The Week of November 26th - December 2nd

 

Introductory words according to Thomas, Co-Founder, Sacrificial Goat, and Creative Director of Raven Vanguard

Today, we graciously bring you another hijacked Weekly Once-over from a virginal contributing observer, our good friend, Mike Hungerford. Mike, like Bhakti Sharma before him, freely accepted our invitation to speak prophetic personal words of wisdom for the betterment of humankind.

Also, same as Bhakti, the words, and thoughts expressed here today are Mike’s alone without any cajoling from @ravenvanguard. Moreover, Mike’s observations, also like Bhakti’s, are passed on to you without any filtering or censorship from us.

Words of Warning, should anyone feel the least bit put off, chagrined, or disillusioned by Mike’s musings, especially any lawyers representing @Instagram, #Instagram, or Jupiter Shop Channel of Japan, please send all correspondence of any kind directly to Mike. He carries liability insurance for making disparaging and defamatory statements; we do not.

So, who is this Michael Hungerford anyway? Let’s start by mentioning who and what he is not; Mike, setting his Wife’s accusations completely aside, is not a hobo, homeless man, or vagabond. If not that, then who the hell is he? Well, Mike, as he is happy to tell you, comes from a many-centuries-old gene pool of handsome and well-dressed men. Mike is also a marvelous dancer, perhaps the Vaslav Nijinski or Rudolph Nureyev of his generation. This might also partly explain Mike’s exuberance for Sergei Diaghilev and Igor Stravinsky. Mike is a successful lawyer and businessman, a loving Husband, Father, and Son. He loves music, literature, travel, David Lynch, online anime pornography, as well as being a closet Furry Fan. He is a man for all seasons, a man’s man. Without further adieu, here’s Mike:

Words according to Mike Hungerford, People-Mover, Business Executive, Board Chairman, and the husband of Mrs. Hungerford, and no connection whatsoever to Raven Vanguard

Will 2019 be better than 2018?  How was 2018?

Pros:

Taught Ella how to ride a bike.  Was proud of Dylan for learning to swim.  Excited that Remi learned English.  

Cons:

I’ve been trying to learn Spanish for like ten years (if downloading the app counts as trying).  It only took Remi two years, and English is supposed to be way harder to learn. 

They say that the best way to learn a language is to have a boyfriend/girlfriend that speaks the language.  Maybe if my Wife spoke Spanish, I’d finally learn.  Although, Remi didn’t have any boyfriend/girlfriend, so I’m not sure that would help.

Last week I figured out why so many people suffer from anxiety:  Instagram stories!  Has anyone else heard of these?  I spent a few minutes “browsing” through some with my Wife before we went to dinner.  Throughout dinner, I felt like I just got off that boat in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. That’s when the lightbulb went off. 

For those of you that aren’t familiar with Instagram Stories ©, let me explain:  they are short, poor quality videos with tons of text overlay (different sizes, colors, typefaces, orientations).  In Instagram Stories ©, people talk about their “favorite” products and why you’d love them.  It’s like a four-year-old took over the controls of the Japanese home shopping network.

I’m not against being sold stuff.  The first time I met Raven Vanguard, they were selling me stuff (they were invited) but now they are good friends. They went from vendors to friendors.  IMHO this is better than the other way – friendor to vendor.  You know what I mean:  that friend who asks you to buy electricity, face cream, prepared meals, vitamins, a beach body. 

You can tell where you stand in the new pecking order by what type of “gig” your friends have. Like if your friends are selling multi-level marketing products, then you’re in one place. If they drive for Uber, then you’re in another. 

For a millennial, I met a lot of new people this year. Good ones too. Many of them IRL. 

It’s hard meeting people when you’re a millennial (Google© it). Like it or not, Millennials are responsible for fixing big problems, like climate change and social justice so sometimes there isn’t much time for meeting people. 

One effective way of meeting people IRL is to do cool stuff. If you can’t find cool stuff to do, try this: introduce yourself to some gallery owners, find an abandoned school building, take it over, put on an experiential art show and get a lot of people to come. Many of the people I met this year, I met by doing this.

I read a book called, The Discovery of France this year. It said that back in the 18th and 19th centuries, people that lived in Paris used to go on vacation to the south of France. They’d use the same roads Julius Caesar built 2000 years earlier. On the other hand, people who lived in rural villages basically never went more than five miles away from where they were born. They’ve found all these journal entries from Parisian tourists about seeing their friends, coincidentally, hundreds of miles from Paris. They’d just nonchalantly mention it like they weren’t even surprised. The historians thought this was odd but considering there were only a few 2000-year-old roads to travel on it makes sense.