Ballin!

I’ve decided today to take a break from what has recently been a lot of political commentaries I’ve been posting. Some of my readers who happen to live in places without democratic processes (Africa, Florida, lower castes, etc.) have mentioned how confused they are about my musings. So it’s back to the original purpose of the blog – a way to document some of my crazy, drunken weekends before I’m too old/senile to remember them.

In honor of Presidents G-Dub and Abe, I had a 4-day weekend this weekend, which, despite the many school and non-school related things I have to do, provided a nice excuse to leave town. After being shot down by friends in Boston and New York, I started looking at hotel rooms in Vegas. Unfortunately, even the cheapest hotel rooms were upwards of $200 a night and I realized that, with the NBA All-Stars and their entourages in town, there’s no way I’d get in to any of the clubs (strip or otherwise).

So Thursday evening, I headed to Long Beach airport to catch my flight to the Bay Area. The trip would give me a chance to party with Aashish on his birthday, re-connect with other friends, as well as milk my own birthday for some free food and beverages. Unfortunately, karma from all the things I’ve done/said/thought in recent weeks caught up to me that night. Moron that I am, I didn’t call JetBlue before making my way to the airport (I feel like even when flights are delayed, the jackasses running the airlines don’t announce it until like 5 minutes before departure time). Alas, as I checked my bag, the skycap informed me that my 8:15 p.m. flight had been delayed til 1:30 a.m. Fuck me. Are flights even allowed to take off and land that late? I stood in line to ask that very question, and was told that the flight would indeed take place. Knowing that I would miss Thursday night’s festivities regardless, I debated switching to a Friday morning flight so I could at least get a proper night’s rest. Unfortunately, the only flight available for Friday was at 6 p.m., and for obvious reasons, I didn’t really trust that the flight would occur as scheduled. So I stuck it out, sat in the airport’s “bar”, watched Kobe vs. LeBron, and did some homework. At about 10 p.m., the inevitable announcement came. The flight had been cancelled. Fuck me, part deux. Once again, I stuck it out in line for like 45 minutes, and the agent told me they could re-book me on a flight on Saturday morning (the Friday 6 p.m. flight had already filled up at this point). Well, considering I had a flight back to Long Beach on Sunday morning, flying up on Saturday morning didn’t make a whole lot of sense. So I cancelled my flight, bitched and moaned for 30 minutes until they finally agreed to pay for a shuttle back to my parents’ house so I could get my car, grabbed my bag, and got the hell out of there. During this time, baller Gaurav stepped up and generously donated a free Southwest flight to me, and booked me on a flight from LAX on Friday morning.

Fast forward to Friday at 3 p.m., and finally I was sitting in G’s apartment in San Francisco. The drinking started a couple hours later when G got home from work, and didn’t stop until late Saturday night. Friday night started off with dinner at Mangarosa, a Brazilian-Italian place, which was disappointing in many respects. Given the fact that Brazilians and Italians are 2 of the hottest ethnicities, and the whole “mutts are hotter” theory, I was looking forward to some amazing waitresses. Instead, we got a male waiter who took 20 minutes to get us our drinks, and on top of that we were branded to the colored section of the restaurant, which even had a curtain they could close in case any non-colored patrons complained that our presence was diminishing their dining pleasure. But the food and drinks were pretty good, and overall I give the experience a solid B rating, which might have been a B+ if Deepa wasn’t bitching about her food the whole time.

After dinner we headed to a club called Larry’s. Or at least that’s what I’m calling it. After a few drinks and a lap dance from a hot blonde who kept talking about Disneyland, we headed to\ Cigar Bar for a friend of a friend’s birthday party. If “Cigar Bar” sounds cool, I apologize for the false advertising. The definite low-light of the trip (excluding the Thursday night experience). At around 1:30 or 2, we headed back to Larry’s (hey, our hands were stamped, so we might as well get our money’s worth). I was pretty hammered at this point, so the only thing I actually remember was G buying a lappie for a female friend, and the female friend sitting still with a horrified look on her face throughout the dance. There goes $20 G will never see again. Ballin!

Saturday was an absolutely beautiful day, particularly for mid-February. So, after we all finally agreed on a brunch spot, we headed out, ate some eggs, and downed a couple excellent Bloody Marys (City Tavern I believe is the name of the place – highly recommended $5 bloody marys on Saturdays, and pretty good food). From there, the fun began. After finally getting up from our table after spending 20 minutes not-so-conspicuously gawking at the white girls at the table next to us, we walked over to Bar None to pretend we were frat boys, and I must say we did a pretty good job. After warming up with a quick game of Flip Cup (in which G and I DOMINATED Anuj and Vijay), we played a few games of Beer Pong while gawking at the very same white girls, who also ended up at Bar None. Overall, the 5 of us downed 9 pitchers in around 3 or 4 hours. Despite this, we thought picking up a huge bottle of Jager on the walk back to the car was a good idea. We also thought buying $35 worth of food at KFC/Taco Bell was a good idea. I guess that’s what happens after you drink an average of 1.8 pitchers per person – things like Communism, women’s suffrage, and tremendous amounts of greasy food start to look like good ideas.

After sleeping through All-Star Saturday (which we did NOT TiVo – good job, G), we reluctantly rallied to head out to triple-birthday party action at Mr. Smith’s. The night got off to a bad start as we could not find a cab if our life depended on it. For a while I thought we’d have better luck getting to the bar on a JetBlue flight. Alas, we lucked out by flagging down an empty limo - $35 to the bar. Ballin! Unfortunately, there was no liquor in the limo – at least none we could drink – and we didn’t look like ballers as we (we being 4 dudes) exited the limo right in front of the line to the bar. Awk…ward. Anyways, we waited in line for a few minutes, with me and Vijay wondering aloud to each other why some bitch we know came to the club in a bathrobe. We walked in, strolled downstairs where our friends were, and the party started, albeit slowly. The bar was insanely packed to the point where we were pretty much forced into conversations with whoever we happened to be standing next to. If I wanted to be imprisoned in bad conversations, I would have just spent the weekend at my parents’ house. Or with half the girls I USED to date. Finally, after a few Grey Gooses and a couple shots (and an hour or so of God-awful music), things started to pick up. At around 1:30, G and I made the drunken decision to ditch the party to meet up with Anuj and Vijay at the local Indian party. We made a quick stop at the deli for a Jager shooter and small bottle of Goose, which we promptly downed in the cab, and got to the club a little before 2. After initially being denied entrance, we were eventually waved in by Anuj and Vijay, who had paid off the bouncers when they got in an hour earlier. Ballin! After that, the club gets a bit hazy – that’s what happens when you pound Grey Goose in a cab at 1:30 in the morning.

By 3, the KFC had finally settled and we exited the club in a quest for food. Despite my insistence on just finding a local diner and eating some eggs, G insisted on taking us to a late-night Korean BBQ spot in Seoul. Or on the opposite side of the city, either way it was far. The highlight by far was G’s decision to bring with him to the restaurant a full bottle of Jager, which he proceeded to share with some random guy at the table next to us. The random guy seemed to enjoy the nightcap. The girl who probably was gonna have to “wait” for him later that night did not seem as pleased. Things finally settled down, and we housed some chicken and kimchee and rice and whatever else it is that was on the plate in front of me.

The rest of the trip was essentially sleep, a hangover, some Katt Williams stand-up comedy on TV, brunch at a pretty good Italian spot near G’s apartment, and an hour-long debate Anuj had with himself as to whether to leave in the afternoon and thus miss the All-Star Game or to watch the game in SF and leave at like 8 p.m. We ended up making the hindsight-is-20-20 wise decision to leave at around 2:30. But, in an homage to the weekend, rather than the standard Carl’s Jr. or In N Out stop, we decided to go upscale and eat at El Torito so we could watch the end of the All-Star Game.

Ballin!

An Op-Ed Piece for Fox News

This post is primarily dedicated to Bhargavi, who in response to my latest post, accused me of being "flaming-liberal" (not to be confused with her fellow Briton John Amaechi)

Anyways, just so no one can accuse me of subjectively posting stories that validate my leftward leanings, I wanted to post this article, and with it, a kudos to the Bush administration. No, I'm not referring to those granola bars we all ate when we were kids, along with Fruit-Roll-Ups and Squeez-It Juice Drinks. But I mean kudos as in "props", "good job", etc. While the deal is tentative, it appears that some significant progress has been made on the North Koran nuclear situation. And in what must come as a shock to anyone that has followed U.S. foreign policy over the last 6+ years, it actually seems to benefit both the U.S. and its international allies. See what happens when you use a combination of diplomacy and carrots/sticks, as compared to invading and bombing people just for the hell of it? Lesson learned? I hope so.

The value of 3,000+ American lives

By now, some of you may have heard this story or come across this article. Just shocking.

To date, the war in Iraq has cost over 3,000 American lives and probably many, many more lives of Iraqi civilians. These numbers seem to grow by the hour, or at least as often as I get a chance to check cnn.com. Costs to taxpayers like me (before I quit my job) and you have totaled hundreds of billions of dollars. The Bush administration recently asked Congress for an additional $245 billion to cover the costs of the conflict through 2008.

For THIS?!

I ask - correction, I DARE anyone to please comment (anonymously if you wish) on what benefits all of this have yielded for us Americans, or for the world more broadly.

A safer country/world from terrorism? Questionable as to what the impact has been in the US (as compared to other Homeland Security measures). Terrorism continues to happen elsewhere in the world, and of course we read daily about insurgent attacks in Iraq.

A free and democratic Iraq? To state the average Iraqi is better off now than he or she was 4 years ago is debatable at best. As for democracy? Well, let's just say it's had better results here in the States than it has in Iraq. Apparently, a convicted Embassy bomber has been voted into Parliament - as part of the Prime Minister's Ruling Coalition no less. His seat in Parliament gives him immunity from prosecution. Of course I haven't even mentioned yet the fact that this guy has somehow evaded justice for 23+ years. Who exactly has been trying to capture him all this time???

Despite all this, the Bush administration and the Republican Congressional Minority is unwilling to even debate the merits of the war, or to consider alternative strategies for a lesser American role. They accuse anti-war activists of supporting a "cut and run" strategy. I accuse them of supporting a failed strategy, and of jeapordizing our troops and our taxpayers every single day.

Is this plagiarism?

Well, whatever. I'm not getting paid for this or graded on it, so even if it is, fuck it. No original material today. Just wanted to refer you all to Ali's blog, where he's pretty much summed up my opinions on the topic. Enjoy. And stop eating you fat fuc*ers.