Name: Hank Reads from 'An Absolutely Remarkable Thing'
Uploaded: 2020-03-30T04:04:42.000Z
Duration: 19 min 54 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Not everybody's gonna know this, but we have a tradition here in the bottom of the channel.

Adverbs of degree

When one of us has a book come out so far, it's just been you into a video reading the first chapter of the book.

This stretches all the way back to paper towns.

Nine years ago, I discovered by searching our channel.

There's a few really great things about this one.

It's exempt from the four minute rule, so I could just go on for as long as I want.

Right now, too, it's just reading a book, so it's pretty easy.

A little bit of a cop out there was the whole writing the book part, which turns out to be labor intensive.

You get to tell people about the book, which, theoretically and indefinitely in my case, is something you want to do because you're proud of it and you like it and you think people will like it too, and hopefully also will be useful and enjoyable.

Generally in life can I be useful and enjoyable.

That's just like what I say to my son every morning.

Basically not in words, but in actions I may have got to the meaning of life here.

So do you want to hear the first chapter of my book?

If not, go away as read by me and not Kristen, See who does the audiobook and who is fantastic.

I am aware that you're here for an epic tale of intrigue and mystery and adventure, a near death and actual death.

There's a bunch of curse words in my book, and there will be some in this chapter that I'm about to re.

Look, I'm aware that you here for an epic tale of intrigue and mystery and adventure and near death and actual death.

But in order to get to that, unless you want to skip to Chapter 13 I'm not your boss.

You're gonna have to deal with the fact that I April may, in addition to being one of the most important things that has ever happened to the human race and also a woman in her twenties who has made some mistakes long first sentence.

I'm also in the wonderful position of having you by the short hairs.

I have the story and so I get to tell it to you the way I want.

That means you get to understand me and not just my story.

So don't be surprised if there's some drama.

I'm gonna attempt to commit this account honestly, but also admit to a significant pro me bias.

If you get anything out of this ideally, it won't be you being Maur or less on one side or the other, but simply understanding that I am or at least waas human.

And that was very much feeling only human.

As I dragged my tired ass down 23rd Street at 2:45 a.m. After working a 16 hour day at a startup that, thanks to an aggressively shitty contract I signed, will remain nameless.

Going to art school might seem like a terrible financial decision, but really, that's only true if you have to take out gobs and gobs of student loans to fund your hoity toity education.

My parents were successful running a business, providing equipment to small and medium sized dairy farms.

Like the things that you hook up to the cows to get the milk out, they sold and distributed them.

It was a good business, good enough that I wouldn't have had a lot of debt if I'd gone to a state school.

So after jumping from major to major advertising, fine art photography illustration and finally settling on the mundane but at least useful BF and design, I took the first job that would keep me in New York and out of my old bedroom in my parent's house in Northern California.

And that was a job at a doomed startup, funded by the endless well of rich people who could only dream the most boring dream.

A rich person condemn dream, being even more rich.

Of course, working at a startup means you're part of the family, and so when things go wrong or when deadlines fly past, or when an investor has a hissy fit, or just because you don't get out of work until three in the morning, which, honestly, I hated.

I hated it because the company's Time management act was a dumb idea and didn't actually help people.

I hated it because I knew I was just doing it for money, and I hated it because they asked the staff to treat it like their whole life rather than like a day job, which meant I didn't have any time to spare toe work on personal projects.

But I was using my degree doing actual graphic design and getting paid enough to afford rent.

Less than one year out of school might work.

Environment was close to technically criminal, and I paid half my income to sleep in the living room of a one bedroom apartment.

My bed was in the living room, but I mostly slept in the bedroom, Maya's room.

We were roommates, and April from the past would like me to be very clear about that.

What's the difference between those two things?

Well, mostly that we weren't dating when we moved in together.

Hooking up with your roommate is convenient But it's also a little confusing when you live together through much of college before finally hooking up and now have been a couple for more than a year.

If you happen to already live together, when does the should we move in together?

Question, come up well for Maya and made the question was, Can we please move that secondhand mattress out of the living room so that we can sit on a couch when we watch Netflix?

And thus far, my answer had been Absolutely not.

We're just roommates who are dating, which is why our living room still had a bed in it.

Anyway, back to the middle of the night that fateful January evening, this shitty app had to get a new release into the APP store by the next week, and I had been waiting for final approvals on some user interface changes and whatever you don't care, it was boring work B s.

Instead of coming in early, I stayed late, which has always been my preference.

My brain was sucked entirely drive from trying to interpret cryptic guidance from bosses who couldn't tell the Raster from a vector, so I checked out of the building.

It was a co working space, not even actually least offices, and walked the three minutes to the subway station.

And then my MetroCard got rejected for no reason.

I had another one sitting on my desk at work, and I wasn't precisely sure how much money I had in my checking account.

So it seemed like I should walk the three blocks back to the office just to be safe.

So across 23rd and a taxicab Blair's, its horn like I shouldn't be in the crosswalk.

I turn and head back to the office, and immediately I see it.

As I approach, it becomes clear that it is a really, really exceptional sculpture.

I mean, it's awesome, but it's also a little bit New York Awesome.

You know, how do I explain how I feel about it?

Well, in New York City, people spend 10 years making something amazing happens, something that captures the essence of an idea so perfectly that suddenly the world becomes 10 times clearer.

It's beautiful and it's powerful, and someone devoted a huge piece of their life to it.

The local news does a story about it, and everyone goes neat.

And then tomorrow we forget about it in favor of some other absolutely perfect and remarkable thing.

That doesn't mean that those things are on wonderful or not unique.

It's just that there are a lot of people doing a lot of amazing things, so eventually you get a little jaded.

A 10 foot tall transformer wearing a suit of samurai armor.

It's huge barrel chest lifted up to the sky, a good four or five feet above my head.

It stood there in the middle of the sidewalk, full of energy and power.

Turn and fix that empty, regal stare on me.

But instead it just stood there, silent and almost scornful, like the world didn't deserve its attention.

In the street light, the metal was a patchwork of black as night Matt and mirror reflective silver, and it was clearly metal, not some spray painted cardboard costly thing.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Hank Reads from 'An Absolutely Remarkable Thing'

awesome

barely

convince

dumb