Why Donald Trump is an Idiot

I guess Donald Trump was a phenomenon past my time. Whereas he used to actually be successful with his real estate empire and his home made of infant bones and puppy souls (or so I'm told), today he scrapes by with shameless cries to be relevant. The guy hosts a reality show that pits community college dropouts against former crack addicts for a chance to WORK FOR HIM. He claws his way to the front page of supermarket tabloids by making swipes at Rosie O'Donnell forchristsakes. If I got 15 minutes of fame every time I made a joke about Rosie O'Donnell, I'd be a household name, too.

Hey Rosie, why don't you host some more Kid's Choice Awards, you big fat fatty!? Hah, score.

Anyways, good ol' Donald Trump also makes a little scratch by peddling self-help books to the kind of people who buy that sort of thing-- namely your black sheep uncle and used car salesmen. I was douching around the Internet a few days ago when I stumbled upon this gem of an article. Why anyone would spend a waking minute of their life reading Trump's hardback version of the Holocaust is beyond me. But the fact that someone actually spent a few minutes of their life typing out a summary for others to read?

There's only one way to bring balance back to the world. Karma must be restored and I'm just brazen enough to do it.

Ten Ways Donald Trump Got Rich and You Won't Because He's Making This Shit Up

1. Don’t take vacations.
Right, that's a great way to kick things off-- tell people if they want to be rich, they have to work non-stop until they get that billion-dollar promotion. Or until their liver gives out from taking little mini-vacations to Boone's Farm every night because their life sucks. His argument is that unless you have a job that engages you and makes you happy, you'll never work your hardest and thus won't succeed. I see the logic but... seriously? That's about as wishy-washy as it gets. In my experience, you can succeed just the same by hating your job, taking lots of vacations, and just stealing get-rich schemes from Chuck Palahniuk novels. [editor's note-- I spelled that name correctly the first time and almost popped a boner]

2. Sleep is for the weak.
So says the man that probably sat on a mountain of cocaine for most of the 80's and moved to crystal meth when it became the in-vogue thing to do. How about this-- if you don't get enough sleep for three days in a row you will sleep through your fourth day of work and get fired. Trumpy says that being at work all the time shows your bosses how dedicated you are. I have a better idea, though. How about you just do what you're told and buy your boss enough stupid shit from Brookstone on random holidays to garner a promotion?

3. Have a short attention span.
Right. That's why every two seconds, someone at a top-tier university pops an Adderall. Short attention spans worked out great for everyone I knew in high school with ADD. I mean, some of them are shift managers at 7-11 now! People with short attention spans are the reason that President Bush got re-elected, they're the target audience of most reality TV (which Trump must love), and I believe the general consensus is that they're ruining the world. There's no possible way to spin that phrase in a positive light.

4. Don’t depend on technology.

RAWR!! DINOSAUR TRUMP HATES PROGRESS!!!

5. Being underestimated is a good thing.
In these times, I reckon that being underestimated is about half a notch above being completely worthless. Can you actually remember the last time someone asked you to do something unreasonable? Here's the hierarchy, and it's very much a no-shades-of-gray. Either you're a lazy asshole who doesn't put an effort into life, you do average work and you live the same day over and over again until you retire, or you're a pretentious hard worker who gets sexual satisfaction out of success. Believe me-- being underestimated by anyone is never good.

6. You are a one-man army.
Let me be a total college kid for just a second and quote Tyler Durden on this one [editor's note-- too much Chuck Palahniuk] : "You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else..." The fact is that the most successful people in the world got there through groups of trusting connections or rich family members. You are not the one-man army. You're not even the one-man accounting department. You are the one man scumbag who needs to meet and use more important people in order to ascend to billionairity. Sure, you're on your own, but you're not going to get anywhere playing with yourself.

7. Success Leads to More Success.
Now this seems like an iron-clad, logical balloon that even my pin-headed cynicism can't pop. Sure, you ascend the ranks of society as you make money and raise your dick rating. I'll give Trump the kudos for summing Horatio Alger's works into a bullet point on a list in a self-help book. But Trump says that if you don't have success you should feign it. Good luck doing that without divorcing your wife and having the bank foreclose your house because you bought frivolous horseshit to impress your coworkers in marketing. Hard workers with charisma don't have to lie in order to be successful... they just have to sleep with their bosses. And believe me, when you sleep with your boss everyone knows you're a failure.

8. Ponder each decision carefully.
I love this guy! Point three was that you should have a short attention span. So "ponder" each decision carefully by focusing on it for about two seconds before spending the rest of your workday reading the Superficial. Point one was that if you aren't enjoying your job, you're in the wrong place. So follow your gut but only when it comes to where you're working, not how you're getting work done. Most jobs are so dead-end that the your decisions is usually between staying hired or being fired. No one's going to get a Scrooge McDuck vault full of gold coins if they sit around and pretend to be "pondering" an easy decision all day. And admit it-- when you're thinking things over, 99% of the time you're just stalling anyway.

9. Trust your family.
I wonder if these people would back him up on that...

10. Curiosity didn’t kill the cat.
BE CREATIVE! USE YOUR IMAGINATION! EXPLORE NEW WORLDS! THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX! I bet Trump's office is full of that Inspirations propaganda. Anyone who's ever worked in an office knows what I'm talking about.

I hope that now you understand why self-help books are a crock of shit and Donald Trump is a UN-recognized nation-state of shit. If you seriously can't find worthwhile advice anywhere in your life and you must resort to the Books-A-Million bestsellers list to fix your world, there's a book for you. It's called "HOW TO GET A NEW SET OF WORTHWHILE FRIENDS AFTER YOU MOVE THE FUCK OUT OF WHEREVER YOU'RE LIVING."

As a side note, writing "self-help book" more than twice in a week has reminded me how awful the movie Red Eye was. But Cillian Murphy can be the Irish cream in my coffee anytime.

Maybe if I'm lucky, the Trumpmeister will read my blog and cry a little on the inside before calling over Kathy Griffin and Todd Bridges and having a big C-List orgy to get his dopamine up.

(And Don, if your book was actually ghostwritten by Dr. Phil, make sure you punch him in the dick.)

Investing in my future, X-mas, my gut, bad grades, etc.

I got all my Christmas shopping done yesterday afternoon. The highlight of the day... well, there were two highlights of the day. First off, I had a Big Mac for the first time in years. Years. Despite the fact that this guy says they're bad for me, there is definitely a reason why America eats 400 trillion every year. Yeah, that's right. There's more Big Macs produced every year than there are slices of available cow in the world. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

The other highlight was sitting in Brookstone with Louie and deciding, simultaneously, that we would buy the same gift for one another. I'll show you what we got sometime, but first I have to wrap his.

Today's as good a day as any to make a semi-bi-monthly report on how my stocks are doing. As you might or might not remember me gloating about in a blanket of smug, I threw about $3800 in the stock market back in late July. I'm happy to report that both of my investments (the 2900 in mutual funds and the 900 in Raytheon) are both up over 10% since July, meaning I have netted about $450 in five months.

Yeah, put that in your pipe and smoke it. I'm making money for no good reason.

The problem is that now the money is tied up in stocks and funds. When I first threw my bowler into the market I was under the impression that in, oh, six months or so I would pull the money back out and reap a nice little $500. But that's totally not the plan anymore. I don't want it to stop growing. In fact, after I make a little more scratch this upcoming summer I'm sure I'll be throwing even more money.

I guess in my quest of greed and my get rich quick mentality, I actually did a good thing for myself and started planning for my future. If I could get out of college like, a few thousand dollars richer through the market it would be a good way towards paying my mom off for all this tuition nonsense. Or buying an apartment. The possibilities are endless, but it's so damn easy that I don't understand why everyone else doesn't invest their money.

On the other hand, though, I'm never going to learn my lesson about putting things off until the last minute. I have an economics exam tomorrow that will probably pull my pants over my head, but that's not the worst part of it. The worst part is that I have three other exams to take on my own time.

See, Rice has these wonderful things called take-home exams where the administration & co. trusts us to take our exams home, find a quiet spot, and spend the time allotted without using outside sources. It's a pretty noble concept but it sure as hell doesn't help me. I need things scheduled for me.

I haven't been studying for anything all week. Criminology isn't going to be hard and multi is open book and open note for (get this) four hours. But I should have been studying for intro to EE this entire time because that test is going to fuck me in ways banned by the Geneva convention-- a real waterboard of a test.

So I'm fucked. But at least I have great ways to waste my time. If you don't already have one, I suggest everyone reading this sign up for last.fm and start using it to track their tunes. It's seriously my favorite way to waste time besides Facebook. So yeah, get last.fm then FRIEND ME. I need more people to track using this thing, and you all need to realize how great my taste in music is.

I work hard for the money

People think I'm a katamari hell-bent on picking up every vice known to man and to some extent, they're right. It's just a matter of time until I'm on my knees in a crummy toilet stall clinching a belt between my teeth and shooting gerbil feces into my corrupted veins with a turkey baster because I've done everything else. But until that time comes I'll enjoy the newest little time-wasting vice that I've discovered: finances and investing.

Back as far as I can remember, which is a dwindling number due to the rotting of my brain, I've wanted to make my money work hard-- harder than sitting in a savings account gathering $.70 a month in interest. The idea that I can basically throw my money at a broker or a mutual fund and wait for them to hand me more money has always been alluring. I like to imagine myself as a Viking god in a Norse ship, beating a huge drum as dollar bills franticly push the oars and row me to paradise. That's was the dream at least.

So I started this summer on a mission: a mission to put away some of my hard-earned cash money into something safe yet fruitful. I read books by men millions of dollars older than me and scores of years wiser than me. I did research because that's what I get off on. I formulated a plan. I talked to people at work about what they do with their money. I wrote a lot of buzzwords on the back of my hand, like "diversification" and "diversify" and "diversity." The consensus was that I should break my investments into two categories.

• Big money in something steady and dependable, like a diverse mutual fund.
• Not so much money in something I'm familiar with

So I settled on Schwab Core Equity as my big boat and Raytheon as my small, rabid moneymaker. The idea is that the steady, dependable core equity will offset any losses that Raytheon might endure in the short run in order to keep me calm about my money. In reality, both investments are pretty dependable. If the equity fund ever gave out, well, that would mean that America fell under completely. If Raytheon ever gave out that would mean that America was done fighting wars. Hahahah, yeah, right. If it wasn't so complicated, I would totally invest in the Vice Fund, but Schwab has higher standards that to make that available to me.

So I dropped a sizable chunk (read: around half) of my monay into these investments, buying a lot more mutual fund than warmongering death company because I'm a giant pussy.

And how's it been going? Well, if you're actually man enough to click on those links up yonder, you'll see that everything's been on a downward slope SINCE I STARTED INVESTING. This has caused me much distress, since I've lost about $50 so far, but fuck, I can't let that get to me. I'm in this for the long haul. And when those babies start paying out dividends and Raytheon sends me a flying robot, I'll be the boss of the town.

Besides, it's something to do at work.