Conspicuous Leisure

Here’s a short story about a teenager behaving like a teenager. For you marketing folks, here’s a case study in how creating an image can flip emotional switches and influence purchasing decisions. I had just turned 14 when Rolling Stone’s Hot List for 1998 issue came out. I have no idea whether Rolling Stone still [...]

It’s a cardinal sin for a traveler to have ear buds in while he’s walking around, right? A guy’s only got five senses, if he’s lucky, and he needs all five of them to absorb his surroundings. He needs to be able to hear the locals’ foreign tongues to get a feel for the place, [...]

It’s been a while. With the holidays, friends visiting, three new books from the “Song of Fire and Ice” series (shut it) and a personal branding business idea that I spent a week trying to fully conceptualize, I haven’t been at the computer much. As such, my online efforts have suffered. However, now I’m back [...]

  I was trolling through some old emails this morning when I came across a back-and-forth I had with a friend where I spelled out some of my ideas for creating streams of passive income. Most of the ideas I actually pursued are now a few months old, and I think each represents a large [...]

It was only after the eight of us were packed tight in this stranger’s car and racing down a jungle road at night that we realized we’d been set up. That’s a bit dramatic. Really, we just got caught up in a Costa Rican tourist hustle. It went like this: Our man on the ground [...]

There was a line of customers to the door at the copy shop where I usually print off my class materials. I didn’t have time to wait. I knew I would feel like a bum, but I could still print the handouts at my student’s office, where we have class. On my walk across town, [...]

Every few weeks or so, I have a business idea that gets me excited, and I spend some time rolling the idea around in my head. Thanksgiving weekend found me with such an idea. It’s not something that’s entirely in my wheelhouse, so I’m offering it up for free on here in hopes that it’s [...]

When I was studying in Sweden, our university had a sizable contingent of foreign-exchange undergraduates from one of California’s state schools. I didn’t meet many of them, but one day, a friend from France remarked to me just how arrogant they were. This surprised me, and I asked what made them so arrogant. “Because they [...]

  Sometime in the spring of 2003, I had adopted my habit of wearing a wife-beater under my t-shirts. That summer, after my freshman year of college, I found myself in a Days Inn bathroom in O’Fallon, Missouri, a western suburb of St. Louis, undressed as far down as my white wife-beater when I noticed [...]

A cold day and a canceled English lesson has me sitting in the kitchen, contemplating two grotesque jars of liquid fat. They look like grade school science projects. The briny, straw-colored liquid in each jar has a thick, white head, and I could almost pass the contents off as beer from afar were it not [...]