Rear-View Mirror

Putting the Rabbit in the Hat, by Brian Cox The second half was a lot less interesting than the first – and that’s probably on me. Perhaps if I was a film buff or knew any of the names Cox mentions in each chapter, I would find the book more intriguing. But because I’m very much a product of the 21st century with little cultural knowledge of iconic British, Scottish, and American actors in classic films and plays, he could have been making up names and stories for all I would’ve known. However, as a humble optimist at heart, I made my best attempt to find something valuable to take out of the rest of the piece and succeeded with flying colors. I found two. The first was learning Cox’s unique writing style. While he doesn’t necessarily write the way he would speak, the sophistication of the words he uses juxtaposed with the mundane or comedic tone of many of his adventures makes for great comedy. I couldn’t care less whether Cox was talking about this person or that and what pi...

Society Wants You On This Drug  –  Here's How You Take It A comprehensive guide to caffeine and its complications On a cold morning stumble to the loo, you swing open the bathroom door and do a double-take at the monster in the mirror. That guy needs coffee. Conventional wisdom agrees with your assessment – and I happen to as well. On your average morning needing an average kick to start off the day, a cup of joe however you like it is the way to go. But what if I told you that there are drinks sold over-the-counter with more than double the caffeine content of that morning coffee? Or that some come to your fridge calorie-free? Or, that some aren’t even beverages at all? That’s what we’ll explore here. In the wide world of caffeine, I’ve corralled all of the noise into two distinct categories that you’ll be able to run through the next time you’re deciding how you’ll get that precious pick-me-up: Caffeine Content, and Health Considerations We’ll frame our journey through the l...

Putting the Rabbit in the Hat, by Brian Cox One hundred pages in, and damn do I feel lucky I never wanted to be an actor.  Maybe that paints the picture I little too poorly – Brian Cox really does present a great case for why he was meant to be an actor through his nomadic independence and curiosity as a child, but the number of lucky breaks this guy had to get to be successful is insane.  He had to first know from a very young age that he wanted to be an actor and an actor only, which he himself admits was a stroke of luck. Then, his entire career was kickstarted when an actor happened to leave the local theater, one of Cox’s teacher’s happened to hear about it, and Cox happened to be old enough to fill the opening. Still after that, this theater burned to the ground on a freak accident which gave him a reason to leave Scotland behind and pursue formal acting training in London – and this all happens in the first 50 pages.  Less lucky on his part was the fact that neithe...

Debt Capital Markets Debt capital markets (DCM) are a lot like the forgotten child of post-business school job options – no one knows what DCM bankers do, and we get a lot of unwarranted neglect and nose-turning. Luckily for me after working as a DCM banker for an entire summer, I don’t think we deserve the hate. Boiling it down: debt capital markets professionals connect companies seeking funding to pools of money seeking a return on their investment . When Tesla needs money to build a new factory and the schoolteacher’s state pension plan has money to fund it, or Pepsi decides it wants to buy the energy drink maker Celsius and your 401k investment could make it happen, DCM bankers are the middlemen that evaluate the risk of those types of transactions and charge the borrowers accordingly. We spend much of our time watching the stock and bond markets day-to-day to get a gauge on how risk-seeking or risk-averse investors currently seem, and then relaying this information to companies t...

I’m Truly Unbearable I was born and raised in Orange County, California, in a town called Fountain Valley with a decently sized Asian-American population. Living close to the largest Vietnamese community in the world outside of Vietnam itself, Little Saigon, I was influenced by an intermingling of Vietnamese and American cultures.  My father immigrated on a boat with his parents after being suspected of being capitalist sympathizers during the Vietnam War, and through the hardships he and his family faced learning to live in a completely new environment, developed an unrelenting work ethic and a pervasive sense of responsibility. On the other hand, my mother grew up in a single-parent household in Long Beach, valuing socialization, living in the moment, and caring for others.  I’m very much a product of both of these experiences – the drive of my father and the extrovertedness of my mother have combined to create someone truly unbearable.  This Life Is My Own Like my moth...