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Check this video out:

Isn’t that cool? If each block weighed about 3-5 lbs, he was carrying about 60-100 lbs of weight on his head.

Over the history of time, many cultures—who didn’t have sophisticated equipment—came up with ways to do things efficiently. It could be transporting heavy loads, like shown in the video, or other types of manual labor.

Here are more examples from Ghana:

You’ll notice that all the white folks carried the loads with their muscle (shoulders, biceps, forearms), while the locals used their heads. The original poster of these pictures wrote that each brick weighed about 40 lbs, and they walked 100 yards to the construction site. Not only that, the women showed no signs of strain; they could casually stop and chat with the heavy loads on their heads.

That is not an easy task. When I in college, I had to carry a 40 lb package from Georgia Tech mail center to my dorm. The walk was longer than 100 yards, but my muscles failed 75% of the way. I barely made it to my dorm. If I knew about this technique, I could’ve saved a lot of trouble.

You can try it yourself. Put something heavy on top of your shoulder or head. It’s much easier to carry stuff that way. It’s very efficient because the weight is closest to your center—it’s pretty much on the same plane.

Does this mean we can now start carrying things on our heads? Not really. The locals did this for a long time. The top of their heads, mind-intent, and the necessary bone and muscle connection became conditioned through years of practice. It’s just not good leverage; it’s good body conditioning.

What they’re probably doing is relaxing certain muscles so their structure will transmit the ground through their bodies and support the weight. In a nutshell, the ground holding up the bricks. The only muscles they’re using are the muscles to hold their structure (and walking). Of course, their structure has to be conditioned enough so the ground can transmit through it. But even if you know the secret, it’s still be hard.

If you do ancient Asian martial arts like Taijiquan or ancient Asian body conditioning like Yoga correctly, your body should be conditioned in that way. And since I’ve been doing that kind of Asian exercise stuff for a few years, I was curious if I could carry at least 80lbs on my head. I tried it and failed miserably.

The problem wasn’t my structure, but my skull felt like it was being crushed. Therefore, my skull wasn’t conditioned enough to hold that weight. I do think my spine and legs were able to transmit the ground to my head though. I think I need to practice more if I were to do this seriously.

Anyway, next time you move or have to carry heavy loads, trying putting it on your shoulder or head. In fact, the other day, I had to carry a drunk girl away to our car. I used my structure to hold her weight, but if I really wanted to be efficent, I should’ve put her on top of my head and carried her.

I had more needles on my head than her.

Brief Introduction To Alternative Medicine

We all know and love alternative medicine. You know, the new age crap that people do to feel better. In case you don’t know what some of these alternative medical practices are, here are some examples:

• Acupuncture – stick needles in people to make them feel better.
• Natropathy – use natural herbs to make you feel better.
• Prolotherapy – stick needles that squirt chemicals into your joints to make them feel better.
• Chiropractic – twist and bend your spine in all sorts of ways to make you feel better
• Aromatherpy – using smells to make you feel better.
• Rolfing – giving a really painful massage to make you feel better.

If something goes wrong, however, these can be dangerous. For example:

• Acupuncture – needle gets infected and you die.
• Natropathy – eat a toxic or poisonous herb and you die.
• Prolotherapy – squirt acid into your joints and you get die.
• Chiropractic – adjust your spine wrong, get spine trauma, and you die
• Aromatherpy – you sniff toxic fumes and you die.
• Rolfing – they dig too deep and puncture your organs and you die.

Sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it? Of course, Western medicine community look down on these practices. I mean they’re not scientifically proven. One time, I told my doctor that I did acupuncture, and he laughed at me. Hey, I would laugh too if you tried to fix a broken arm with Natropathy.

Luckily, I didn’t have a broken arm or AIDS. I only had tinnitus. Tinnitus is one of those billion problems that Western medicine can’t figure out. After going to ENTs and having no cure, I did acupuncture. And it worked.

My Experiences With Acupuncture

I grew up in a pretty traditional Korean home. We were Buddhists, believed in Shamanism, ate kimchee, and ate nasty Oriental herbs to make us stronger. Every time I got sick, my old-fashioned grandparents would take me to a TCM¹ doctor. They stuck needles in me and gave me disgusting medicines.

When I went to college, I began to break free of my family’s brainwashing. I began to develop rational thought and general teenage-know-it-all-ness. I started to think acupuncture was a load of baloney. I even got into minor debates with a few loony, tai-chi, hippy Westerners about acupuncture.

Of course, my problem was that I was also a hippy, tai chi person. And every green-tea sipping, peace-loving, Asiaphile, hippy Westerner dabbled in acupuncture as well. Since, you know, you can’t be Asian unless you do acupuncture and speak broken Chinese (or Japanese).

So I was exposed to acupuncture a lot. Then I began thinking and reevaluating it.

These Asian folks are pretty smart people. I should know since I’m Asian. They figured out a whole system of strengthening and conditioning the body that’s different from Western method. And like acupuncture, those conditioning methods haven’t been thoroughly scientifically researched yet. If those Asians came up with cool ways to develop your body², they probably came up with some unique ways of treating sick people.

In fact, in an article I read, they found out the acupuncture points had an 80% overlap with fascia planes. 80% is not an accident. These Asians probably knew something was up. Besides, 80% is pretty good for a culture that frowned upon dissection of human bodies for the last 2000 years. They had to develop it using empirical methods.

Since acupuncture had to do with manipulating fascia layers, I tried testing that out. When I went to the acupuncturist, I tightened the fascia layer where the doctor stuck the needles³. As I did that, the needles jerked around. It hurt a lot. But it confirmed my theories.

So I went my fair share of acupuncturists. Some worked, some didn’t. Maybe it’s just placebo.

So Should You Go To Any Old Acupuncturist Operating Out of a Van?

No, not really. I mean it can’t hurt, but I rather go to an Asian guy than a Westerner. Of course, I’m also racist, therefore I could be biased.

In all seriousness, I would make sure your acupuncturist went to a legit TCM school somewhere in Asia. If they got their certificate at some community college or is just a “hobbyist,” then avoid. There’s other criteria that you can follow. For example, I pay attention when they poke and prod my body to see if they’re using jin. Also, I find out if they do qigong. They should also be able to explain what they’re doing as they poke needles in you.

One final word of advice is to use your common sense. You can’t cure cancer, AIDS, broken bones, dislocated joints, gunshot wounds, heavy burns, or dismembered limbs using acupuncture. But check them out if you have a lingering pain or weird problems in your body that Western medicine can’t figure out.

1. Traditional Chinese Medicine [↩]
2. to do farming and to hurt people really bad [↩]
3. using breath and intent. It’s complicated, I do this when I do my mystical, Eastern conditioning exercises [↩]

There’s a lot of stink over this Proposition 8 being passed. Here is a solution: let’s make marriages a religious thing and just give out civil unions for everyone. This way, anyone can have a civil union with whoever they want. This solves everything.

Then what will become of marriages? It’ll become a strict religious ceremony. It’ll be religious as a baptism or a communion—both of which secular people have no interest taking part of. This way we won’t have these debates, the church and state will be separate, and we’ll live happily ever after.

Then again, non-theists would probably say that there was a such thing called marriage before the popular religions were established. On the other hand, theists can say that since God created the world from the beginning, He also created marriage with it. Which means that marriage was always synonymous with theism. So there could be debate of that. Well, you can’t win them all. I guess pesudo-intellectual people who love to argue for the sake of arguing will debate about everything.

On a Different Note

One reason I propose this is because of the differences between getting married at a court house and getting married at a religious institution. For example, we had to fill out 3-4 pages of personal information about our faith and ourselves to be considered to be married at Mt. Paran’s. Not only that, we had to go through a month long, mandatory pre-marital counseling session.

At a court house, you just have to show up and the judge will marry you in 5 minutes.

Also most churches view marriage as something more than just a contract. This means that 2 people are physically bonded into one. It’s like two cells joining together into one cell. So separating that cell back into 2 cells is extremely difficult and painful.¹ The church kind of don’t like it when their members get divorced.

In a more secular marriage, all you have between the husband and wife is a piece of paper saying they’re married. It’s still messy and hurts a lot, but it’s easy to do.

By the way, Christian couples get divorced just as much as non-Christian ones. So I guess it’s easy for everyone.

What Was My Original Point?

I propose California to change all marriages into “Civil Unions.” And for the religous people who want to remain “married” can do so via their religious institution. So maybe in 20 years, couples will say, “we’re in a civil union.” Or if they’re religious, they’ll say they’re married.

1. I’m not a Biologist so don’t nitpick here. I have no idea how cells work [↩]

According to Malcom Galdwell’s new book Outliers, it says the mastery of skill takes 10,000 hours of practice. I haven’t read that book, but I’m sure it means 10,000 hours of correct, focused practice. That’s such a de-motivator. It seems so overwhelming.

This means you need to practice something 5 hours a day every day for 5 years to master it. 5 years is not a long time, but 5 hours a day every day is. People can get burnt out from that. I guess that’s why some people take 10, 20, or even 30+ years to master something.

I don’t feel like I have that type of time. It’s probably because I was raised in the instant-gratification culture of America. Or maybe I’m not disciplined enough. But I know people who have great focus. I envy them.

That’s who I was, literally. We spontaneously thought up this costume idea before spontaneously thinking of going to the Big Wicked at The Compound. So we bought some Got 2 Be Glue hair glue, some tanning lotion, some accessories, and went as a couple of douches.

Douchebags travel with friends

We had one problem: our tanning lotion didn’t tan us so we didn’t look quite as orange as we hoped for. So in the club, we looked like regular dudes.

We should’ve used orange paint and painted ourselves. Then it would’ve been funnier. It’s okay. Next year, I already know what I’m going to wear as a costume. It’s gonna be BIG.

The popular costumes for this year was the Joker (of course), and the Jabbawockeez. I swear, it looked like every Filipino dude had a Jabbawockeez costume. For girls, it was the standard affair. I saw a lot more sexy cop costumes though.

The club itself was okay. I’m getting way to old for this crap. There were cool costumes and sexy girls, but I wasn’t feeling it at all. I think it was because I wasn’t expecting to go to a club, and it was a last minute thing.

Or maybe because I’m am old. Sigh, I wish I was 23 again when I could stay all up all night partying.