Smarter than the Average Bear?

There are times in my life when I realize I have become dumb as shit - when my brain decides to ignore 21 years of education and run on auto pilot. I don’t know if it is due to the heavy drinking I have done, the shit I have smoked or just working in this brainless industry known as investment banking.

In college, I was able to do derivatives and solve complex o-chem and physics equations with ease. Now, I need MS Excel to add or multiply two numbers together. Sometimes, when I am typing quickly, I use the wrong homonym. For example, when I mean to write "I want a piece of pie", I'll type out "I want a peace of pie." Further, now on most posts, I just get emails or IMs saying how poor my grammar is or how awful my punctuation is. Maybe that is why I do not want to go business school - I don’t want to write essays or take the English portion of the GMATs. The thought of spending an afternoon thinking of a "thesis" or a "topic sentence" scares the shit out of me. I can write presentations and bullets all day long, but a properly composed sentence? Forgettboutit.

In any case, the reason I admit to all this is that this weekend I had another fuck-up. As I have mentioned in a couple other posts, I am trying to "mature" and "grow up". To figure out where I need to change, I asked my sisters and some female friends. Unfortunately, both had pretty long lists. Among their many comments, one thing they both said was, "G, you got to improve your wardrobe - buy some nice jeans."

Now, I must admit, I am not the most stylish guy. Jeans and a button down is usually what I roll out with. Growing up, nice clothes were a premium - I only rocked designer labels if I could find something nice at Ross or Marshalls. Otherwise, all my gear was from whatever was on clearance at JCPenny's or Mervyns. Maybe that is why I just assumed jeans should cost $20.

In college, I used to buy the same set of Anchor Blue for $24.99. However, last year I got called out by some analysts for rocking Anchor Blue. After giving him some bullshit comps to do, I decided to upgrade and bought some jeans for BR that were $80, which for me was a HUGE upgrade. I still remember going to the cashier and paying for them. The whole time, I just envisioned the shocked face of my parents and boys in LA - "You spent how much on jeans? Have you lost your mind?"

For the first couple months, I only wore the BRs on "big nights" - you know, those nights where you roll out with the intent of spitting some game, and not getting drunk. You watch Swingers to get in the mood and play some ill music in the kitchen as you pregame….In any case, while the jeans fit a lot better than the Anchor Blues, the whole time I thought of LL Cool J's famous line: "Man made the money, money never made the man" Nevertheless, after a while, I got used to the jeans and eventually gave the Anchor Blues to the Salvation Army.

You can then imagine my shock, when one of my female friends said, "G - you need to buy nicer jeans." Normally, I would make a sarcastic comment and ignore her, but this time I remained quiet, as I figured there may be some truth in what she was saying. Change is meant to be hard, as it means going against everything you are used to doing.

I ended up rolling to Nordies and looked at some "7" jeans, a brand that I heard was considered was premium. I told the girl working in the department, who was actually pretty hot, what I was looking for and why. She got a kick out about the Anchor Blue reference and helped me find a good pair. I tried them on, and truth be told - they were way more comfortable and felt a lot better. The sales lady even came in the dressing room and said I had a nice ass as I modeled the jeans for her. Even though she worked on commission, I still felt good. Though, in the back of my head, I could not help but compare this situation to when a stripper goes up to the ugliest guy at the club and says "I really like your [ ]. Do you want a dance?"

In any case it was not a compliment that I heard often, so I took the bait. I was feeling pretty good @ myself - I was actually making changes in my life. Then, as she scanned the jeans, the price came up on the cashier - $190. Ever farted in a full elevator and try to control your facial emotions, so no one would know it was you? That is exactly how I reacted. I could not let this cute girl know the price affected me.

It was not as if I did not had the money lying around, it was just hard for me to justify paying that much for jeans. (As a side note, an MD made an interesting point when I entered this business… just because you have $50MM, it still does not justify paying $20 for a water bottle.) However, given the scenario, I was like fuck it. I charged it up and in the back of my mind I knew I could always return it if need be.

Then, the girl dropped one more wrinkle on me. The jeans obviously needed to be hemmed, and she called the tailor to measure how much length needed to be cut off. In truth I am very particular about the length of my jeans. I want the length to be long enough so that if I wanted to sag, they only drag a little bit. I also want them to be long enough so I can tuck a shirt in and wear them properly on my waist. There is nothing worse than jeans that are too short - you look like Steve Urkel.

When the tailor came in, I thought I would be clever. To make sure he did not cut off too much, I stupidly wore the jeans lower than I normally wear then- for some reason I thought this would give me extra slack. I did not realize that I had inadvertently made the jeans extra short till the next day. Sure enough, when I picked them up they were a couple inches short. Fuck me.


As a side note, Yat forwarded me a very important story about CAL. Apparently, Allison (pictured to the right ) is coming to CAL. She will single handedly kill the stereotype that Cal has the ugliest girls........All I got to say is that I plan to attend every track and field meet next year. Go Bears!!!

[ Note: Due to all the recent media attention regarding her picture and her' father's plan to seek legal recourse, I have decided to take down the picture. If you are really horny / desparate, go to Google.]