Politics

As we head into the big 2008 political season, I think back to my brief venture into politics. I'm not generally one that feels strongly one way or another. I tend to lean towards the Democrats and nothing this year makes me feel like I'll be changing that. I haven't watched any of the debates this year, although I tried to record the Democratic one last night. Of course I set it to record on the wrong channel so instead I recorded a Morgan Freeman/Ashley Judd film. But based strictly on the physical, I would have to say Huckabee, Romney or Obama will win. They just look Presidential to me. Anyway...

Back in college I was a member of the Student Government Association for a year. It may have been two years now that I think about it, but only one year was memorable. My senior year I was the co-chair of the Health and Public Safety Committee. Did I get the job because I was the most qualified? No. Did I get it because I cared deeply about the health and public safety of my fellow students? No. Did I get it because I asked for it? Yes. See that year two of my closest friends ran for, and became, President and Vice-President of the SGA. I remember standing in someone's dorm room after they won and jokingly asking if they had any cabinet positions for me. Pete, the President, laughed and said, yes, Health and Public Safety. I asked if I could have the position and he said, sure, why not? And thus I entered politics.

Before you think it was just that easy to become the co-chair of a highly influential and important committee, it wasn't. I had to be confirmed by the Senate. The Senate was made up of mostly people I didn't know nor cared about. And there was also another co-chair, although I don't recall his confirmation hearing. So anyway, I get to the confirmation hearing and am fairly confident it would be an easy process. Most of the time these chairmanships are rubber stamped and everyone is confirmed unanimously. Of course, it wouldn't be much of a story if that happened. I sat there and the President asked if anyone had any questions for me. One girl, who was extremely serious about her position, looked at me and asked me if I had a working relationship with either the head of Health Services (whose name I didn't know) or Public Safety (lead by Chief Evans). I looked her square in the eye and said that while I didn't have a relationship with the head of Health Services, I had met with Chief Evans many times in the past and had a good relationship with him. She seemed a little wary of my answer (as she should have been - more on that in a second) but didn't ask any follow-up questions. No one else had anything to ask so there was a vote. I got 13 votes for confirmation and 3 abstentions, including one from the question-asker. Of all the votes for confirmation that day, I was the only one who got more than one abstention. Of course there's no way I should have been confirmed knowing what a slacker I am, but what can you do?

So, that 'relationship' I had with Chief Evans? Well that basically boiled down to one incident I had had the previous year. I don't remember if I've blogged about this before, so I'll just tell the story. It's my junior year of college and my friend Pete (remember him? He became President) had just gotten back from Israel and had brought me some incense. It wasn't like any incense I had ever seen - it was more like a foam triangle, about the size of my hand. It burned nicely and smelled good so I didn't question it. Anyway, as I'm burning it, a friend of mine walks into my room and asks if I could give her friend a ride to the train station. As I am a fairly nice person, I agree and we leave. Now normally, I'll leave incense burning because the smoke it creates isn't enough to do any damage. Unfortunately, it seems this Israeli incense was different in more than just looks. When I returned from the train station, I walked into my room and immediately noticed that my trash can had moved into the middle of the room. I thought that was rather odd, and then I noticed I had a voicemail. I checked my phone and it was from one of the Public Safety officers. She said that while I had been away, the incense had set off the fire alarm and they had to break into my room. While there, they had noticed two street/parking signs handing from my window.

Which leads to another brief side story... earlier that year I had taken two parking signs from one of the lots behind one of the dorms. For some reason I had a fascination with street signs (and in fact still have a couple at my parent's house) and so I took them. Needless to say (but I shall anyway) I hadn't planned on getting caught with them. But since when you walked into my dorm room they were pretty much staring you straight in the face, Public Safety had seen them when they came to put out my incense. And now I was being asked to come see Chief Evans to explain the parking signs.

I made an appointment and later that week went into his office. Chief Evans was a very nice, calm guy. He welcomed me and I sat down. He looked at me and asked "why did you take the signs?" I looked back at him and lied. I said that I had been walked through one of the dorms and seen them lying in the hallway and I took them from there. Meaning, I hadn't been the one to take a screwdriver to the back of the metal post and removed them. I simply took them from someone else who had done the dirty work. He looked at me and I'm not sure if the believed me, but he simply said "don't do it again." I looked at him and said "OK," and that was the end of our meeting.

And that was my working relationship with Chief Evans.

I don't remember really doing much in the SGA, much like I didn't do much during my two-year tenure as Vice-President of the A.S.I.A. Society. It was a nice thing to put on my resume however. Considering I was a Political Science major, you'd think I'd care more about politics, but it's rare that there's a politician that gets me interested. Most of them say the same thing, just in slightly different ways. I'm more of a showman and I like someone that captures the imagination. I like reading stories of J.F.K. for instance, since he became President at a very young age and captured the nation in a way no other President ever had or has since. Yes, it helps his legacy that he died in office and there's a chance he'd be seen just like anyone else had he done his two terms and gone home, but I'd like to think he'd have changed the way the office was seen in the public's eye. And looking at the current crop of contenders, the only one who really has the chance to change the nation's way of thinking is Barack Obama.

I honestly don't know enough about anyone's policies to know if he really is the best person to lead the country from a political point of view, but from a social point of view, he would shake up this country - this world - like no one has in decades - possibly ever.

Hobbies

If you take a look at various Facebook/Friendster/MySpace pages (as well as the random resume) you'll find that everyone has a hobby. One definition of hobby is: "An activity or interest pursued outside one's regular occupation and engaged in primarily for pleasure." So you'll see people list skiing or listening to music or collecting stamps as a hobby they enjoy. My hobby is collecting keychains. To those of you that know me, you know I've been doing this for quite a while. For those of you who don't know me - I've been collecting keychains for quite a while. I don't know when I first started, but at the moment I have about 225 hanging on my walls, and at least that many in various bags, as I've run out of places to hang them.

Collecting keychains may seem an odd choice for a hobby, but the way I look at it, they're usually fairly easy to find wherever you travel and they're rather inexpensive. And when people go away on vacation and say 'can I bring you anything' I can always say, 'sure, bring me a keychain.' Is there an airport in the world that doesn't have a gift shop with keychains for sale? I think not. So over the years I've gotten a lot of keychains. I can't say that I have a single favorite one, but there are a lot that I enjoy. I've got one that's a fake chicken's foot, which a friend sent from China. I've got one that looks like a piece of sushi, which a friend brought back from Japan. I've got a couple in the shape of feet with sand from the city it came from. I've got Popeye, Frankenstein, Homer Simpson and the Loch Ness Monster. I've got this cool one of a dog with a working clock in the middle. I've got keychains that talk (including one that has the 2004 Red Sox LCS and World Series championship final outs.) I've even got one with my name written on it, in Korean. I'm pretty sure I've got one from every continent, except Antarctica (and if my parents ever go on that cruise, I'm set.)

The reason I started collecting anything... now there's a story I'm betting no one knows. It all started, as a lot of my stories do, back in elementary school. I don't remember exactly what grade, but I'm thinking somewhere in the 4th-6th range. We had a Hobby Day in school where all the kids were supposed to bring in their hobbies to share with the other students. Me being the stellar student I was, I remembered the morning of Hobby Day. So my mother and I quickly scanned the house to find something collectable. Having traveled a little bit back then, we had coins from a few countries. So we rounded up different coins from Canada, India, England, the U.S. and maybe a couple of other places, put them into these plastic coin holders that you could get in Fruity Pebble boxes, and off I went to school.

As soon as I stepped into the classroom, I knew I was in trouble. People had all sorts of things on their desks. But the worst was this kid named... Chris Eastwood I think. Chris had a coin collection. But his was a real collection. He had coins from every place imaginable, and he had them in these official looking cardboard coin holders. Since my coins were in my bag, no one had seen them and I decided I was going to do the honorable thing and lie and say I left my hobby at home. So when my turn came up, I mumbled something about forgetting my collection at home. I didn't feel that bad because as I had sat down, I noticed that two other people didn't have anything at their desk. Gail and Steven if memory serves. So I figured I was OK - I wouldn't be the only loser. But something curious happened. As the teacher went around the room, she skipped over Gail and Steven without asking them anything. I thought maybe they had spoken to her earlier and said they had left theirs at home, so she was being nice and wasn't going to make them say it aloud.

We got to the end of Hobby Day (which was about an hour in the morning) and the day went on. I felt embarrassed, but since I wasn't the only person without a hobby, I didn't feel too horrible. Then gym class came and our teacher came with us. This didn't normally happen since there was an actual gym teacher, so I couldn't figure out why our regular teacher was there. Then she said "OK class, now Gail and Steven are going to show us their hobbies." I was mortified. It turns out Gail's hobby was gymnastics, and Steven's was basketball. They proceeded to show us a few moves and everyone clapped and blah blah blah. I ended up being the only person without a hobby.

From that day I was determined to collect something. I never considered playing baseball or tennis or soccer a hobby because it wasn't something you could show someone easily. I needed to collect something. My first collection? I shouldn't say this because it's completely ridiculous... but my first collection was the insert cards you get from magazines. Yes, those cards that let you sign up for other magazines. I had a ton of them under my mattress at one point. I'm not sure when I realized it was ludicrous to collect these things, but one day I came to my senses and tossed them out. The next thing I remember trying to collect was bookmarks. That didn't go so well since, while they could be cool, there weren't a lot of places to get them. That one re-emerged briefly in the early 90s when I was in London and found that they had a lot of nice bookmarks.

I also collected shot glasses for a while, and still kind of do, although not as seriously as before. They're nice to look at and all, but there was something odd about being someone who didn't drink and collecting shot glasses. And then the keychains came up. I don't know exactly what my first 'collecting' key chain was, but I think it was from a cruise we went on when I was younger. It's from Norwegian Cruise Lines - the M/S Sunward II. It's in the shape of those circular life preservers. I remember actually using it for keys for the longest time before I realized that I didn't want to eventually break it, so I put it aside and it now hangs in the center of one of my keychain squares.

So there you have it, the story of my keychain collection. It all started one fateful day in elementary school because Chris Eastwood (I hope that's his name) had a better coin collection. I wonder sometimes what would have happened if I had shown my coin collection that day. Would I have ever bothered to try collecting anything? Or would my keychains have been sold to 500 other people around the world? In closing I'd like to say, if any of you reading this happens to be travelling somewhere and sees a cool keychain or two... I'd be more than happy if you sent them to me :-)

Karma

This past week at work has been simply ugly. The power-that-be feeling the need to micromanage things they don't really understand since they're not involved in day-to-day activities. This of course causes large groups of people to have to scramble to make the higher powers happy for a couple of weeks before they crawl back into their offices and forget about us lowly people for a while.

In the midst of all this, we had a couple of massive downpours last week. It made life a little more miserable than it already was. One night I walked for 15 minutes in the rain which lead to me having to dry my shoes for two days before they got back to normal. The next night, as I walked in the rain from the subway station to my apartment, I decided to swing by McDonalds to get some dinner. McDonalds is normally busy and the people working there - well, let's just say they're either not very smart, or are so annoyed and depressed at having to work at a McDonalds, have stopped caring. Lines were long, people were wet and on the edge. I try to understand how people feel and give them some leeway, so I stood there, quietly waiting my turn.

I place my order, pay for it, and then stand aside to await my food as the next person in line orders. I didn't hear what he asked for, but it must have been a lot because his total came to $20.06. He handed the cashier a $20 and said something to her I didn't catch, and neither did she. She looked at the money and looked at him and said, "It's $20.06." He then repeated what I imagine he said earlier which was, "Can you give me a break on the six cents? I only have another $20." He held up the other $20 bill to show her. She looked at him and said "It's not my money" meaning, it wouldn't be her giving him a break on the six cents, it would be McDonalds giving him a break on six cents. Now, there are a couple of ways of looking at this. One, chances are all registers at the end of the night are counted and people have to explain why something is over or short. This happened to me when I worked at a video store. If it's under, by a reasonable amount, it comes out of your pocket. So I can understand the cashier not caring if it was only six cents. That kind of thing can add up. The other way of looking at it is, its six cents to a multi-billion dollar company. Considering the amount of times I've gone to McDonalds and not gotten correct change, I think they can afford it.

So anyway, upon hearing this exchange I reached into my pocket and fished out a dime and handed it to the guy. He looked at me and said thanks, and handed it to the cashier. While we both sat waiting for our orders, the guy kept talking to me, saying thanks and whatnot. Then he said "Karma man, it's all about Karma. See, I did something nice earlier, and now you're doing something nice for me. It's raining right? And I stood in the rain and held the door open for a woman before, and now you're doing something nice for me. Trust me man, something good is going to happen to you." I smiled politely and said I hoped it would. I got my order and turned to leave, and as I did I could hear him still say, "Karma man, Karma." Before you start imagining what this guy looked like, he wasn't a hippy. He reminded me more of a frat boy, only one who wasn't all that good looking.

As I walked out of McDonalds and crossed the road to go home, I kept thinking about what he said. He did something nice for someone; I did something nice for him, so that meant something nice would happen to/for me. It wasn't that I felt I deserved something nice to happen (not that I'd complain if it did of course) but I wondered if the world really worked that way. All I did was something I hoped someone would do for me in the same situation. I knew how I'd feel if I had to break a $20 bill for six cents. It would be a little annoying. So I handed a stranger a dime. I can afford a dime here and there. It was such a small little thing to do, but he seemed so touched by this that he felt the need to tell me over and over that something good would happen to me. And I started to hope that maybe he was right. I walked into my building and into my apartment. I went to the fridge to pull out a drink, then went and sat down on the couch and opened my bag of McDonalds. As I pulled out my food, I thought about everything that had happened in the last few minutes and smiled to myself. Then I looked down at my food and realized something...

They gave me the wrong order.

Karma man, it's a bitch.

Hyde & Sikh

Recently I've discovered that whenever I'm in the elevator in my building and someone else is on with me, I start to think about my breathing. And for some reason whenever you think about breathing, it's harder to breath. I'm not sure why I notice my breathing when someone else is on the elevator with me, but now that I know I think about it, I can't stop thinking about it. But that's neither here nor there. On to the story...

So as many of you might know, I've made a few short films in my life. The one I'm most proud of is one called Hyde & Sikh. A few years ago a couple of friends and I entered a film competition where each team had 64 hours to write, shoot and edit a 6.4 minute film. Every team had the same theme, which was "hide and seek" but spoken aloud, not written down. So, as you can probably tell, my team went in a slightly different direction and made a pretty decent romantic comedy. Although this may be disputed by one teammate, I came up with the idea and wrote the script. As a team we directed and shot the film, then one of us edited it in a 24 hour editing marathon. Due mainly to our ability to think outside the box, we took 2nd place in the competition. We didn't get much out of it, but it was nice that people liked our film that much.

As it turns out, someone may have liked our film more than I thought. A couple of days ago one of my teammates was on Facebook and he was uploading some of the videos he had made. It got me thinking about Hyde & Sikh and how both of us had independently uploaded the video onto YouTube. For some reason his copy has more hits than mine. So I decided to Google 'Hyde & Sikh' and 'Hyde and Sikh' and see which one of ours showed up in the search results. As it turns out, the version of Hyde & Sikh I uploaded onto Google Video is the first one that shows up in both searches. As I scrolled down the search results however, I came across this site: http://www.sikhnet.com/sikhnet/news.nsf/NewsArchive/36F7E49AB65E6D9687257209007947B1 which mentioned our film. It seems that someone somehow decided to show our film at a Sikh film festival last year. If you go here: http://jagomiami.org/filmfestival.html you can see our film listed. I immediately wrote to my friend and asked him if he knew anything about it and he said he didn't. And I know I never got contacted about it. So now we're sort of wondering how our little film got chosen. And did they use the crappy online version or did they someone get a DVD?

I know I made a bunch of copies for various friends and families, but you'd think if they lent it to someone and it made a festival, someone would have contacted me. I'm even listed as a director on the web site (sort of, they spell my name wrong.) It's not as if we're upset about it. It's just one of those things where it would have been nice to have known about it. Maybe we could have gotten some friends or family down in Miami to go see it. Maybe we could have gone down to see the audience reaction. So before I track down someone connected with the festival on my own, I thought I'd see if anyone out there happened to know anything about the festival, or knew someone associated with it. I just want to find out how this all came about.

Oh yeah, and if you want to see the video, go here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5854716159956251111

The American Dream

When I was in grade school, the year 2000 felt like it was a long time off. Which in fact, it was, having been in grade school in the 80s. Back then whenever someone would ask me (or I’d just think about) where I wanted to be when 2000 hit, I never said what you expect a normal boy to say. I didn’t say, oh, I hope to be playing 3^rd base for the Red Sox; or, oh, I’m gonna be a movie star! When the year 2000 came around, I was going to be 27 and my dream was that I’d be married with two kids, living in the suburbs in a white house and, to finish off the American Dream, we’d have a white picket fence. I couldn’t see who I was married to, but I could see two young kids - one boy and one girl. The house was small, but it was in a very nice neighborhood. There was a tiny front lawn with extremely green grass. I have no idea what job I had, but I knew that it got me home when it was still daylight outside, because I could see myself walking down the sidewalk and opening the picket fence, and my kids are playing in the front yard. When the actual year 2000 came around, I spent it in a friend’s house in Massachusetts, in freezing cold (since my friend didn’t like turning the thermostat up) surrounded by half a dozen friends. No wife, no kids, no white picket fence.

When I worked in a video store back in high school, I used to be able to rent movies all the time. Needless to say, that’s about when I became the movie junkie I am today. I watched so many movies that someone told me I should write them all down, just to keep a count of exactly how many I saw. So I started doing that. I think to this day my all-time record is 251 (theater and video) in 1992. And in case you’re wondering the 251^st movie that year was The Bodyguard. Back then I used to write down all the movies I saw in a small notebook. A year or so later I started using a date book to keep track of, well, important dates. So then I would write down in the date book every movie I saw, along with when I saw it and where I saw it. I was recently going through a box I had here in my apartment, looking for some Indian clothes I had stored away, and I found an old date book from 1996, the year I started law school. I have no idea how a 10 year old date book ended up in a box in an apartment I’ve only been living in for 4 years, but there it was. I sat down on my bed and started looking through the days and saw all the movies I watched that year. That was the year I first saw Braveheart (even through it was released in 1995.) It was a nice trip down memory lane. I got to the end of the year and kept turning the pages and there was a section in the back entitled “Goals for this year” and I had written 2 words in that entire section. Although I was in my mid-20s and had my whole life ahead of me I had one single goal for that entire year. The words I wrote back then are the words that still consume my life today. “Find someone.” Obviously, that never happened. I remembered, as I looked at the words on the page, that I had written those exact same words in every date book I ever used. And not once did I manage to fulfill my goals for that year. I stopped using a date book a few years ago.

And so now we sit in the year 2007. Y2K is a long forgotten memory. But when I close my eyes really tight, I can still see the white house with the white picket fence. I can still see the green grass in the small front yard. Now I can even see some flowers planted under the window sill. There are still two small children running around the front yard, and my wife standing in the front door as I walk down the sidewalk and open the fence. When I open my eyes however, I see nothing except an empty apartment.

Habits

As I ran into another wall today, I started to think about strange habits I have. Bumping into walls for one. For some strange reason, I have this habit of taking corners as close as I possibly can, while walking, which leads me to run into corners a lot. Not like I come to a complete stop when I run into them, but more like I brush into corners. But sometimes I cut the corner so tightly that it hurts. And for the life of me, I can't figure out why I do that. I know I do it, I've told people I do it, I'm writing to you about it now, yet I can't stop myself from taking corners really closely. I could understand if I was in some kind of race and cutting those precious few milliseconds meant the difference between winning the gold or taking second. I could understand if I was being chased by a homicidal maniac and I needed to escape. But to go from my desk to the bathroom, I have to go around 4 corners, and each time I brush up against the wall. What's the point? I wish someone could explain this strange phenomenon.

When I was in college I took a summer or Jan term class in creative writing. For one assignment I wrote about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I'm not sure what the overall point of the paper was, I just remember that I wrote how when I eat a PB&J, I have to eat it with the peanut butter side on top, and the jelly side (obviously) on the bottom. To this day, I still eat them that way. Why? How would my life change if I ate one of them 'upside down'? The other thing I remember about that class is being introduced to a little band called Pearl Jam.

When I go to the movies, I have to sit on the left side of the theater looking right. If I sit even dead center I feel like something is off. That's not to say I haven't sat on the right side of the theater. If I'm assigned a seat there, I'll sit there. If the theater is crowded I'll sit there. Or if it's a movie I don't really care about or have seen before, I'll sit on the right. But if I have my way and I can manage it, I will always sit on the left side. And more importantly, if I'm with someone, they have to be sitting on my right. I feel really backwards if I'm with only one person, and they're on my left.

I also have to go to the bathroom when I go to the movies. Even if the theater is 5 minutes away, and I went to the bathroom before I left, as soon as I walk into the theater, I have to go. I think after all the times I've gone to the movies, I've just developed a Pavlovian response to the smell of popcorn or something. Or maybe it goes back to the time I was watching Dances With Wolves, and after 30 minutes I really had to go, but I was so afraid of missing something I figured I'd wait until the movie was over. Not realizing the movie was something like 3 hours long.

Those aren't all the strange quirks I have. Although I do suppose everyone has a few things about them that are odd. I just really hope I can figure out why I cut corners so hard so I can stop scraping my shirts against walls. I actually have a hole in one of them now and it's a little troubling.

Vomit

Vomiting isn't something I'd generally talk about. Personally I feel that a person's bodily fluids are their own and should be kept to themselves. However, a couple of weeks ago I had a bout of food poisoning, and for a couple of days I felt like I was going to throw up. I never did though. It reminded me of that Seinfeld episode where Jerry says he hadn't thrown up for years, until of course that particular episode where I think it was a black & white cookie that did it to him. I honestly can't remember the last time I threw up. But I do remember one memorable time.

(Cue flashback music)

When I was younger, I had an uncle (now deceased) in India who was a judge. He was a fairly influential one, as far as I remember, and was always there when we landed to help us through customs (read: skip customs) and for that I shall forever be grateful. He was also part of what was arguably the biggest criminal case in Indian history. As many of you know, Indira Gandhi, while she was Prime Minister, was assassinated by her guards. The guards were quickly arrested, tried, and sentenced to death. My uncle was on the 3-judge appeals panel that upheld the conviction and the death sentence. Because of this, supporters of the defendants put him under a death threat. What this meant was, he had armed guards not only as the front gates to his house, but wherever he went he had a group of guards go with him.

Now, I never fully understood why there were guards around all the time. At that age I was a) oblivious and b) didn't really care since I would have preferred to be anywhere but India. On the other hand, I did find it kind of cool that whenever we'd go out somewhere, a guard would drive us, and a car full of 4 armed guards would follow us. It was kind of a powerful feeling. Oh yeah, and another reason I didn't like India when I was younger was that I always had a habit of getting sick. Regardless of whether I took medication before we left, or if I watched what I ate, sooner or later I'd get sick.

Do you see where this might be going? I remember distinctly we were getting ready to leave India. I wasn't feeling well, and we had an armed escort to the airport. I was in the car with the driver, while we were followed by the car with four other guards. I don't remember which one opened the door for me, but I'm betting he remembers me. As soon as he opened the door to let me out, I threw up on his shoes. While these days I'm bigger than your average (and above average) Indian, back then I was still a kid. And I remember throwing up on his shoes, then looking up into his face. Here was a guy who was taller than I was (especially since I was still sitting in the car and just leaning out, while he was standing) who was wearing a green military outfit, and had a machine gun around his shoulder. To this day I don't know if the look on his face was one of annoyance or understanding, but in my mind, I thought he was gonna shoot me.

Needless to say, he didn't and I don't really remember what happened from there, other than my parents asking me if I was OK. But to that armed guard who was nice enough to protect my uncle, I'd like to apologize. I realize the chances of you reading this are about 2 billion to 1, but if someone somewhere out there has a cousin, uncle, grandfather, brother-in-law, 2nd cousin twice removed or is best friends with a guy who knows someone who told a story about a brash young American who threw up on his shoes... please let him know I'm sorry.

5 Things

So recently on a friends blog, I was 'tagged' and now have to write 5 things about myself no one knows. I was going to just post them on her blog but I realized I hadn't written anything in a while, so why not just write them here. So, 5 things most of you might not know about me...

1. Back in college a friend and I used to steal those long fluorescent tube light bulbs and smash them against trees. For some reason, every so often, the maintenance people would leave a box of them in the hallway. What were we supposed to do? Ignore them? And you might be asking, OK, taking the light bulbs is one thing, but why smash them against trees? Because they explode. And as you will see from the following story, I enjoy things like that.

2. In the same vein, my friend Pete and I used to go out back into the woods behind college and light things on fire. It was nice finding a friend who had the same pyro personality I did. We used lighter fluid for the big stuff. And no, we never burned down the forest. The main building that went up in flames at our college happened the year before I got there. When I was really young, a family friend and I once sat in the closet under the stairs and lit many, many boxes of matches. And yes, I do realize these two stories involve me going with a male friend either into the woods or into a closet. Shut up.

3. Back in high school I had a friend named Jared who was really good at stealing things from our 7-11. He was so good he used to take requests. He never charged people however, which now that I think about it would have been a good side business. And yes, I also shoplifted from there once or twice. Mainly Snickers bars. And I also once stole a pack of baseball cards from a 7-11 in Florida. We used to own an apartment on Singer Island and on the way there, I think just before the bridge, there was a 7-11 we would stop at to pick up supplies. I remember taking the cards and rushing to the car before my parents were done and ripping them open looking for an All-Star card. Didn't find one. I made the mistake, about 20 years after the fact, of telling my parents. My father immediately insisted I send the store the money.

4. I once wore lipstick. It's not what you think. I was in a musical back in high school (The Pirates of Penzance - I played pirate number 13) and I had to wear it. Well, sort of. First off, we had mandatory sports during our trimesters and I would do whatever I had to do get out of it. Not that I wasn't good at sports (as my numerous tennis championship t-shirts can attest to) but I was just bored by them. So one semester I decided to join the musical, which apparently was considered enough exercise for a sport. I had to 'audition' and I chose the Star-Spangled Banner as my song. Not completely sure what I was thinking. Anyway, I was accepted and the first day of rehearsal I joined my other friends in the Bass section. I was then immediately called out and taken down to the Tenor section. At that point in my life, this was cause for embarrassment because it meant my voice was higher than everyone elses. There were only 4 tenors and the other three guys weren't the most masculine of people. Not fun. Anyway, the girl I had a massive crush on at the time happened to also be in the musical, happened to be my dance partner (I got to lift her in the air, that was fun), and happened to do the makeup. So even though with my skin I was told I didn't need makeup, any time I could get her to touch my face I went for it. So I wore brown lipstick. I then asked her to go to the prom with me and was informed she had just started dating someone else a couple of weeks earlier. Good times.

5. And lastly, a story to reaffirm my masculinity. When I was in high school I had a HUGE crush on Alyssa Milano from Who's the Boss. I used to tape all the shows and in my lesser moments I'd attempt to use my new Kodak Disc camera and take pictures of the TV set. Remember of course that back in those days everything was on film. Film that needed to be developed. And paid for by my mother. Who then saw what pictures I took and seriously wondered if I had issues, which it's fairly obvious I did. One day I remember I got my grades and they were less than stellar and my father got real, real pissed off. He rushed upstairs to my room on a mission. At the time I used to have a twin size bed with a headboard. The headboard had two sliding cabinets on the sides and two shelves in the middle. Needless to say they did not hold books, no, they were filled with pictures of Ms. Milano. I may have been the only guy who ever bought Tiger Beat for the pictures of women, of which there were generally two, Alyssa and whomever the other girl of the month was. Anyway, my father walks over to the headboard and reaches out to rip down the pictures at which point I scream 'NO! It's not her fault!' As sad as that sounds, it stopped him in his tracks. He didn't rip them down. Of course, my grades never got any better either.

So there you go, 5 things you may not have known about me. And likely 5 things you kind of wish you didn't now know.

India 2006

I have returned from India with many pictures but sadly, no wife. It amazes me how people over there are always talking about wanting to find me someone, yet no one actually does anything about it. The best they could do is find a girl from Bangalore who would have flown up to meet me. Excuse me? There are somewhere around 15 million people in Delhi, with who knows how many others in the immediate area around the capital city, yet out of all those people, the closest girl they could find was a 2-hour flight away? I nixed the idea of her flying up because that would be a bit too much pressure. How bad would I feel if she flew all that way only for us to take one look at each other and say, umm, no, I don't think so. So, I spent most of my two weeks with family.

Within the first 3 days of landing, I went through 4 family dinner/lunches. Most of my family live in an area called Noida, which is just outside of Delhi. It's a huge up and coming area. Back when my family invested in land there and built two identical 3-story apartment buildings, there was literally nothing else around. All you'd see is empty land for miles, then suddenly two buildings, then nothing. Within a few years however, there were apartments everywhere, along with shopping areas and now malls and golf courses. You name it, Noida has it. So in one building live two families from my father's side, and in the other building there's one from my father's side and now one from my mother's side. Talk about family togetherness. It does make it a lot easier to see everyone, but that also means they're always there. This trip wasn't all that bad though. All the cousins I have on my father's side are older than me and all have kids (the oldest being 20!) and I tend to get along with kids better. And then the two cousins I have that are younger than me are my favorite people in the world, so that's always a good time. When we weren't holding family gatherings, the girls and I would go out to dinner, go shopping, play pool at one of their friend's apartments and one night we went out drinking.

In the middle of all that, my parents and I took a 4 day trip to the cities of Udaipur and Jodhpur in the state of Rajasthan. Simply saying how incredible everything looked would be an understatement. At the bottom of this blog I'll post a link to the pictures I took while there and you can see what I'm talking about. Oh, and if you're a guy, please keep the comments on the relative attractiveness of my female family members to yourself. While in Udaipur, we stayed in a palace on a lake. The lake has four natural islands and on one of them, then built a palace/hotel which takes up literally the entire island. The only way on and off is on a boat. And lucky me, they don't allow cots in bedrooms, so I got a room to myself. There must have been 2-3 people working there for every guest, so everyone knew my name and they would all stop and wish me a good day whenever I walked past. If you ever want to go some place and feel like royalty, the Taj Lake Palace is the place to go. In Jodhpur we stayed in an actual palace which is still used by the royalty there. The rooms weren't as nice, but the sheer size of the place was overwhelming. We were taken to our rooms and an hour later when we tried to get to dinner, we got lost.

As per usual, my relatives all kept giving me money to buy stuff with. Normally I never buy anything because I never need/want anything, but this trip I decided to spend. Nothing major, but cheesy fun stuff. I bought a watch which my Masi (Aunt) said reminded her of Batman. I got a box with camels on it, which I now use to store my incense. I got an Egyptian sarcophagus which, when you open it up, has a mummy inside of it. One of my cousins works for a TV station as a dresser/consultant, so she knows a tailor who works quickly and does a good job, so through her I got 2 suits made in about 4 days at a total cost of around $150. Can I tell you how much I love the exchange rate? At one point we had two bathrooms with issues, so my Masi called a plumber over. He came, spent about 20 minutes working, fixed both bathrooms and charged 200 rupees. That's less than $4! Are you kidding me? Can you imagine how much it would have cost here for that to happen? She said, but you can't translate it back to dollars, here 200 rupees is a lot. But I paid 900 rupees for a backpack just a day earlier. You're telling me a backpack is worth 4.5 times as much as a plumber? That amazed me. So back to my shopping... I also got some little things like a belt buckle with The Godfather logo on it, some pillow covers, a couple of keychains, and this big tapestry of the Taj Mahal with glitter on it.

I'm sure I'm missing something, but all in all, I had a pretty good time. I didn't want to leave, but I knew I had to and get back to my life. Hopefully I'll get a chance to go back soon. Right now I'm on a 5-year streak of seeing my cousins and I'd prefer that didn't end in 2007.

And now, as I promised, the link to all the pictures I took. Let me know what you think!

India 2006 - The Pictures

The Motherland

In just under two weeks I'll be going back to India for the first time since February of 2003. I'd say in my life I've been to India 10-12 times, although I lost count a long time ago. Each trip has its own memories but after all this time, I couldn't for the life tell you what happened on what trip. So for the sake of a) trying to write down as many stories as I can remember and b) keeping all you entertained for a few minutes since I haven't written in a while, here are some of my India memories.

Both my grandfathers were in the legal profession, with one being a lawyer and the other a judge. When I was really young, I remember taking a trip to the courthouse where my judge grandfather was working. I can vividly picture the courtroom, which was nothing like American ones are. Maybe something special was going on, but it was a room with two judges at the front, on a raised platform, kind of like judges here are, at least on TV. But the rest of the room was filled with rows of benches where a bunch of lawyers were sitting. I have no idea what was going on, but I don't remember there being any sort of case being talked about. And the second judge was flipping through a book the entire time. I later learned he was a new judge so he didn't have a lot to say. The funniest part was that when the lawyers found out who I was, they all started kissing up to me. I was sitting in the back near the lawyers, and a few of them came up to me to tell me how great my grandfather was and all that good stuff. He laughed when I told him about it on the car ride back.

On another trip when I was in my teen years, there was an incident that to this day makes me shake my head. Now granted, I didn't go to India a lot, and in my younger years I wasn't a big fan of going. OK, I hated it. But still, I had gone a lot and even though every time I went some relative or another would pop up that I hadn't seen in a while and didn't recognize, but I knew who the major players were. On my father's side, my grandmother didn't speak English, and I didn't speak Hindi, so she and I never could talk to each other. And to be honest, I was kind of afraid of her. It wasn't like she was an intimidating presence, at least physically, but man, she had a look about her that scared me. I don't know much about her though, so that kind of makes me sad. My grandfather though, could speak English, so we had decent conversations from time to time. It was strange because he looked a lot like an older version of my father, and everyone says I look like my father did when he was younger, so I could kind of see what I'd look like when I got older. Anyway, one night I'm sitting in my grandfather's bedroom area (which was just off the kitchen) and he and I are talking. To recap: I am having a conversation with my GRANDFATHER. So in walks one of my Bua's (Aunt) and she steps into the room, looks at me, looks at my grandfather, looks back at me and says... 'This is your grandfather, do you know him?'

I'm sorry, what? What did she just ask? Did she ask me if I knew my own GRANDFATHER? The person I was sitting there having a conversation with? What the hell did she think was happening? That I thought I was talking to some random old man who walked into the room? That I was going to jump up and say 'Oh! Is that who I'm talking to? I thought he was my father in bad lighting!' The stories of this particular Bua could take up an entire blog in itself, but that moment was a classic. I wonder what my grandfather thought. I suddenly have this fear he thought 'Oh my, my own grandson has no idea who I am and needs someone to tell him!' Or, hopefully, he thought 'Damn my daughter is an idiot.'

What else... I could go into stories involving the bathrooms there, but let's just leave it with, for most of my formative years, it was a hole in the ground and with bad knees I could never fully grasp the concept.

Oh, the ghost. I'm not sure what I believe in when it comes to God or an afterlife. I know according to my religion, I should believe in many Gods and that we are all reincarnated after we die. And I'm not sure if I believe in ghosts or spirits, but I do firmly believe I saw a ghost one night. We were in my grandfather's house (my father's side) and I must have been somewhere in the 10-13 range. Their house, while kind of run down and in the middle of a lot of stuff in Delhi, was kind of cool. There were a couple of different ways to get in, but if you came in the front, you would walk into a small waiting room. Off to the right was my grandfather's study, which was filled to the ceiling with law books. And we're talking some pretty high ceilings. Straight ahead was what turned into his bedroom. Off to the right of that room was the living room, which was generally lit by a single fluorescent light which made everyone and everything look rather sickly. It was the room however which also featured a few pictures above one of the doorways. One of my father from when he was on the front page of the newspaper back home, and at least 2 of me from when I was a baby. Anyway, you continue walking into the house and you're in the dining room/kitchen area. Then out the back there was a small courtyard, which had another bedroom off of it.

Then you go these narrow, curved stairs (which, from what I've heard, I once fell down) and you're upstairs and outside. The main area upstairs was open which was rather nice. To the right, there was a sitting room, and farther down a bedroom. To the left, there were two bedrooms. OK, back to the original point of my story now that you can picture the house based on my awesome description. I was in one of the bedrooms upstairs off to the left. I remember that it was still early because everyone else was still awake, but I was in bed. It was dark out and I was lying in bed, on my left side, facing the window that lead out into the upstairs outside area. I was looking out the window when I swear upon whatever you want me to swear upon, that I saw a ghost. I'm pretty sure it was a woman, and there she was, just floating outside. No one else was around for me to call out to (I think they must have all been downstairs) but I don't remember being scared. I didn't think she was a bad ghost or something that was going to attack me. She was just there, sort of looking out for me. I looked at her for a couple of seconds then closed my eyes. When I opened them again she was gone.

I've never seen a ghost since or anything that would lead me to believe they're around, but I will go to my grave believing I saw one that night. Granted, I'm the same person who still believes he saw four girls get out of a car in Orlando, but after I create my time machine, and once I prove the whole girl thing, I think I'll go back to that moment I saw a ghost.

So in a couple more weeks I'll be back in India. Hopefully I'll come back with a few more stories, and some good pictures (now that I finally broke down and got a new camera.)