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| a day in the life of jerry chiwell, i realized that my work hours are too long.
i remembered when taking the job, i was told that I would be working 12 hours a day and no weekends. hmmm not exactly true. i average a little over 14 hrs a day and i've started to come in on weekends. hmm not good.
i strongly believe that since you are young only once, really the best time to enjoy life is when you are young. there are tons of people i want to chill with, tons of places in tokyo and elsewhere that I want to go, tons of books i want to read, movies i want to see, etc, etc. I actually regret studying too much in high school and college. When I actually do get to have fun it's really great but it seems like that's only going to be limited to once or twice a week. But I mean, wow weekends and vacation can be really great when you have practically unlimited spending money and you're in an exciting city like tokyo with lots of yummy food, lots of cool and convenient technology (cell phone etc.) and lots of cute girls who are really impressed when they meet you.
but seriously just 1. work, and 2. one girl can keep me incredibly busy.
So what is a day in the life of Jerry Chi like?
6:20AM wake up from alarm clock. turn on the TV to Bloomberg (24/7 finance channel), realize that it's freezing cold and turn on the heater. go back to sleep for 5 minutes while half-listening to Bbrg.
6:25AM get out of bed. throw on suit. try not to trip over stuff on the ground.
6:50AM load Nikkei Shimbun (like japanese wall street journal) podcast onto Ipod.
6:55AM turn off heater and Bloomberg TV. leave house and start listening to Nikkei Shimbun.
6:56AM stop at convenience store and buy onigiri or tofu and drinks with caffeine.
7:00AM sprint to catch train, almost getting crushed by the train door (this happens fairly often)
7:10AM arrive at work, hoping that boss is not there yet.
7:11AM get more tea
7:12AM eat breakfast at desk while reading news. think of how hard it is to earn money in such an illiquid market. (credit default swap flow trading)
8:00AM brokers start saying "good morning" over phone box
8:20AM about half of the company has come to work
8:30AM morning meeting
11:10AM market goes on lunch break. run/elevator downstairs to convenience store, buy a bento lunch and run/elevator back up.
11:15AM eat lunch at desk while working
3:30PM start to calculate profit/loss for the the day
5:10PM run/elevator downstairs to convenience store, buy a bento dinner and run/elevator back up. food starts to run out around this time, because this convenience store is not 24/7 like most convenience stores.
5:30PM eat dinner at desk.
7:30PM about half of the company has gone home already
8:30PM look around and realize that almost everyone has gone home
9:30PM go home. listen to rest of Nikkei Shimbnu podcast on the way.
9:45PM reach home. turn on Bloomberg TV
10:00 do push-ups and sit-ups while listening to Bloomberg TV. shower.
11:30PM turn off Bloomberg TV. go to sleep
you would probably think that I would gain a lot of weight with a lifestyle like this. actually, no. i did a health check recently and realized that I've lost about 25 pounds since half a year ago. wow. however it's true that i try really hard to lose weight. i never use dressing on salads and I eat tofu plain. often my meals are vegetarian the only meat is fish. I take stairs when I can. I treat shopping bags like dumbbells. i receive positive comments from cute girls so i guess it's worth it. well i suppose not just comments.
another thing I realized is how a lot of japanese guys are too lazy to do nice things for their girlfriends. obviously this is crass overgeneralization. but lots of times if i do something nice for a japanese girl, she'll say "oh wow a japanese guy would never do this for me." it seems that in japan there is a huge demand for and huge shortage of nice guys and that is where I come in. there is also a huge shortage of tall guys, buff guys, young guys with decent salaries (new grad from top university going into a top japanese firm still gets paid shit, in japan young = poor except for foreign firms) you have to realize that lots of these new grads at japanese firms are working even longer hours than me while getting paid shit. like 20k USD per year for the first year at a top japanese securiites firm. japanese people are workaholics in general.
anyway, my life has started to focus on one girl in particular, more on that later...
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| in Japanwell, how does it feel to finally live in Japan?
Well, it's everything I ever dreamed of.
I'll be heading to shanghai from Dec 30 to Jan 3, since my mom moved there in september.
I'm almost done souping up my crib. LCD TV's are awesome. maybe eventually i'll get around to posting pictures of it on my xanga. oh yeah I have color-changing LED's attached to my main light on the ceiling.
it seems like i've been living here all my life. (i've actually lived in Japan for 11 months, adding up all the times I've come to Japan) besides the fact that my name isn't japanese I feel like I basically fit right in to the lifestyle and everything. Many other foreigners still feel like foreigners (and suck at Japanese) after years and years living in Japan, but Tokyo totally feels like home now.
work is cool. I'm workgin with my boss to trade credit default swaps, across the whole japanese market (all sectors incl. govt.) so i'm learning a lot about the entire japanese economy and market in general and companies specifically. this is interesting stuff.
As for my past in the U.S.... well of course I miss my friends and certain aspects of Cupertino and Stanford, but overall I really don't miss the U.S. nor do I miss or care to think about my past. I'm looking forward, not back.
A problem is that with the long work hours and the tons of stuff to study and the events and parties and girls and everything, I am pretty damn busy enough just with Japan. Do I really have extra time to think or learn about the U.S., Taiwan, Asia, the rest of the world (besides economics/finance)? I was planning to start learning Korean on the weekends but this idea is goign to have to wait. I hope that wait won't be forever.
The thing is, though, I realized that I could have a totally fulfilling and happy life even if I only focused on Japan. I mean, all I really need to do to be happy is
1. be good at my job (which happens to be highly lucrative)
2. marry the girl of my dreams
3. stay healthy
it's a much shorter list than I realized.
given that
1. my job is in Japan, and my skill set is highly focused towards doing finance in Japan
2. the current girl of my dreams is Japanese, and if there is another girl of my dreams in the future, she will probably be Japanese, if not Taiwanese.
3. people in Japan are healthier in general than people in other countries.
Wow, it looks like I am stuck for good in this country. but then again I already knew that. don't tell my mom.
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| owning myself and getting owned a lot1. a couple days ago I was convicted of a SECURITIES TRADING LAW VIOLATION for doing margin trading of an ETF. ETF's are not included in the compliance policy but margin trading is restricted for pro traders by the Japanese Securities Dealers Association (JSDA). Aargh hella owned myself.
2. Today I realized that the JSDA EXAM (like series 7 in the US) I THOUGHT WAS TODAY WAS ACTUALLY YESTERDAY. yes all my bosses are going to kill me.
3. Yesterday my boss kept saying "i'm expecting a lot of you!" many times so finally I said "please don't expect too much" and then he was like "wtf r u saying? (nani itten dayo!!)"
4. my body is getting owned. the credit derivatives team in tokyo is crazy and they all work until like midnight.
5. i can't like register or apply for anything. i don't have a permanent address in japan and i don't have one in the U.S. either because my mom just sold our house. yeah so it's like umm...how do i get a bank account and cell phone and apartment and stuff?
however my serviced apartment has like digital cable with four channels constantly playing music videos, so i guess it was worth it to come to this country.
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| LET ME GO TO JAPAN!!my flight to japan was delayed a third time by my boss in order to stay in hong kong and help for an australian bond issue. my flight might be delayed a fourth time. did I not go to a fukin JAPANESE career forum and apply for a job in JAPAN to trade JAPANESE SECURITIES??
btw everyone watch this korean movie called "the art of seduction" it's the best romantic comedy i've seen since My Sassy Girl, and i'm not just talking about korean movies, i mean ANY country's movies. especially jonathan hwang should watch it.
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| korean hostess in hong kongwell it's the end of my third week at Barclays Capital in HK. HK is cool but can't wait to go to Japan (August). work is challenging and fun and the people are nice.
So, I went to a hostess bar (in case u dont know what that is, it is a bar where you pay for pretty girls to sit and talk and drink with you) for the first time ever, about 2 weeks ago with my Japanese colleague, who was visiting the Hong Kong office from Japan. My boss told me to show him a good time, so I took him to dinner, and then he insisted that we go to a hostess bar, so I asked around and we ended up at a karaoke hostess bar completely run by Japanese-speaking Korean girls. (remember that this is in Hong Kong... kind of weird eh?) so yeah i had a pretty good time. it was about $350 US dollars for 3 hours.
One of the Korean girls, Mieun, apparently thought I was cool or something and gave me her personal (non-work) contact info. She was pretty damn cute. And she smoked. A lot. I don't know why but I am really attracted to girls who smoke, maybe i'm fuked up. Having very few friends in Hong Kong, I e-mailed her a couple days later asking if she wanted to chill, just to chat, typing english and japanese. Since she is probably more than 10 years older than me (altho she looked 25) I wasn't thinking of doing anything other than hanging out as friends. She replied in romanized japanese full of spelling errors, saying sure. Apparently she can speak Japanese well but she can't read/write/type. I was like haha ur japanese is cute.
two days later she called me at 3:30AM (on a friday morning), wanting to go drinking and have sex. I was like WTF do u know what time it is, but sure I'll go drink with you, but probably not sex. (I am not morally above hooking up with random girls...but it was a little too sudden...) there was a woman screaming at her in korean in the background of the call. it turned out that something shitty had happened to her but she wouldn't tell me what. So when I showed up to meet her in Lan Kwai Fong (bar/club district of Hong Kong), she was hanging all over me, and also kissed me on the cheek. I didn't really realize it at the time but afterwards I concluded that yeah she must have been really dying to have sex, with anyone, just to vent. I bought her a beer and we drank and she smoked and then we went home separately.
Saturday Night, two days later, I took her to a very expensive Japanese restaurant and we walked around Tsim Sha Tsui and Mong Kok. She was not at all what I would have expected of a hostess (no offense to hostesses). She was intelligent, well-brought-up, considerate, spoke some Chinese and English in addition to Japanese and Korean, used the internet a lot, and knew quite a lot about most of whatever we were talking about. Now that I think of it, in some senses for her being a hostess is a pretty cool job...you sit and drink, sing karaoke, smoke, chat, have fun, and then get paid by the hour like a lawyer. I mean $350 for 3 hours...even after you take off the money for rent and other expenses that's still a lot. I mean you might get sick of it after a while but that's quite a lot of money.
After Mong Kok we went to Lan Kwai Fong again because most other places were closed. We went to maybe 6 different bars/clubs again with me paying everything. We had some pretty interesting conversation, and then went home separately sometime after 4am. our conversation that night was maybe 80% about korea and japan.
I have this compulsive habit of spending money recklessly on cute girls. Like, I can be saving like a couple cents at the supermarket, and then blowing hundreds of USD on a girl in a night. If Mieun wanted me to blow a thousand on her I would have. I even like spending money on girls who I have no intention of hitting on and who I know I'll never see again. I mean, besides this, in Hong Kong I've spent almost no money except for transportation and food. it's like, i don't really need anything.
I realized, this time, how much I liked this girl. I kind of fell for her. This is kind of messed up considering I met her in a hostess club and that, if I were to make the best possible educated guess of her age it would be maybe 33 (based partly on things she would say, such as, oh I did that like 10 years ago back when I was young). Maybe it was while watching her smoke. She must have smoked 8 cigarettes that night. She was intelligent, nice, had class, was chill, was fun to hang out with and had long flowing slightly-curled permed hair. And she actually knew about alot of the random stuff I mentioned. She even read Slam Dunk and Murakami Haruki's Norwegian Wood (in Korean) and watched Meteor Garden before. I also realized how much I wanted to hook up with her. Of course, she was in a normal mood now compared to two days ago, so she was no longer desperately dying for sex. Yeah so my chance was gone. Oh well. I think for a long time I will be wondering whether or not I should regret not having taken up her offer.
argh, I hate it when the girl is a much stronger drinker than I am. Yeah, I guess I am stronger than most asian girls, but some girls are crazy and can drink quarts and still be fine.
back to studying credit derivatives.
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