Day 53 – Lunch at The Cheesecake Factory

His breath reeked of fish.

It was awesome. I’ve never been to The Cheesecake Factory although I’ve passed many over the nine weeks that I’ve been in the States. If you haven’t been to The Cheesecake Factory yet and you live in the States… then that’s alright, you don’t have to go. I just highly recommend it, that’s all. I had some enchiladas with rice and black beans. It sounded like the perfect meal to get at a restaurant like the Cheesecake Factory.

So Joe and I met with this elderly woman who works with the LAPD and with children and with all kinds of social entrepreneurs around the globe. It was inspiring to hear her stories about the orphans who were rescued from homelessness and malnourishment in countries like Brazil and Indonesia.

She also gave us a book called The Creature from Jekyll Island, which I’m super excited to read because it’s about economics. I’m really interested in finances because the second (or maybe the third) novel of our series will be about the global economic system. I mean, I’ve researched quite a bit and read a lot of books about it, but TCfJK will probably be the best read out of all of them. Or so I’ve heard. We’ll see.

Other than that, Joe and I have been writing our novel and we’ve made quite a bit of progress developing an additional character we thought we might add to the story because she contributes a very important aspect of the plot. It’ll be a little tough, though, because Joe is flying to New York tomorrow and I’ll be flying up to Seattle on the same day, so we won’t be able to write this book together in person, which will be a bit difficult. But thank technology for Skype and Facebook. We’ll figure it out.

Day 40 and the morning of day 41 – Work Hard Play Hard

Today was a day of work and I’m excited for it to be over so that I can party. And by party I mean sit in a corner with Dean Koontz’s novel, Intensity, and read the hell out of it. I haven’t read any fiction in a while. I guess the last time I read fiction was Dan Brown’s Inferno, which I finished reading about two weeks ago.

I discussed some education things with Amanda and Joe. I also created an infographic and helped build a website and wrote some content for it and I’m still working on creating the website logo. So there was a lot of sitting involved in all of this, and I can feel my body just aching to play football or go for a 10K run. Haven’t done that in months.

I still can’t get over the beauty of the campus here at Pepperdine. Maybe I should’ve gone to college. Hahaha yeah right. But honestly. Where would I be if I had gone to college after high school? I’d probably be sitting in my college room right now, downing a bottle of orange juice and gnawing at a granola bar while weeping over the lost opportunities of working with amazing businesses around the globe.

So at 10 PM we drove from Woodland Hills to Pasadena with Amanda. We fell asleep at around midnight and woke up at 3:20 AM in order to get ready to drop off Amanda at LAX. So we got in the car and Joe drove to the airport and we said goodbye to our good friend “Manders” and proceeded to drive to Long Beach. There, we parked the car and walked to the beach at roughly 4:12 AM. We decided to build a little mount of sand and lay there for a bit, attempting to sleep for a few hours. Unfortunately, we both got cold and had to retreat back to our car and catch up on sleep. So that’s where we slept for about two hours, from 6 to 8 AM.

Now Joe and I are at Starbucks somewhere in Long Beach, waiting to meet up with a date. Joe’s date. I don’t get dates because I don’t have a glorious English accent like Joe does. I’m enjoying an iced caffé mocha, which is the absolute bomb. I’m also watching a homeless man engaging in a semi-violent discussion with… himself, it seems. There’s nobody around him. Oh well. I wonder what he’s talking about. I’ll go ask him. Brb.