OK you asked for it, by popular demand I present to you the follow-up to Part 1: The Funniest Email I’ve Ever Read .

Your Correspondent's Correspondent: Mr. Cherneff

The author of these literary achievements recently wrote a screenplay that fulfills the promise of what you see here. I printed it out and snuck into the pool at a five-star hotel in Mandalay, Burma, and got hooked sitting by the poolside. I was alternatively laughing out loud or staring transfixed at the paper.

Sadly, reading it destroyed any dreams I may or may not have harbored about being some kind of screenwriter: I can see that I’m way out of my league there. Anyways, if I were a movie producer or a sweet lass in London I’d be clamoring to get my hands on this guy.

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Subject: SAT practice

[UPDATE: It appears I have subconsciously taken my inspiration from this post, without proper credit. Oops!]

If you want to read how the NY Times spent 36 Hours in Hanoi, you can do that here. If you want to read my version, well you’re in the right place.

After going to the office Friday for a morning meeting, I spent the rest of the day working from home. Finishing around 6, I spent the next hour and a half working a few upcoming projects. (details coming soon).

At 8 I headed to meet some friends to watch the Vientam National Symphony orchestra at the 99-year old Hanoi Opera House, an old and awesome French-styled building that packs a lot of charm. They were running late, so I stopped by a nearby pool hall, Wings, where some months before my patronage earned me the highly-esteemed VIP card, number 112. I ordered a club sandwich, and skyped my dad from ipod while playing two games against myself.

Hanoi Opera House

I made it to the concert a few minutes late, but not too late to be treated to an hour and a half of symphony orchestra and opera. The plan was to go immediately to Solace to catch a ride on a boat a friend had hired for his birthday party. Unfortunately, the uproarious applause at the end of the concert coincided with a text message notifying us that the boat had just departed, and wouldn’t be re-docking for another two hours.

We were left with three choices: 1) go to the re-opening of Apocalypse Now, a seedy but happening place that had been shut down in a drug raid three years before, 2) go to another local bar and basically hang out with ourselves, 3) find a way onto that boat.

Odds against us, I was the first to arrive on my motorbike at Solace, where the boat had taken off from. I could see the boat, which seemed to be sitting still in the water (more on this later). After wandering among the docked boats and being shut down by several uninterested locals, I walked back up the pathway to the road and started chatting with the taxi drivers and locals sitting around drinking bia hoi.

Sure enough, there was one guy willing to take us out there. Despite an admirable performance on my part to bargain him down, he was asking the ridiculous price of 600,000 VND, or right around $30. But if we wanted to get on that boat, it was the only way.

An Appropriately Sketchy Picture of Solace

Suckers for the idea of pirating a schooner to get onboard the party boat, Jimmy and I split the cost for the five of us, since we were basically dragging the rest of the crew along. Ten minutes later, a small boat with what sounded like an old lawnmower engine driving it forward appeared, and reluctantly we tried to maintain our balance as we boarded the sketchy craft.

Ten minutes later we boarded the boat with indian screams and pirate noises. Ten minutes after that, I realized why the boat had seem so close and still from shore: it was stuck on a sandbar. We had boarded a doomed ship, essentially volunteering to join Gilligan and friends on their island. Not that this really affected the party- the light wind atleast made it seem like we were moving.

Two hours of engine-revving and a couple of 360s later, two small boats came to take passengers back to shore. After two such trips, the boat was lightened enough to allow it to break free from the sandbar, and we made our way back to shore only an hour and half later than anticipated.

In the parking lot, the notoriously-asshole parking attendants gave me grief for not having a parking ticket. They couldn’t understand that I didn’t have one because I’d arrived for the boat around 10pm, well before anyone from the Solace crowd had started to arrive, and before the parking attendants were there. Some mayhem ensued of which I’ll omit the details, but after paying $3 to get my bike out of there I made my way through the empty streets to my house and fell into bed exhausted just around 4am. The party had been fun, I was reminded of how sketch Solace is and why I’ve only been there twice in the past 6 months, despite the fact that its a staple of the late-night scene in Hanoi.

I awoke the next morning around 10, and spent the next two hours working on the aforementioned side projects. I then met up with some friends to work on a presentation to the Red Cross for MotoMedic. Basically, intense traffic congestion and the abundance of alleyways make ambulance response times something terrible: around 45 minutes in the cases that they can actually respond to. The idea behind MotoMedic is to equip motorbikes with first-responder gear, which promises to reduce the response time to maybe 10 minutes. Aaron and Katy founded MotoMedic and have been working on getting it off the ground for a few months. I like the idea a lot, so I offered to help in any way I could.

I headed to play ultimate frisbee at 3. Its played at the UN school, which is in the middle of Ciputra, a complex where rich locals and expats live in seclusion from the charm, craziness, and realness of the rest of Hanoi. The cookie-cutter houses and air of exlusivity make it a somewhat disturbing place, but as far as frisbee fields go it has one of the best.

Ciputra Blah.

Two hours later, I’m zigging and zagging my way home, blasting the new MGMT album inside my monster motorcycle helmet. A quick shower later, and I’m out the door to meet up with friends to head over to the American Club, where “the world’s greatest beat boxer”, Killa Kella, is set to perform. Maybe every two months there’s a relatively “big” event/concert that is thrown , and you can count on the majority of expats attending such a party. (Ratatat, one of the DJs from Jurassic 5, and Girl Talk are the only semi-famous performances I’ve seen in a year in Hanoi.) It was good to run into a wide mix of people, many of whom I hadn’t seen in awhile, and the reasonably-priced beer and solid performances kept everyone happy.

I snuck out early and headed home around 11. I’d gotten my late-night fix for the weekend the previous night, and I was looking forward to some peace and quiet to ease the transition to Sunday. I put on an episode of the BBC Life series (not the one with Oprah), but drifted to sleep before making it very far at all.

If you’ve been here before you might notice that something has changed. Indeed it has. I’ve switched from Google‘s Blogger to WordPress. I did this for a reason, and you’ll understand more if you read below.

Blogger sucks. The features it offers are weak compared to WordPress. From favicon, to hosting on your own provider, to plugins, to add-ons, to features, to customization, Blogger is so far behind WordPress that I have a hard time believing that Google is behind it.

I love Google. In so many areas they dominate, simply because they are the best at whatever they try to do. If they aren’t the best, they buy the best, and then they are the best.

That’s why I’m so confused with Blogger. What the $%&# are the Blogger people at Google thinking? I’m not going to go into anymore technical details, but I’m just shocked at how bad Blogger is. What you should take from this is that Google is not invincible- they can lose, and they will lose to superior products.

My friend Nick sent both the funniest and second funniest emails that I’ve ever received. Being the nice guy that he is, after much nagging and atleast two blackmail attempts, he’s agreed to let me post them both. I’m not sure which one is funnier, but I’ll whet your appetite now with the first email and save the second for a later post.

Nick is brilliant, and anyone who knows him will tell you the same. Oftentimes “sharp” is used instead of “brilliant” to describe him. He’s one of those guys that you talk to and then afterwards realize how not funny you are. An extremely rare mixture of cool, wit, and smooth-ness, Nick is a rare bird indeed. And ladies, last I read on page 6, he’s single.

I’ll let him take it from here in this email sent to friends before returning home from a year in Thailand. Part 2 is coming, but tell me this isn’t an astounding literary feat:

Subject: The Repatriation Proclamation

Hello again, friends.

With my last few days in Chiang Mai melting away in the impossibly hot heat, time seems ripe for reflection. I am very very sad to leave this place. I appear to be crying but that’s actually just my eyeballs sweating. Different? Counts? Ok so then I am crying. My entire body is weeping. My grundle and leg pits are inconsolable. It’s a pungent sadness. I really like it here, and have even gotten used to living without air conditioning. I wonder if it will be hard for me to go back to a cool and dry world. Perhaps I will just have to sleep in a sauna, until I readjust.  Also, I am excited, but at the same time worried, about cheese.

In exactly one week I will be back home. It will be great to see my family and to reconnect with many of you. That being said, I don’t want anyone to be caught off-guard when they first see me, so I think it’s best to prepare you a little.

I’m different now. This year, this country, this life, have all changed me. Cliched as it may sound, I have been altered by the countless new experiences I have had in this post-college time abroad. Looking back on my former self, I think the transformation has been quite remarkable. It’s hard to explain, but here are a few quick examples.

I think differently now. If my old way of thinking was, let’s say, apples, then my new way of thinking is the absolute furthest thing possible from apples. Pears. You probably don’t understand. That’s because you just aren’t capable of the level of different thinking necessary to understand true difference. Most people aren’t, don’t feel bad. But trust me, it’s pears. The faces I make now are different as well. They are confusingly beautiful faces.

I experimented with Buddhism for a while, even combined it with my jewish upbringing to form Budaism, and then eventually, Jewddhism. Then as I continued to grow, spiritually, I  tossed in a pinch of Hinduism, a splash of Taoism, a thimbleful of Southern Baptist-infused Televangelism, a dollop of Voodoo and a dash of Islamic fundamentalist vinaigrette for flavor. What I came out with is called Voobrewdali’llamaramaslammabammaslamtasticism. As theologies go, it’s pretty much the tits.

I taste noticeably saltier. I still don’t wear corduroys, but if I were to stumble onto that PERFECT pair…

I have taken on some characteristics of my brothers and sisters from the animal and plant kingdoms; the trappings of bonds forged during my prolonged journey into the savage depths of the jungle. The keen eyes of a hawk. The balance and single-minded determination of an ant colony. The impressive phallus of an aroused gibbon. The seamless fluidity of a jaguar. The patience and serenity of a palm frond. The sardonic brow of a speckled jungle shrew. The ruthless cunning of that microscopic fish that follows your pee-trail back up your pee-hole and pitches spiky little tents all up and down your pee-pipe.

I wear a watch but I never look at it. I don’t conceptualize time and space in the traditional sense anymore. For me, it’s always ‘go-time’ and wherever I am, that’s ‘the zone’. Seriously, look at my watch. It just says ‘go-time’ ‘go-time’ ‘go-time’ ‘go-time’ . One hour for me might take an entire week for you, with each second full of more spiritual significance than you will probably achieve in an entire lifetime. I pour the sands of time out of the hourglass and  make sand sculptures of mermaids with killer racks. I have bequeathed my earthly form to the cosmic powers that be and allow their infinite wisdom to guide me. Sometimes that means skipping over a Wednesday and banging out two Thursdays in a row. Sometimes that means spending a week straight making a collage out of cigarette butts and bubblegum I pick up outside KFC.

I sense things other people can’t, like when toasters are grumpy or when friendly looking people have crabs. I’m never ever wrong, about anything, even for a second, not even Sudoku. My facial hair can change minute-to-minute to reflect my shifting emotions. Think of a mood-ring. Now keep thinking about it but also think of my hairy face. Yes, perfect.

Instead of just stacking a full toilet paper roll on top of the holder or stacking it on the back of the toilet, I put it in the holder. Then I take the empty toilet paper roll out of the holder as soon as it’s finished and throw it away or use it as an incense stand or a makeshift bong or a skateboard park for my ant friends.

If this year has taught me nothing else about the world it’s that just like toilet paper rolls stacked on the back of the toilet, things in life will always fall, and they will always get wet and gross when they do, because the bathroom of life has no separate area sectioned off solely for showering so the floor of the bathroom of life will invariably be wet and gross. In Voobrewdali’llamaramaslammabammaslamtastic culture, when someone says something deeply profound, it is a sign of acknowledgment and respect to snap three times and then vigorously pleasure yourself. So go ahead and take a minute, then continue on reading.

I think you get the idea, and if not, you’ll see for yourselves soon enough. I hope that these changes in me are not too shocking or off-putting and that you can find it in you to accept the new, and, I think, improved Nick. Oh yeah, another thing, I don’t go by Nick anymore. I have come to be known by my Thai name ‘Pee-Dang-Fuck-Me-My-Cow-Cop’, which of course means ‘do you have any respected elder red rice pumpkins?’. Don’t worry if you’re pronouncing it incorrectly for the first few weeks, as i’ve mentioned in my past emails, the tones can be kind of a bitch to get used to.

I hope to shine some of this brilliant light that I’ve been blessed with on you and pray it  wont do too much permanent damage to your spiritually impoverished eyeballs. Your gaudy, oversized “Ray Bans” or “Gucci” sunglasses probably have decent UV protection — you sickening soulless prodigal capitalist shit-bandits — so you should be just fine.  In the wondrous places I have been…you don’t need eyes to see.

So yeah, really pumped to see all you cats. Still, mostly just worried about the whole cheese thing.

How many hours of deliberate practice are required to prepare you for success?

10,000 hours. That’s 555 days straight with only six hours sleep. Its the equivalent of working an intensely-focused 8 hours per day at your job for five years.

That’s the summary of research put forth by Malcom Gladwell in Outliers. Gladwell outlines other ingredients, including timing, geography, upbringing, and a modest threshold of success, but the main point he makes is that do something really well, you have to work really, really hard.For that aspect of “success” atleast, 10,000 hours sounds like a reasonable guess.

Online poker’s impact on the poker world is an interesting example of this phenomenon at work. The great poker players of yore (think Doyle Brunson, Amarillo Slim) had a much tougher time finding games, traveling a lot and playing in illegal games with criminals and at risk of being arrested. For them to get 10,000 hours of poker experience would take years, if not decades. Online poker changed all that. Suddenly, you could play at 10 tables at one time(!), at any stakes you wanted at any time of day.

At a live table, a dealer will be able to deal about 40 hands per hour. In the old days, tooling around for a decade in your truck searching for 10,000 hours of  live poker experience would take quite a while, and 10,000 hours give you a total of 40,000 hands of poker played. Compare that to playing four tables at a time online for 8 hours per day: you could play the same number of hands in two weeks online.

When poker came to the internet, kids in dorm rooms were matching the poker-hand equivalent of Doyle Brunson’s life experience during a few all night binges. The next thing you know, there’s a 16 year old with pimples cruising around in the Maserati he just paid cash for, and a 21-year old is bluff re-raising Johnny Chan on national TV with a hidden set for a few million bucks.

Online poker transformed the playing field in live poker, and now it seems every year some internet pro is winning the World Series of Poker and cashing out with a few million bucks. Internet pros are so prevelant partly due to the fact that so many players now play online. Even the old guys now play online, partly because there’s so much money to be made there, but also partly because they need to in order to keep up with the young guns.

While poker is in some ways an exceptional example, in this case atleast, what’s true for poker is true in other fields. The internet has fundamentally changed the way that people discover, use, and share information. It has also made that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice that much easier to acquire. Among other things, this fundamental change has come in the form of software innovations that create more effective learning/practicing tools or, more importantly, providing the information and infrastructure that allows anyone with internet to explore and practice in their given field.

Want to be an expert Java programmer? Want to learn how to do graphic design? Trade stocks? Become an incredible pastry chef? Learn bird songs?

Just 10,000 hours. The clock is ticking.

• We arrived with no plans, but were convinced to hire a taxi, driver, and guide from our hostel for $80/day for 7 days. At $280 total, this was about the same as flying around, but gave us the benefit of seeing the country on our drive, the ability to stop whenever we pleased, a guide to arrange our activities when needed and point out little-seen places, and transportation within each of the cities we were in. While I’d recommend doing this to anyone traveling there, we had a few rough drives in the taxi (8 bumpy hours to Kalaw on some of the worst roads I’ve ever seen, and an epic 15 hour drive from Mandalay to Yangon overnight to give us a full day in the old capital). 
• Our taxi was a piece of crap. It had a sunroof that didn’t work, a radio that didn’t work, and might have had shocks, which as you might guess, didn’t work. Running over a pebble made that thing shake like we were in a tornado, so you might imagine how it handled on a lot of the rougher roads we found ourselves on. Anyways, from what I could tell, 2/3 of the cars in Burma had steering wheels on the right side, the rest on the left. This makes no sense, as they drive on the right side of the road, making it difficult for most drivers to know exactly how close to passing cars they are. That said, worrying about where the steering wheels are in Burma is kind of like freaking out about the color of the doctor’s scrubs before open-hear surgery; there are more pressing concerns at hand.
• We visited Yangon/Rangoon (the old capital), Bago, Kalaw (treking area), Inle Lake, and Mandalay. Yangon and Mandalay are both big, sprawling cities with high concentrations of ethnic Indians, moderate traffic, and only modest attractions. 
• Inle Lake was my favorite place: its got a low-key beach town-y vibe and is a great place to rent a bicycle and pedal around. Plus, taking a longboat around the lake was interesting and refreshing. 
• We skipped Bagan, which has thousands of pagodas. We saw plenty of pagodas without visiting Bagan, and frankly after 10 or so, they all start looking the same. Some of them were really awesome:
• Longyis are awesome, and wearing one for the first few days was a great decision. Not only are these “man skirts” comfortable in the humid heat, but wearing one immediately drew a warm smile from any local that saw me. I learned four Burmese phrases: “hello” (ming-la-ba), “how are you” (olay-gong-la), “thank you” (jezu-bay), and “its comfortable” (my day). The last I learned in order to have some kind of response to every smile, nod, and point I got in response to wearing the longyi.
• The Moustache Brothers in Mandalay was interesting- its a troupe of brothers who do a stand-up comedy routine and dance show, and basically the only entertainment in Mandalay listed in the Lonely Planet guide. One of the brothers was sent to prison for 7 years for making jokes about the government, and now they can only perform in English and out of their home. I don’t think humor translates so well between languages, and most of it wasn’t funny. The dancing was a little boring as well. One of the four dancers came out and was just hideous. These guys are making like $250/night, I’m sure they could have found some more beautiful faces. All was explained when he introduced her at the end of his show as his sister in-law!                
• During a one day trek in Kalaw, we had an awesome guide who opened up a lot about the people of Burma and their thoughts on the governments. A few points that he made:
• The Burmese people don’t really understand democracy and how it works, and if you asked many of them what they think about the government, they really don’t have much to judge it against. They probably wouldn’t give you the pros and cons of military rule, they’d just tell you that they’re afraid of the government                              
• He told us an Aesop’s Fable, “The Frogs Asking for a King”, ultimately saying that the Burmese people have gotten the leaders they deserved. The Buddhist underpinnings of their disposition made it such that they allowed the military rulers to take power and abuse their rights. I think that’s what he meant.
• The guide had been a student during anti-government riots in the 70′s, and though he didn’t participate, he was putting out a fire and believes his picture was taken. In the picture it looked like he was participating, even though he wasn’t. As a result, he was expelled just before finishing his degree, which he was ultimately allowed to get over 10 years later.
• The guide was reluctant to get involved in any kind of politics, saying that now all he cared about was money. He said it was because there was nothing he could do, that the situation seemed so hopeless, and it only made him sad to think about it.
• We passed through a village during the trek, and the guide went to several houses and handed out medicine to the locals, one who had a frightening case of the measles. After finding out that the funds for this medicine often came from tourists, we gave him $25 at the end. $10 for his own pocket, the rest to buy medicine with.                
• We visited maybe 20 pagodas during the trip, and while we saw tons of monks, there were two who really “adopted” us during our visit to their pagoda. One was super-quiet and nice, the other was ADHD-talkative; really, he wouldn’t shut up. (Left, ADHD, Right, Quiet Monk)                                         

I just returned from an 8 day trip to Burma, or officially “Myanmar” since the military government changed the name in 1989. Before the trip, in my mind Burma was a sad and poverty-stricken third world outpost of cruel leadership among the likes of North Korea. (I should note right now that spending 8 days in a country doesn’t come close to making you an expert on the culture, and that my grasp of Burma is pretty limited.)

Post-trip, I still think the above is true, but that isn’t how I’d describe the country to others. You can’t help but be impressed by the friendliness and warmth of the people there, the remnants of historical wealth evident in the thousands of beautiful pagodas, and the presence of modern conveniences, however inaccessible they are to the majority of Burma’s poor population (the 13th poorest in the world).

In many ways Burma is a truly tragic country. The rule of the junta has been one of political oppression, economic mismanagement, and a general decline in wealth and world standing. What was once a prosperous and vast kingdom is now a backwards, poor, and stifled outcast nation ruled with brutal and uncaring military force. Diplomatic efforts and economic sanctions haven’t accomplished much, and in fact are partly responsible for the continued poverty there, which is partly responsible for the ignorance and powerlessness that are partly responsible for why the future of Burma seems so grim, which is partly responsible for why the military government is still in power.

That’s a lot of “partly responsibles”, but if you’re looking for simple answers then don’t try to wrap your head around what kind of solutions will turn the situation in Burma around. Sure, getting rid of the military junta would be a great first step, but even then you’ve got to overcome all the damage and developmental issues that are the result of decades of incompetent rule. And make no mistake, the junta has a firm grip on power that is partly thanks to the complicity of the Chinese, who are unwilling to get involved with the internal affairs of another state (read: give up their economic interests in Burma).

If the U.S. is so concerned about human rights, we should have invaded Burma rather than Iraq. Or at least offered a helping hand to the monks who led country-wide protests in 2007 before being brutally murdered and jailed as the international community sat idly by. This was chronicled in Burma VJ, a depressing documentary created from smuggled footage regarding the Saffron revolution.

There are supposed to be “democratic” elections this year. The last time elections were held, the junta was handily defeated but refused to give up power. Its hard to imagine this time being any different.

I have no idea what will happen in the future. Perhaps more “enlightened” military rulers will replace the current generation of generals, though organizations like that are specifically designed to promote those with worldviews in harmony with the current leadership. Perhaps the junta will be pressured into actually adhering to election results. Sadly, I’m afraid it will just be more of the same.

A team member at work emailed me their resignation letter today. Here is the letter:

From: HN-MKT-.Dung
Sent: Monday, February 08, 2010 1:25 PM
To: Jesse Maddox
Subject: Resignation!

Dear Mr Jesse,
Please accept this message as notification that I am leaving my position with our company effective February 28.
I appreciate the opportunities I have been given here and your professional guidance and support. I wish you and the company success in the future.
Please let me know what to expect as far as my final work schedule, accrued vacation leave, and my employee benefits.
If I can be of assistance during this transition, please let me know.
Best Regard,

Dung

Being that Dung is not a native speaker, I knew that there was a better chance of me winning Mr. Universe than him knowing the word “accrued.” It took Google and I about twelve seconds to find this exact letter, word for word, as the top result. I replied to him with only this link.

I got up from my desk and walked over to talk to him, and as I approached he was reading his email. Then he made a confused face, looked up and pointed at me, both of us laughing out loud.

I don’t blame him for just copying the top google result for “email resignation”. I would to if I had to in a foreign language, and anyways a resignation letter isn’t where you say what you want to say. We skipped out of work for an hour later that afternoon and discussed things over a few beers, as was appropriate.

Anyways, its worth noting here that Dung is a really talented guy. I interviewed over 35 people for two positions, and he was one of the two that made the cut. He decided to quit against the advice of all of his friends and his family; I’m the first to applaud anyone who takes a leap of faith for the sake of their dreams, and so I’m proud to see him go after his own.

1. You wear your motorcycle helmet when you aren’t riding your motorbike
2. You say “Oi!” instead of “Oh!”
3. Red lights mean “You can slow down a little, if you want to”
4. You get pissed off when the bar charges you $3 for a gin and tonic
5. The food groups consist of: Fortifieds, Vegetables, Meat, Rice, Milk, and Street Food
6. You don’t think twice when throwing an elbow at an old lady’s face as you push your way to the front of the line
7. You see a pig strewn across the back of a motorbike and think “That’s a good-looking Honda Wave”
8. Your mind doesn’t even register car horns
9. Your friday night plans include “raging” until midnight, and then going home since the bars are all closed
10. When anyone even begins to talk to you on the street, you immediately cut them off with “No I don’t want a motorbike ride!”