decided to go with a song that we all used to rock out to back in the careless days of high school. Presenting, "Spread Your Fire," by Angra!