When life has situations that aren't pleasant, you must appreciate what's already in front of you and progress with your intended goals. I've always been one to focus on happiness, self-realization, and reaching a physical potential with myself. But at the same time, I'm pretty stubborn when it comes to certain things, and maybe that has acted against via karma with my unfortunate disappointments in the past which has delayed my college graduation.

But I'm through it and will always persevere through the hard times. The beginning of this semester and year was really hard for me and honestly don't know where the last 4 months of my life have taken me but I'm glad it happened. This last semester of school I've really became closer to some fellow kinesiology classmates that are for sure my brodies for life..haha. (FYI : bro + buddy = brody) . I finally found more time for myself to train, exercise, and be there a little bit more for my family. Being an older brother and uncle has always humbled me to being a mentor and positive role model for my younger sibling, and even older siblings- I'm the first person in my family to finish college and it feels great! Even though it took me a long time, the fact still remains: I DID IT! Bachelor of Science Degree - Exercise Science Concentration (aka Pre-Physical Therapy)

Now I can't wait for the summer. I feel like so much weight is finally off my shoulders and I can just focus on me. This summer all I have planned really is teaching myself portuguese through books and CD's. Although I will be partying up like a beast this weekend, monday I'm going straight to Barnes & Noble 4-5 days a week after I hit up the gym from capoeira or mma training and learn as much portuguese as much and as fast as I can.

In the Fall I will turn in my packet for the Army to become a Field Medical Assistant/Platoon Leader.

And after this week I will see how soon I will be going to Korea! I want to go to Seoul to hang out with my bredren Zumbi! He's awesome and is one of my highly respected Cordao De Ouro Capoeira brother. He told me before that all I need to do is find a flight out to see him and he'll take care of the rest. Well, I'm going to find out what dates are best suiting for me and I will be taking a week vacation from everything and go up to Korea for a week. I just have to get my plans straight Zumba! But don't trip, Logan's comin up and we're gonna tear up those reggae clubs! haha

For now.. I'm going to enjoy this week with a big ass smile on my face because Saturday morning at 8:30am my commencement starts!

PEACE

Logan C.D.O.

you'll only pay attention to 150 people if they're worth it...

The Magic of 150
Your brain is hard wired to pay attention to about 150 people. Try to have a relationship with any more than that, and your life will turn to pure crap. Just ask the Military, Gore-Tex, or Krippendorf's tribe. They'll all tell you the same thing. One fifty is the way to go. They've known for hundreds of years that people work best in groups of 150 or less. Now it's your turn.
The human cortex, responsible for complex thought and reasoning, is overgrown in humans when compared to other mammals. Scientists have argued for years about why this is the case.
One theory holds that our brains evolved because our primate ancestors began to gather food in more complex ways. They began eating fruit instead of grasses and leaves. This involved traveling long distances to find food, and required each species to maintain a complex mental map in order to keep track of fruit trees. More brainpower might have been needed to determine if a fruit was ripe, or to discern proper methods for peeling fruit or cracking nuts.

The problem with this theory is that if one tries to match brain size with the eating habits of primates, it doesn't work. Some small-brained monkeys are eating fruit and maintaining complex maps and some larger brained primates are eating leaves. What does work, apparently, is group size. If one examines any species of primate, the larger their neocortex, the larger the average size of the group they live with.
Anthropologist Robin Dunbar has done some of the most interesting research in this area. Dunbar's argument is that as brains evolve, they become larger in order to handle the unique complexities of larger social groups. Humans socialize the largest social groups because we have the largest cortex. Dunbar has developed an equation, which works for most primates, in which he plugs in what he calls the neocortex ratio of a particular species - the size of the neocortex relative to the size of the brain - and the equation gives us the maximum expected group size for each species. For humans, the max group size is 147.8, or about 150. This figure seems to represent the maximum amount of people that we can have a real social relationship with - knowing who another human is and how they relate to us.

Dunbar has gone through anthropological literature and found that the number 150 pops up over and over again. For example, he looked at 21 different hunger-gatherer societies around the world and found that the average number of people in each village was 148.4.
The same pattern holds true for military organization. Over the years, through trial and error, military planners have arrived at a rule of thumb for the size of a functional fighting unit - 200 men. They have realized that it is quite difficult to make any larger a group than this to function as a unit without complicated hierarchies and rules and regulations and formal measures to insure loyalty and unity within the group. With a group of 150 or so, formalities are not necessary. Behavior can be controlled on the basis of personal loyalties and direct man-to-man contacts. With larger groups, this seems impossible.

Further is the religious group known as the Hutterites, who for hundreds of years, through trial and error, have realized that the maximum size for a colony should be, low and behold, 150 people. They've been following this rule for centuries. Every time a colony approaches this number, the colony is divided into two separate colonies. They have found that once a group becomes larger than that, "people become strangers to one another." At 150, the Hutterites believe, something happens that somehow changes the community seemingly overnight. At 150 the colony with spontaneously begin dividing into smaller "clans." When this happens a new colony is formed.
Another good example of our hard wired social limits is Gore Associates, a privately held multimillion-dollar company responsible for creating Gore-Tex fabric and all sorts of other high tech computer cables, filter bags, semiconductors, pharmaceutical, and medical products. What is most unique about this company is that each company plant is no larger than 150.

When constructing a plant, they put 150 spaces in the parking lot, and when people start parking on the grass, they know it's time for another plant. Each plant works as a group. There are no bosses. No titles. Salaries are determined collectively. No organization charts, no budgets, no elaborate strategic plans. Wilbert Gore - the late founder of the company, found through trial and error that 150 employees per plant was most ideal. "We found again and again that things get clumsy at a hundred and fifty," he told an interviewer some years ago.

Take a lesson from this. If you are engaged in a large enterprise or are planning to work for one, realize that large groups rapidly reduce the efficiency of an operation. If each department is separated, especially if there are hundreds or thousands of people involved, complex systems of organizations will be required to keep everyone in check. Peer pressure is much more powerful than the somehow vague concept of a boss or punishment. People will work only hard enough not to get fired in a very large group, but will live up to the expectations of their peers in smaller groups where they have a personal relationship with each of their co-workers. Of course, a small group size is not by any means a guarantee of success. Small enterprises fail all the time. It's just a concept -- an idea to keep in the back of your mind as you vegetate in that basement cubicle.

R.I.M Dunbar, "Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates," Journal of Human Evolution (1992), vol. 20, pp. 469-493.

to LBD

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHfJr3HajZE&feature=related

I Love You Mom !

My mom has always wanted to see me do well in my life. I thank her so much for that. I know I haven't been the perfect son these past years but I always try to make my mom proud of me for the things I've accomplished and love to do. My mom is hardworking even though sometimes she seems too busy for certain things. But my mom works full-time, supervising the casino floors at Cache Creek 5 and even a couple time a month 6 days a week. On her spare time she loves to just watch her TFC shows, cook some of the best filipino and other asian foods ever, play mah jong with her friends once a week now, and babysit her grand kids twice a week! One thing I love about my mom that I think is really cute is that my mom and dad watch tayong dalawa and a couple of other TFC soap opera shows, and my parents drink their margaritas and tecate, and watch those shows for hours. They get into the show and my mom translates everything for my dad. That's hella cute!

My dad now knows the characters and gets into the soap opera drama even though he has no clue what the actors are saying. But yeah my mom stays up literally every night and cooks lunch and most of the time dinner for our family the next day. She'll stay up 'til 1-2am just to make sure my dad, brother, me, and other brother and sister in law come home to cooked food. I make her kitchen duties easier on her by cleaning the kitchen and keeping the living room clean as much as I can. She really is beautiful. Whenever I see my mom at family parties just socializing and smiling, I can't help but do the same because I know my mom is happy with her life and although our family isn't perfect, whose family isn't? Honestly, for every bit of encouragement, discouragement, disappointment, appreciation, and love that my mom has given me, I know that she is a beautiful person inside and out. She always tells me she just wants to see all of her kids be successful and happy with their lives, have a nice home to stay in, and not be in debt. Once I give my mom grand kids, she said she could live happy for the rest of her life. Her retirement dream is to move back to the Philippines with my dad and see the rest of her famiy in Pampanga.

Thank you Mom for everything you've given me, taught me,

You've always made me proud for always being yourself and still being able to be a good mother who just wants to see people to well in their lives. I will always carry that belief with me and pass it on everywhere I go.

I love you MOM!

cheek bones

I walked into the kitchen this morning to make breakfast and my mom almost had a look of disgust and said " my gosh mijo, you're losing so much weight in your face, your cheek bones are sticking out..what are you doing?". I laughed and said "Ok, Christmas time you said i was getting fat and my face was getting chubby, now I'm losing too much? what do you want mom?!" haha. I am proud that I literally lost 30lbs since Christmas time! I went from 192 lbs to 162 lbs! It's weird to notice but I need not only new jeans because they're all too big on me, but I need a new belt. What's up with that? everytime I run to class my pants fall down and I have to hold them up like a gangster running away from the cops. Eh well, time to hit the gym. My left leg is still oddly banged up. I think I bruised my lateral collateral ligament (LCL). is that possible? when I sleep on it, i feel a radiating pain on the side of my knee, but when I stand up, walk, run, squat, it feels ok. Maybe there's a nerve impingement? if this keeps up for the next couple days, I'm going to make an appointment at kaiser..

SHOGUN vs MACHIDA 2...I say shogun wins!! what about you?!?!

attention seekers

there are mental disorders marked by continual attention-seeking. The American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR) suggests that people with dramatic, emotional, or erratic behavior and thoughts that interfere markedly with day-to-day functioning might be suffering from a personality disorder.

someone who seems to crave and create drama and attention might be experiencing symptoms of histrionic personality disorder (HPD). Only mental health professionals can diagnose this when there is clear evidence that five of the following symptoms occur in various contexts and seem to have begun in early adulthood:

experiences discomfort when not the center of attention
often interacts in inappropriately sexual or seductive ways
displays shallow and rapidly shifting emotions
places extreme value on personal appearance and uses appearance to draw attention to self
speaks with little detail while conveying vague ideas
displays dramatic and theatrical expression of emotion
is easily influenced by others and seems suggestible
thinks interpersonal relationships are more intimate than they really are

You can imagine that people who meet criteria for HPD may experience some negative reactions from other people based on how they behave. Yet, many people with HPD lead relatively successful lives. The problem is that they seem to fall apart when faced with situations where they perceive rejection from others and especially when romantic relationships sour. In fact, break-ups or instances of social rejection often push people with HPD into depression.

Sometimes you wonder what happens to these people when you actually don't give them the attention they seek. I've seen some people crack and try to play mind games by making you feel bad for something that's not even your fault; this blame calls for drama and attention that these types of people tend to want. There are some people in this world that actually cannot get enough attention because of social issues, insecurites and other psychological factors that may be hidden within the person that may have been caused by adolescent problems like family issues. Sometimes when the parents are not there to show compassion, attention, affection, love, and needed guidance to grow as a mature man or woman, these people are very likely to have some attention seeking problems. Some tend to thrive for attention just to stir up drama between people when it is clearly unnecessary. Parent's lack of discipline, morals, love and attention will strongly affect these kinds of people.

When these people grow up with the lack of discipline, morals, love and attention these people tend to seek it from other people. This can be a good thing and a bad thing for the person depending on his or her ability to balance out the 4 things listed above. In relationships old and new, this attention seeker still carries on old habits because it is very hard to change one's values over night. And sometimes you just need to let these people do what they do best: learn the hard way, accept whether or not they get the attention they seek for, realize when they're being irrational only after they feel like an asshole (if person actually let's their pride down for one second to think outside from another POV), love others quickly because of the lack of attention they may not get at home from the loved one they thought should love them back with the proper attention and affection. In some cases where these people are a lost cause and are unable to realize when good help, love, appreciation and affection is right in front of their eyes..ya just gotta say "fuck it, life goes on with or without you"

And my life will be just fine and even better without these types of people. It's less stressful that way.