Gravitational Bull

Putting the 'family values' in 'horrendous, unstoppable nuclear apocalypse'

A funny thing happens when you get more than 120 miles outside of New York City....you stop giving a shit if you ever go back.

This is not to say I don't love it here, cause I absolutely do. I'm usually the first to jump all over out of towners, pointing out that we have culture and shopping and taxis and comedy and theater and a park. I love bragging about how I don't need to leave the block to find every single thing I need to survive and how I can have pizza, laundry, and a questionable Craigslist masseuse delivered to my front door without even having to put on pants. Practice note - Dear Lonely Planet does not condone eating pizza without wearing pants: mangia at your own risk.

But this past weekend, I broke free of NYC's gravitational tether and took a road trip with the 'rents down to the University of Virginia. My lil bro was graduating, so I went to go support him and yell inaudibly as Pomp And Circumtance blared through hastily assembled towers of speakers. Truth be told I also went down cause I knew I was gonna get in a night of college-style fun, but ostensibly it was cause I'm an awesome brother. During my hours of down time, strolling through Monticello and learning from my father what ginko biloba leaves look like, the wash of calm that exists in nearly every non-gotham washed over me. Stress melted like so many shreds of mozzarella on the slices I wouldn't be eating at 4 a.m. that night; anxiety flowed down like the trash water I wouldn't have to jump over to cross the street.

What was this strange sensation I was experiencing? Could it be...peace? Could I actually live in a place outside of the East Village of Manhattan and not go crazy with boredom, finding instead the simple pleasure of, oh, I dunno, dog ownership? Might the two grand a month I was spending on rent be put towards an actual house that has a yard and a bbq out back that will most likely not be peed on by a homeless person someday? Good lord, I thought to myself, New York is killing me!

Don't start hatin' on me or say "oh Eric, now that you're thirty you're slowing down." I'm just as ridiculous as I ever was! I've attacked the work hard / play hard dichotomy with aggressive zeal ever since I found out you could drink and still get good grades my Freshman year of college. Well, Bs, at any rate. But it was once again made clear to me that I really don't have to do that! Sure, the Onion covered this territory a while back with their aptly titled "8.4 Million New Yorkers Suddenly Realize New York City A Horrible Place To Live" but I needed to see the forest for the trees for my eyes to open.

I'm sure after a few days I'll start thinking about how I'm happy I don't have to drive places, knocking out my current thought that I wish I had a car with a/c to get around town. After two weeks I'll tell myself I couldn't live without walking to a comedy show, a burlesque show, three happy hours, a Cuban sandwich place, and an all night diner without turning off of Avenue A, but for now I'm just annoyed that I have to pay 7 bucks for a beer while I'm doing it.

In a month, I'll probably regret ever claiming I wanted to leave this place. NYC is my home and I do love it, but I gotta wonder if it's only cause I'm not living more than 120 miles away.

The Circle Is Now (Somewhat) Complete

Tell me about it...my boss is a real ball buster too.

Fear not, friends and well wishers, for this is not the end...just another step along the way in an ever expanding path that's taking a lot longer to traverse than I originally planned. The good news is that after 10 months of living off of tax returns and quarterly dividends I'm working again. Temp job baby! We're in the black!

Well, for the week anyway. Over the past few months I've been keeping myself pretty busy with such fun activities as 1) desperately drafting cover letters, 2) quietly sobbing when reviewing my checking account balance, and 3) telling myself that this is progress towards my ultimate goal of transitioning permanently into human rights advocacy. Having yet to score even a single interview to show for my efforts is teeth-clenchingly scary, and now I find myself back in a law firm setting doing some lawyering stuff just like I used to back in the dizzle. My friends being the ever-supportive cast and crew that they are have said fun things to me like, "back to your old unhappy self, huh?" and "you realize you're never going to leave there now, right?"

Thanks guys. Powerful, uplifting messages.

So while it may be progress, I'm still not quite there yet. When I took a hammer to my life last Fall, I set out to accomplish a bunch of things, and I'm still working at that whole career transition one nearly a year later.

But I also set out to start writing more, and my goal was to start getting stuff published. And as of Sunday night, I did it! Thanks to some great editorial guidance and a slightly more serious platform than I normally operate on, I put together a pretty kick-ass article about my experience in Peru during the 2006 presidential elections. It's got humor, drama, politics, pisco sours, you name it...you can check it out here:

Everyone Cheats, by Eric Noah Feldman, at The Hypocrite Reader

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go clean up and get ready for bed, cause (sigh) I have a big day at the firm tomorrow.

The Grift That Keeps On Giving

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."

~ The rental insurance agent, when asked about replacing my stolen iphone ~

Friends of the blog may recall that earlier this year, my iphone was stolen. Well, stolen is such an ugly word - really it was more that a security guard in an upscale Malaysian hotel rifled through my bags while they were in "locked" storage, removing my laptop and iphone, then ultimately returned my laptop to me after he uploaded to it pictures of himself and a short pornographic film of him nailing his girlfriend.

Sadly, the iphone was never recovered.

Along with my good pal Shwa "Player Hater" Losben, I spent my last hours in Asia running around Kuala Lumpur filling out police reports and bitching to various hotel officials in the hopes that I would get some kind of reimbursement for the value of my glorious smart phone. The unrequested acquisition of a homemade sex tape on my desktop bothered me less than the sudden loss of all my Plants Versus Zombies accomplishments, but in either case I wanted justice. I wanted to be made whole for my troubles. And as of this past weekend, the wrong is righted.

A few months of cross-border negotiations led finally to the filing of an insurance claim by the hotel for their little ooops-my-bad, and they wired me the value of my stolen phone. All in all, they were actually pretty helpful throughout the process, even if it did take a few months of back and forth. This fortuitous cash infusion coincided with me FINALLY getting my old Samsung P.O.S. exchanged for a shiny iphone 4. I thought I could never love a piece of technology as much as I loved my old iphone, but I was wrong. New iphone is like getting a second puppy who can fetch the paper and bark the alphabet while the first puppy suffers from arthritic pains and needs to be held upright while defecating. Old phone, replaced and forgotten.

Needless to say, I rushed to get my phone set up right when I got it Sunday evening, so I plugged that bad boy in to my laptop (complete with the homemade Malaysian videos as evidence, should it ever be needed), and to my surprise it offered to restore my old phone settings for me. Could it be? With the press of a button, could all my settings be restored, pictures recovered, contacts replaced, Plants Versus Zombies cheats re-unlocked? It absolutely could have been... had not that damn security guard already updated my laptop with his stupid iphone settings.

My first clue that something was amiss came when iphoto popped up on my computer displaying 9 pictures of the thief himself, staring at the phone in an attempt to customize my gear. I knew I was really in trouble though when I saw the 10 hours of phone calls this guy made to any number of his 85 contacts that he added. Among the dozens of hotel employees and managers, some of whom helped me fix up this whole mess, one named popped off the page and caught my eye - "My Lover Sha". Finally! A name to the...well, I would say face but you never actually see her face in the video.

I had to chuckle as I plugged my phone back in and wiped it clean of the security guard's evidence-stockpile that he left behind. This whole ordeal was so ridiculous and drawn out that when it finally ended, I was just happy to bury it and move on...especially given my new "never-have-I-ever"trump card, "never have I ever seen a Malaysian homemade dirty movie".  

Working Out Difficult, Overrated

Working hard < Working smart

 I finally ran out of excuses. Any attempts to blame a lack of home base, a dearth of viable options, or lingering cost issues have faded...the stars have aligned and there is simply no reason why I can't go to the gym now.

After my half-baked attempts to work out in Sri Lanka failed miserably, I reduced my entire workout regimen to a handful of situps between swigs of ayurvedic tinctures that promised to make me skinny and healthy. Shockingly, the aged berry potion I purchased from the "doctor" in Kandy didn't magically make me lose 30 pounds as he promised, but I took the failure in stride...hell, even some roadside miracle tonics don't perform up to standards. But cmon, this was Sri Lanka after all, so I gave myself a free pass on fitness until I returned to civilization.

Friends of the blog may recall that as my time in South Asia wrapped up, I made a New Year's resolution to do 10,000 pushups in 2011. I wasn't about to let everyone down, so when I settled into my comfortably white-washed life in Geneva, I kept pace and am proud to report that I'm well on my way to meeting my goal by year's end. Sadly, however, I took this somewhat minor accomplishment as a sign that my body was improving itself despite the kilograms of falafel and gnocchi I was pumping in to it. As a reward, I gave up on even attempting to join a real gym or go running outside or anything silly like that. No, I was contempt to drink cheap Swiss pinot noir, crack out 50 up-downs and contentedly fry up some garlic for my "healthy" pasta dinners.

Sadly these blissfully excused days of laziness have drawn to a close. I've got a dresser and a shower to call my own, and there are plenty of cheap or even free work-out options in and around NYC. So finally this past week, armed with freshly washed gym shorts that had seen little action that hadn't involved watching Hulu from a desk chair over the past 8 months, I laced up the cross-trainers and hit the gym. 

And the second I hit the gym, it hit back. My back hurts. My legs hurt. My arms? Well they don't hurt that much but they certainly aren't at 100%. It turns out that doing almost no physical activity for three business quarters atrophied my body such that after just two days of diligent gym-going, I'm calling it off today so I can rest. Possibly also so I can take an ice bath. Alarmingly, despite 4 total hours of gym so far, I haven't seen the drastic physical transformation I had expected; nothing that a deliciously heavy pasta dinner can't cure though.

Today might be a loss but come rain or snow or sleet or shine, I'll be making a concerted effort to get my butt to the gym at least 3 times a week, hopefully even more than that. If nothing else it will seem like a nice way to feel productive while I fail time and again to get a job.

Off Of The Couches And Into The Streets!

Lego Rome wasn't built in a day

63 days.
 
It took me 63 days, return date from Geneva to today, to actually get into a somewhat normal living situation and off of random people's couches. Granted, there were some mitigating factors at play that dragged out the process, including being unsure of my permanence in the country at first, the sudden nature of my leaving The Continent, and a complete lack of certitude as to my eventual landing spot. Any immediacy in settling on a sub-par sublet was eviscerated by the amazing reception I got from all my friends, many of whom offered me keys, room, and board, all at the low low price of the pleasure of my company. Without a reliable budget or even a geographic focus, I was truly forced to embrace the nomadic lifestyle of a couch surfing corporate wash-out, replete with rolling bag full of unlaundered clothes, constantly asking the world, "what's the wireless password here?" Truly, it was a harrowing process and the extremely long delay in landing a new sublet was due to a million outside factors beyond my control.

Either that or I'm just a lazy bastard. Personally I think it's the former, but I could feel murmurs rippling through the crowd that suspicions of the latter were fast crystallizing. I'm still recovering from the emotional and physical toll that my recent adventures took on me, soul and body, and I did myself few favors given my lifestyle in the two years leading up to fleeing society. Hell I barely remember the first 30 days after I got back, mostly due to exhaustion and needing to sleep for a week just to get back on my feet. I needed some time to slow things down, take stock, and rest before getting back to it. But 63 days??

In 63 days, rabbits, foxes, and kangaroos can successfully reproduce. In 63 days, if you count for only 8 hours a day at a relatively fast clip, you can count to a million...three times. 63 days is longer than the Falklands War, the Indo-Pakistani War, and the 6 Days War...combined. And hell, it only took the Apollo 11 astronauts three friggin days to get into lunar orbit! Now, as a matter of course I believe that the marketplace of ideas should decide belief and that we must balance all the facts before making any decisions, but the numbers appear to be stacked pretty solidly against my near-glacial pace of house hunting.

Despite my stutter-start failure in getting my rear in gear, at least I am finally making some progress. I'm all set up in a new West Village spot for the coming weeks, and after a quick trip to visit my parents and steal every ounce of unclaimed food in the pantry I should have enough food to last me at least through the weekend. The job hunt is slow but I'm registered with the proper temp agencies and eventually will make one of these assignments work. And possibly best of all? Last week I got new jeans! Yup, things are looking up, to be certain.

What's to become of the next 63 days? From where I'm sitting, seems like it takes about 48 days to sail around the world using only natural forces...but I'll settle for getting dental insurance.

Come With Me, Sir

For God's sake, please don't cut the blue wire!

I don't pretend to understand the system used by TSA and various border patrol officers for investigating suspicious characters as they cross international boundaries, but up until a month ago I at least put up with its decisions. Well, in so far as it never stopped me from moving about the world unfettered and un-patted-down. It was a nice existence wherein I had the audacious self-entitlement to brag about my mobility to those less fortunate. My friends in the foreign service who always get stopped received comments like, "weird, I always go right through even though I've been all over the place!" My road-weary brothers who constantly find delay got flippantly delivered sucks to be you's, and pretty much everyone else was told, "hey, it's just a random thing man, whatevs."

Whatevs, my left butt cheek! In the past month I've been stopped on three separate occasions, and I do believe that my dumb luck has done run out.

When leaving St. Thomas a few weeks back, I got pulled aside by TSA for a thorough pat down and pants inspection that was really more of an annoyance than an invasion. I was traveling light, so the security folks got to see a shabbily dressed single man traveling alone from the tropics to New York City carrying only a notebook, a wallet, and a packet of sugar-free gum. If that doesn't scream "red flag" than I don't know what does, but the freedom to not carry on a carry-on is a luxury I'm not about to trade for the world. The only other time I was stopped in the past, the TSA lady had a bad reaction to the cat hair on my bag, acquired from a recent visit to my parent's house, and my impromptu bag inspection became a move along sir. No harm, no foul. The St. Thomas folks were a bit more intense, and dare I say competent, in their screening, but they were both wicked friendly to the point that I wanted to fill out a positive comment card afterwards and tell their supervisors they had actually brightened my day.

I got a granola bar instead.

But I tell you what, a week or so ago on my trip to Montreal, the Canadian border patrol really knocked me down from "optimistic patriot" to "skeptical dissenter." Driving up with famous rock star and friend of the blog Shwa "I Just Want To Cuddle" Losben, we two fairly clean cut and upstanding young gentleman were grilled at the border both entering and leaving the frozen north! Already a bit behind schedule, we itched to get into Montreal and get our party on. Sailing through the first border check point, the car was filled with innocently dropped wow that was easy's and a series of unfortunately timed comments about our national security being in jeopardy if this was how they were going to handle things. Boy oh boy was that misguided.

Not two minutes later, we approached the second border checkpoint, and following a quick grilling by the border guard we found ourselves detained at the checkpoint security station. Quietly we sat, awaiting whatever random fate was to befall us, me having a serious need to hit the bathroom and Shwa a serious need to find out why the hell we had been stopped. By the end of this interaction, neither need would be met.

In the drab, portable office-in-a-trailer sat two seemingly bitter border guards, each grilling a separate Canadian couple about their various and sundry US purchases and subsequent failure to declare said purchases. One particularly ill-spirited border guard had apparently seized one woman's engagement ring, purchased in the US over a year earlier but never declared upon entry, and released it back to the unhappy couple only after they begrudgingly relinquished a 10% of fair market value tithe-qua-penalty. Shwa and I were now certain that they were going to nail us on some kind of ridiculous excise tax despite the fact that our carriage lacked any sort of marketable goods. Then came our turn, and the questions were shot rapid fire in our general direction, ultimately uncovering only that we were in fact completely legitimate travelers with valid passports and absolutely zero inclination to do anything but spend American dollars in their stupid country.

During this inquisition, a litany of aggressive WTFs came to mind, including:
- Excuse me, do you think we can get some answers here?
- You know, out bilateral investment treaties pay your salary
- Are you a Pisces? I bet you are, cause all the Pisces I know are fucking assholes

Thanks to an impressive display of self-control and general fear that we'd actually be locked up for even looking at them cross-eyed, I kept my tongue holstered and my potty dance to a minimum. I didn't dare spend any more time in that woebegone shed of misery...best just to get out of there and defile a Tim Horton's up the road.

Amazingly, we got stopped again on our way back through the border to the US! Convinced that I had been flagged because of my recent travels around the world, I asked the border folks what the hell was their problem (in a nice way of course), and unlike their north-bound counterparts they politely took a minute to treat me like a human. "I guess it's just bad luck, these are really random. You guys didn't do anything wrong, and I really do hope that this doesn't dissuade you from coming back up to visit Canada in the future." Once again, I felt like filling out a positive comment card and letting his supervisor know that their border guards were putting smiles right back onto all the faces they had moments earlier ripped them off of. I suppose two out of three positive experiences with border patrol wasn't that bad, and they deserved some kind of recognition for their good work.

I got another granola bar instead.

You Get Out What You Poutine

Dream come true, or night ruining train wreck?

"Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it"

~ Your annoying roommate who thinks he knows what's best for you ~

  
Have you ever thought you wanted something so badly that you would change your plans drastically just to get it? Shifted your entire vacation schedule to make sure you see a hallowed church or glorious ancient wonder of the world? Well that's how I felt about trying poutine in Montreal last weekend. While investing one of my many free days in a trip to Montreal, my travel buddy and friend of the blog Shwa "Slow Jam" Losben asked me how I wanted to spend our big day out Quebec's white-washed Gotham. Without doubt or hesitation, I demanded merely that we see Old Montreal and check out the poutine selection. History and snack food, that's what I'm all about.

Poutine, for those who don't know, is a big pile of french fries, smothered in brown gravy and covered with bits of squeaky cheese curd. Needless to say, this was going to require another pass on my no-dairy policy and at least two lactaid to ensure my personal safety. For the whole day Sunday, we asked every local we met where we could score the best poutine in town - general consensus was La Banquise, a short cab ride from where we had spent most of the afternoon day drinking and engaging in enlightened discourse. Predictably, what started with a meaningful conversation about the distinctions between macro- and micro-level morality over a pint of Boreale devolved into a pissing contest about which one of us was smarter over happy hour shots of Jack Daniels. With both the weather and the conversation turning stormy, we hopped a taxi and handed the nice man behind the wheel a piece of paper with La Banquise scribbled on it in Sharpie. As Shwa was quick to point out, I dropped into my broken "not sure if you speak English" English, and I asked driver, "you know this? Can you drive there yes?"

"Yeah I know it, hop on in guys," he shot back in perfect diction.

The meter ticked up at what appeared to be an alarming pace, and a bit of panic helped clear the clouds in my head left behind by our impromptu bar crawl. We've been driving an awfully long time, I thought to myself. This poutine better be friggin' awesome. After a rainy exit from the overpriced cab, we got seated pretty quickly at the super tacky and super busy La Banquise, and my compatriot and I settled quickly on splitting a large original style poutine and a couple of brewskies. My fork shaking with anticipation, I dove in head first as soon as my prize arrived on the table, unapologetically shoving three full spoonfuls into my face before coming up for air. I leaned back. I savored.

I hated it. How this was possible I knew not. Apparently I had incorrectly assumed that because each element of this delightful mess was in and of itself delicious, the mixed whole would be triply amazing. To be entirely fair to the dish, perhaps it suffered from a bit of "anticipation failure" as much as it was itself a disappointment. Once it was built up in my mind as the greatest thing ever, the very purpose of my visit to a foreign country, it's hard to really live up to that hype. At that point, my poutine needed to be extraordinary simply to meet my most basic of expectations. Such is the danger of building up your travel expectations without really knowing what you're getting into - for all the people that see Angkor Watt and oooh and aaah with joy, there are assuredly just as many vacationers that meh and sigh.

Granted, being saddened by the site of a hallowed 800 year old Khmer temple mountain is a slightly bigger let down than receiving middling poutine in the frozen north, but it still sucks to get exactly what you want only to discover it sucks.

I Call Shotgun!

Failed to bring enough Pizzeria Pretzel Combos for everyone

Much as I had set out recently to prove that following your dreams isn't just for the young and wealthy, so too did I set out recently to prove that road trips are an entirely appropriate way for a grown man to invest his time and energy. To this end, last weekend I embarked upon a fateful journey to the frozen north in an effort to check out Montreal and all that it had to offer. From the overpriced Cuban cigars to the streets packed with underage, booze-hounding Americans, I planned to indulge my inner 19-year-old and apologize for never taking him to this part of Canada sooner in life.

Tagging along with my good buddy and friend of the blog Shwa "Rock Lobster" Losben, I shoved a few t-shirts into a backpack, bought a giant bag of Chex Mix and hit the road. Since Shwa was heading up to play a show at Clarkson University, we figured we would extend the trip out a bit and drive the few extra hours across the border and into funky town USA...er, Canada. And like all great journeys with two idiots at the helm of a meandering ship, half the fun was getting there.

From my earliest days as a licensed driver with somewhere better to be, I've loved road trips. My freshman year of college I spent nearly every weekend driving the six hours back and forth to college from my homestead on Long Island in order to visit my then girlfriend...I will allow the reader to fascinate as to the reasons why. Each Friday, I'd arm myself with two powerbars, two bottles of water, a pre-ordered book of 96 punk CDs, and meticulously highlighted maps and route guides to make sure I didn't screw up the route. So concerned was I with getting each direction exactly right, I would stress myself out just planning the damn trip! By the time I was a senior in college, and said girlfriend had moved out to middle-of-nowhere PA, I ran the engine a bit leaner...two powerbars became a pack of cheap Winstons and two bottles of water a 20 oz. Diet Cherry Vanilla Coke. I measured progress in just how shaky my hands were at any given moment, but I still obsessed about getting the directions right the first time through. I've since learned to let go of all those hang-ups, and thanks to smart phones, GPS-guides, and basically not giving a rat's ass when I arrive somewhere, I've relaxed a bit on my trip preparations.

With snack food in hand, I hopped into the captain's chair and started mucking about with the radio. Unlike my college days, I much prefer the haphazard musings of whatever local radio stations might be willing to offer me as I pass from state to state, allowing me to stay in touch with the kids by learning about which Bruno Mars song I should request at NYU dive bars. Practice note - while I like the sound of Just The Way You Are, I feel that it's ridiculously upbeat message improperly prepares teenagers for the rigors of real relationships. I'll opt for Grenade, thank you very much.

Despite a couple of bumps along the way, including a grilling by the Canadian border patrol and a ridiculously dramatic death-defying swerve off the highway, Shwa and I put together a pretty awesome road trip and I felt successful in my never-ending campaign to stave off adulthood at all costs. I'm assuming that if and when I become a family man, my wife and kids will not want to survive on Panera and powerbars for six hours at a time, but until then I'll road trip however I please.

Best Laid Plans

"Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change."

~ Stephen Hawking ~

I like it when things have an order to them. It's nice to know that you can trust X food not to have dairy in it or Y bus to show up around when it says it will. Of course, random and haphazard travel through the developing world throws all of this into chaos, but at least it's chaos when I expect it, disorganization by design. I'm happy to cast caution into the wind when the time calls for it, but when it comes to scheduling my emotional well-being I like to have just a teensy bit more control over the situation. So when my pre-determined itinerary suddenly shifted last month and all of my carefully laid plans fell into disarray, my psyche struggled to adjust. Before taking off on my "crazy" journey to Sri Lanka and Geneva, it should come as no shock to anyone that I spent nearly 7 months putting this whole exit strategy into place. Sudden upheaval? More like meticulously carved plan of action!

But shit happens. Plans change, and we're forced to adapt quickly or end up suffering for our inability to do so. On the road I'm usually ready for these kinds of split-second changes and am actually pretty good about keeping others calm in the process. While flying from Lima to Iquitos in Peru, for instance, my flight was turned around when it was revealed that buzzards from a nearby jungle trash heap had invaded the local airspace, making it so even the great and powerful Sully couldn't land that bucket of bolts. Did I panic? No, I got on the phone and in broken Spanish somehow managed to switch the reservations of not only myself but two of my travel companions to the afternoon flight and got them to waive the charges. And when I got stranded on a Panamanian island for four hours with no water or bathroom after our guide misunderstood the phrase "pick us up in forty minutes," did I lose my cool? No, me and my ex-girlfriend took to making sandals and undergarments out of palm leaves which we stripped off the trees. I weave a mean frond-cross-hatch, by the by.

But my latest game changer was different - it wasn't a slight setback or a change of expectation. I was coming back early without laying the normal groundwork for my arrival, leaving me unsure of job, home, or future. Pepper in some of the oh so normal events that recently occurred in my life, such as turning 30, becoming an uncle, spending three months in Sri Lankan solitude, etc., and my brain was a lil bit frazzled. Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow became I need this on my desk yesterday, overpriced falafel replaced by impossible rent costs. Waking up after the five month dream was rough, and I'm only just now really coming out of my sleepy haze.

And my leading theory as to why I'm only just now getting back to normal? Because right around now was my originally scheduled return time. My last hurrah in St. Thomas this past weekend was to be my final adventure on the road, signalling the body to stop instinctively slapping the snooze alarm on my adult life and to step out into the light of day. Maybe I'm not as flexible as I thought after all...given a month of adjustment time, I basically just waited until the world caught up to my expectations. Granted, existential readjustment is more complex than weaving a brassiere, but only slightly. Those straps are tricky!

On my way back through the Atlanta airport from the impossibly sunny Caribbean, I thought about all the little steps it was finally time to take in adjusting back into a normal-ish life. Figuring that the process was really only starting, I decided to make a list of what needed to get done to help organize my thoughts. I spent weeks and weeks making packing lists and preparations to travel abroad, but spent exactly 12 hours throwing everything into a bag and racing back home...how could I possibly have expected that to work? Proud of myself for the admission, I allowed for one final trip to Chick-Fil-A to let my brain flood those serotonin receptors and positively reinforce all the wonderful progress I was making as a normal functioning human, but I would deny myself fries in order to stay healthy.

But you know what? Dude behind the counter tossed some fries in there anyway. I signaled to him that I didn't pay for them, but he waved me off..."oh don't worry about it. Enjoy them!" So to celebrate my return to responsible decision making, I failed to cross off even the first item on my newly drafted list.

Oh well. Best laid plans, as they say.

There's No Accounting For Taste

Corn fields: preferred vacation spot of sexual deviants the world over

Some people figure it out early, knowing right off the bat their preferences. For others it takes years of angst-filled searching, arguments with the family, and a series of self-reflective moments that challenge the very core of their being. In either case people tend to fall off the wagon now and then, straying from their chosen path to test out the other waters, check out to see if just maybe their pre-conceived notions of propriety and right in their choice was as correct as they thought. Debate rages whether its a matter of nature or nurture, and the priests and scientists may be fighting it out for decades to come without any real answers.

I'm talking of course about one's taste in vacations. People tend to just enjoy the happiness associated with just being on vacation, so we don't always look back to figure out how we'd like to spend our hard earned days off / extended unemployment. Now thirty plus years wise, I think it's time I made some decisions in my life about how I like to spend my leisure time and be honest with the world about who I am.

The most major distinction I see amongst vacationers is of course Mountain versus Beach. Sure, we can all love the beach when it's cold out and getting up to the hills when you want some bbq and a breeze in summer time, but when faced with the option of one or the other, apples or oranges, which one is the winner? In a none-too-shocking vote of 1 to 0, I voted myself a Mountain man. Sure, a small native chieftan in the jungles of Peru once laughingly told me, "you are not meant to survive in the wild," but I'm not talking about survival skills. I'm talking about a little cabin thing, a grill of some kind, a 30 rack, and the ability to sit on a deck and watch the sun do stuff in the sky. Rise, set, whatever, as long as my feet are up and it's breezy outside. You can do that all at the beach too, but there people expect you to go in and out of the ocean and it's hot out there. I wasn't built for heat, so Mountain wins.

However, my desire to watch leaves grow from the safety of my well-stocked chalet often loses out to a taste for adventure...hence my repeated visits to Asia. The beach does hold some extra appeal to me when it happens to be located at the end of an unmarked path carved lazily through the underbrush of the Malaysian coast. And thanks to a childhood spent on the Jersey Shore, I'm used to my beaches being somewhat crashed out and full of unknowns. So this past weekend when I was down in St. Thomas for the wedding of my good friend Nick I of course was overwhelmed by how goddamn nice everything was.

The potable water didn't make me sick. Paths were clearly marked and the people understood everything I said to them. And the bathrooms, oh the bathrooms! You could sip a pina colada off the floor, I tells ya! Amazingly though, I half prefer the adventure of diseased, convoluted, bathroom-free beach going. Call it what you will, but I think my masochistic drive for challenging vacations are just a part of who I am...why question it? Maybe I'll end up spending a few extra days holed up in a cheap hostel, afraid to stray too far from the facilities, but it's exciting. Most likely I'll bitch about it the entire time, and then afterwards I'll end up with better stories out of the whole ordeal.

When it comes to the wedding last weekend, I must readily admit that I enjoyed the ever-loving crap out of my shmancy hotel room, swim-up bar, and picture perfect dining room experience. Big ups to Nick and the resort, Marriott Frenchman's Reef, and a full admission that as far as the sweet life goes, they pulled it off big time. Still, you give me some street curry and a bat-filled fan room for 8 bucks a day and I will lose it with joy. What can I say, I know what I like.

Goin' South

One of them was eaten by hill people

 
"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed."

~ Mahatma Gandhi ~

I really thought it was time to settle back into a normal routine. I finally adjusted to being back in the states and was very seriously somewhat kinda considering starting to think about looking for non-couch-based housing again. Then a warm breeze gusted open the lovely curtains at my friend's apartment, rousing me from my squatter slumber and ruining an otherwise glorious mid-week, mid-afternoon nap. Despite the spike in mercury a chill crept down my spine. The snow had melted. Flowers, re-awakened. My post-travel recovery coma was in danger, for Father Time had marched forward and Wedding Season was upon me.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love weddings, but my constitution is that of a jellyfish, my willpower non-existent. "Another Long Island Iced Tea?" Why yes please. "Porterhouse steak with a red wine demi-glaze and frites?" Don't mind if I do. "Stay up for four straight days making it rain all over this hotel, dropping down science on how we wreck every establishment dumb enough to let us forfeit a security deposit in lieu of being responsible?" You betcha. The first thing to go at any nuptial celebraccion is my 85% veganism. And my friends find no end in teasing me as to this point.

This latest wedding trip took me down to St. Thomas to rock out with my Crocs out down Caribbean way. The first mettle-testing treat came into view well before I even got to the ceremony; for anyone who has ever been to the A Terminal of the Atlanta airport knows all too well the gravitational draw that is Chick-Fil-A. My bagel-centric northeast lifestyle affords me few opportunities to go Cowboy and get down to Chick-Fil-A territory, or as I like to call it, "the promised land," so I actively schedule flights through Atlanta with enough of a layover to get me some chicken biscuit action. I'm not saying I've ever added in a stopover through Atlanta when I could've easily flown direct, but I'm not saying I wouldn't consider it.

Anyways, my vegan guilt was nipping at my frontal lobe and begging me to get back to eating well again, so I put the buttery goodness of chicken biscuits out of mind and patted myself aggressively on my proverbial back. Job well done, I prematurely boasted. My flight was off in a different terminal anyways so there was no real chance of me getting pulled into the black hole of failure. So I took my time, wandering lazily over to my gate, only to arrive and find that due to weather issues in Florida they moved my plane...back to the A terminal...shouting distance from the Chick-Fil-A. Ruh roh.

Still convinced I was strong enough to make it through without caving at Mile One of this ill-fated self-restraint marathon, I busted a move over to the gate to catch my flight and get out of the danger zone before it was too late. Panting and short of breath, I charged past the precious and powered through a crowd to get onto my plane to paradise and away from dark, sexy temptation. In the comic timing that only the universe itself can design, my thunderous arrival coincided perfectly with the Delta rep hopping on the horn, announcing sorrowfully that "due to weather issues in Florida, we have moved back the departure time...three hours." Me and my half-assed veganism were screwed.

Accepting my fate as a lapsed health nut, I ambled over to the terminal map to find exactly where my Christian chicken joint was hiding and panicked when I didn't see it on the board. I read and re-read the directory, angrily scanning the Food Services list over and over again to find my way home. My irascible chicken lust turned my quest of inconvenience into a full on manhunt, and I opted to just run up and down the hallways hoping to spot the Chick-Fil-A logo. Each foot fell effortlessly forward, pulling me knowingly towards my prize. I moved independent of thought or want, my automation driven by the sole and unified purpose of savoring that chicken biscuity goodness. Seconds felt like eternities, but I could smell that I was closing in, and then....nirvana!

I brushed past an indecisive mid-westerner debating between chicken and spicy chicken, and with hands trembling asked the nice lady for a chicken biscuit. "Sorry hun, breakfast ended 30 minutes ago." I was crushed. Devastated. Breakfast had passed, and with it all hope of biscuit. Forced to settle for the basic Chick-Fil-A chick-fil-a sandwich, I reassured myself that even without the biscuit, this mid-morning lunch was still a brag-worthy event, so I sent out some taunting text messages to fellow chicken lovers alerting them of my accomplishments. Sneaking off to a nearby seating area, I hunkered down and plowed through that sandwich with a determination bordering on frenzy. Each carefully lain pickle danced with the lightly breaded fillet and quickly flooded my neuroreceptors with massive amounts of soul-soothing serotonin. Greasy and satisfied, only then did I notice I hadn't snagged any napkins whilst scoring my sandwich.

No matter. The receipt would do. 

On The Going Of Home Again

Pensively he stares and wonders, feeling all alone /
Re-living his missteps and blunders; all the misplaced bones...

This past weekend I had the joyous opportunity to return the the land of plenty from which all of my post-college hang-ups sprung: DC! Of course I had been down to visit our nation's capital a few times since abandoning ship three years ago, but never had I showed up with a great wave of many of my old friends from back in the day. Thanks to a mid-Atlantic based bachelor party, I Bolt Bus'd my way through the highway that is New Jersey and strapped on my old school party shoes for a night out with a dozen of my closest friends/fellow idiots to see if we were able to pick up where we left off so very long ago.

Spoiler alert, we can. Follow-up spoiler alert, it takes a serious toll on the body.

Yes, apparently the collective will of a score of newly-turned-30-year-olds is greater than the sum of its parts, and we were each made stronger by the desire to outdo those around us. The evening started with a biergarten style dinner that escalated quickly out of control thanks in part to liter-beers and pretzel-sandwiches. What was to be a fast, no-nonsense pit-stop before the evening began devolved into a screaming sausage-fest, meant both literally because of the bratwurst entrees and figuratively for the high-volume-dude attendance rate. Undeterred however, each of us pushed forward in a sort of reversion-to-our-20-something-selves that played out in a series of separate vignettes across the night.

Highlights included drinks being spilled, heads being butted, ruffians being arrested, crashing an Asobi Seksu show without paying a cover, jamming out front with a homeless dude who had a guitar, and ultimately a severe case of heartburn from the Bulleit Bourbon / weisswurst combination. Seemed like a good idea at the time.


Anywho, the weekend clipped forward with the usual level of inside jokes and stupid human tricks one would expect from juveniles such as ourselves, and as I pushed through each day I thought to myself, "I could totally move back to DC! This still seems like a great place!" When I shared this sentiment with some of the other guys I received about 7 variations on the "you're not serious, are you?" theme. Ultimately I ran through their arguments, recalling also the 6 months or so I just spent traveling the world essentially by myself and each lonely night that I sat wishing I was back in Gotham to hang out with my friends and family, and decided my delusions of grandeur, my creatively retold histories of DC, were just that...delusions.

So much separation from the ups and downs of normal life in the District allowed me to forget all the badness and just remember the happy shiny. Just like as I move forward from my trip abroad, I'm sure that all the bad pieces about it, like the crushing loneliness or getting attacked by a rat in the john, will soften into a soupy milieu of joyous escapism. For now though I can at least learn my lesson and keep re-establishing life in NYC unabated. 

All things told I had an awesome weekend, and it was super sweet to get back down for another night of old-school chillin in my old hood...but it certainly was hard to separate the glories of the past from the potential for fun in the future. My DC time was great, but even if I do go back it wouldn't be the same. To paraphrase Heraclitus, "you can never step into the same river twice, for they have gentrified that area of town and built a Whole Foods over it."

Lessons Unlearned

"How happy is the blameless Vestal's lot! 

The world forgetting, by the world forgot."

~ Alexander Pope ~

Vacation mode is a hard mantle to shake. After a week or so the jet lag falls away and the circadian rhythms return to pre-travel standards. After a fortnight, every single sentence ceases to begin with "woah, that's so expensive here, in Sri Lanka things were cheaper," or "woah, that's so cheap here, in Geneva things were more expensive." And finally, after a month or so, the waking dream of foreign travel is replaced with the stark reality that real life has once again banged down your door and has placed its feet on your bed and eaten all your Cheerios. Damn you, stark reality.

Granted it took me a while to get to this point but I'm finally emerging from my extended feeling of "vacation mode" that resulted from my half-year of life on the road. Slowly but surely I reintegrate into the fabric of New York society, whose forlorn loom lay dormant lo these past five months whilst it was denied my thread. I'm loving the easy access to my friends and family, extensive public transportation, and myriad restaurant options, each more exotic than the last. But just a few days ago while perusing the East Village dining scene, I saw undone some of the great personal progress I had made while traveling abroad! Even though I didn't love the idea of it, being on my own for such an extended period allowed me to try new things and forced me to excel at stuff like traveling by myself, drinking by myself and dining by myself.

But now that I'm back where I can understand all the conversations around me, and thanks to a healthy dose of personal conceit assume they are all about me, I no longer feel comfortable marching into a popular restaurant and uttering the soul crushing phrase "table for one." I saw all of this unfold as I was killing a couple hours in the E-Vil last weekend, waiting to meet up with some pre-game companions. Having been kicked out of my friend's apartment moments earlier, I had to find a way to spend two hours and get myself fed. The perfect opportunity to enjoy a leisurely sit-down meal, I thought to myself.

After a brief stroll around the avenues, I traversed the restaurant-laden bazaar that is St. Marks Place dead set on stopping into Yaffa Cafe. As I approached I noticed the excessive crowding of the interior and figured, "gee, it's awfully packed in there, I wouldn't be able to get a table for one right away so I'll keep going." This of course was a lie to cover up the fact that I was scared to dine along amongst such clamor. I reformulated my plan of attack and figure I would check out Hop Devil down the street...but as I approached I noticed the excessive emptiness of its vast interior. "Gee, it's awfully empty in there. I'd stick out like a sore thumb if I was sitting by myself." I felt unable to deal with the inevitable, "are you waiting for someone or do you just want to order and feel alone in the world? also, would you like to hear our specials?" So on I walked.

The cold was biting and my shame mounting, so I figured the best place for a single 30-year-old man with no self-respect to dine in this area was my favorite overpriced taco joint, San Loco. As some of you may know, I love San Loco with the kind of fervor normally felt by creepy shut-ins for 1000 piece puzzles, and I have made many a late night stop there for a solitary Guaco Loco at 4 am. But even two Tecates and a rice and beans soft taco brought me little solace - this wasn't a celebratory wee hours drunky snack. This was a man's dinner, and that man was too scared to eat by himself again.

What the hell had become of adventurous Eric? Like many a vacation beard before it, is so effortlessly my confidence trimmed off once returned home? Was I simply burnt out on keeping on my brave face while abroad that I just needed to hide out in a divey taqueria until I found my pride again?

Then all at once it hit me - I'm simply never going to be happy about dining alone. I can wish it were different or pretend that I'm awesome at being out on my own and not caring about what other people think, or that I'm cool with grabbing a book and reading at a restaurant to wile away an evening instead of standing around at some overcrowded bar as my friends and I discuss how awesome we are for being at an overcrowded bar. Nope, the fact is that my least favorite thing about being abroad and on my own was that whole on my own part. And frankly now that I'm back I see no reason whatsoever to be ok with it now that there are actually people around who want to hang out with me.

I suppose the lessons I learned abroad haven't actually been forgotten now that I'm back home; really I just needed to realize that what I learned was that I couldn't be taught in the first place.

Look Ma, No Home!

Testing the limits of "make yourself at home"

One of the hallmark travel habits of 20-somethings is the ever popular couch crash. While relatively green to the concept of having money, post-college journeymen and women reluct at parting with their hard earned dollars for anything that isn't bacon-wrapped or cargo-pocketed. Granted, as we get older and our bank accounts get a little more cushy, the itch to act like a growed up and get a hotel room when we visit our out of town friends starts scratching its way into our psyches, but we continue to fight for our right to couch surf. I'm proud to report that even at the ripe old age of 30 I've been able to tamp down the ominous threat of "maturity" and continue to sleep on the sofa whenever I head out of town. In fact, I'm even taking it to the next level now that I've landed back in the states without a home or a job - I'm a career couch crasher.

Yessir, my transformation from responsible adult to useless layabout is nearly complete. In my furthering efforts to continue the good fight and find a human rightsy job back here on the homefront, I've become that dude for whom you make excuses for when you bring home a late night booty call. I'm the permanent fixture in your living room that continually takes your snack food when you're not at home. The six-packs I provide as in-kind payment keep me on your sunny side, but I'm always one coffee spill away from ruining our friendship. And guess what - I'm not going anywhere.

Well, that's not entirely accurate. I actually am in the process of re-integrating into the normal routine of NYC living, it's just that the process is slow-moving. To help me out along the way, all of my friends have been super supportive and amazingly willing to let me use up their vital resources while figuring out what  my next steps will be.So believe you me, I want to get off of your couch as much as you want me off of it, it's just that the glacial pace of the job market right now is keeping me firmly planted in the middle cushion with me feet splayed lazily across your snack table. I suggest we just treat this like I'm a friend visiting you from out of town...indefinitely.

Go West, Young Man!

Delta's wildly unpopular "if one of us sits near a baby we all do" policy in effect

"Good bye, proud world! I'm going home."
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~

Friends, countrymen, lend me your couches! Your restless wanderer is returned to you, and he's as homeless and jobless as the day he left. Now, I know what you're thinking - why haven't they wrapped up How I Met Your Mother yet. I mean, how many chances is this guy really gonna get? Rest assured, we're all equally concerned about the situation and I promise now that I'm back in the states I'll start up an aggressive letter writing campaign to the powers that be at CBS. Oh right, you may also be wondering where I've been and why the hell I'm back in the US of A.

A bit of necessary exposition on my recent absence and sudden reappearance in an entirely different hemisphere of the world. First, please accept my sincerest apologies for the sudden blackout and just know that I missed you all lo these past three weeks. I was actually clipping along at a really hot pace in Geneva, and Dear Lonely Planet even hit the amazingly rewarding 10,000 page views mark just a couple weeks ago. When last you heard, I was eating cheap pita and hummus in Tel Aviv and reeking havoc with my continuously successful "halvah for my men and arrack for my camels" campaign when I received some troubling news about a brewing family emergency back home. This is not the proper forum to go into great detail, but to accent the severity of the situation I was on a plane to Geneva a mere 8 hours after receiving said news, and back in the states just 12 hours after that. Things are settling here on the home front but I will be NYC based for the foreseeable future.

Given the sudden shift in schedule, I had to cram a massive amount of self reflection and looking back into just a few short hours as I tossed everything into my suitcase and raced to the airport. After a few restless hours of fitful sleep in the rank dorm room my brother was trying to pass off as a viable shelter, I grabbed an overpriced taxi to the Tel Aviv airport and settled down in the main rotunda to wait for my flight.

Overwhelmed by a sudden sense of deja vu, I took stock of my surroundings and realized I had in fact been there before...even in the same seating area perhaps. Just about three years prior to this hastened Israeli exit, I took full advantage of Jewish philanthropy's boy-we-hope-you-marry-another-Jewish-person campaign popularly known as Birthright to visit the homeland and get free schnitzel. I sipped my fresh squeezed orange juice and the vitamin C jarred loose some long forgotten memories of my trip, and suddenly it was clear to me that I sat in this very food court 1,095 days earlier on my way back home. Then, as now, my great adventure was drawing to an abrupt close, and I was left only with the pulpy innards of 8 oranges and my thoughts.

Personally I love it when things come full circle like this, so I gave a little nod to the universe so as to thank it for its ham-handed attempts at existential subtlety. I kicked up my feet and tried to unpack everything that had happened in the past three years since the last time I sat in this chair, drank this OJ, and window shopped at this duty-free store. Unsure of where to begin, I defaulted to counting the countries I had seen since last I fled Israeli's shore.  Eight, by the way.

I reminisced about the weddings I had been to and strained to retrieve the bachelor parties I had drank away. I recapped quickly all the friends I had visited, and recalled slowly all the women I had kissed. I chastised all the decisions that led me to work at a law firm, and barreled angrily through the bumps in the road that drove me to Sri Lanka, Geneva and now Israel.

I sat for hours in the Tel Aviv airport, exactly where I sat for hours just three years before. And for a few more hours I remained, kept company by three years of memories and an orange juice.

As the pre-flight procedures started up and my cup ran dry, I rose from my post and took my leave of Israel. I knew that I was returning home but almost nothing else was certain...I wasn't even sure then if I would be back to Europe. Thanks to a frisky Malaysian security guard, I had no phone, and thanks to my insatiable need to find fulfillment from my life I had no job or apartment waiting for me upon arrival. Here and I thought burning down my life to leave for Sri Lanka was intimidating. Turns out that coming back home proved to be even scarier.

Next Weekend In Zion

Inspired by true events

Boring. Expensive. Sub-par grocery selection. Say what you will about Geneva, but one major advantage of the Swiss paradise where I lay my dopp kit is that it's incredibly easy to get to the airport from anywhere in town, and incredibly easy to fly around Europe and the Middle East without having to suffer crushing jet lag. For this reason, I decided to spend my hard earned birthday money on a quick puddle jumper over to Tel Aviv to hang out with my little bro. The gluttonous over-indulgence of pita and hummus was a happy bonus, but believe you me I was looking forward to some good ol' fashioned family throw-down.

My last trip to Israel was about three years ago on the ever-famous and ubiquitously brainwashy Birthright experience. Needless to say, the shiny chaperoned charade that is Birthright was a slightly different experience than crashing with my brother and his six housemates in the relative ghetto of Ramla, about twenty minutes and a thousand gunshots away from Tel Aviv proper. I had received some prep info from my globe-trotting sibling, eight years my junior and a chiseled physique my superior, but as soon as I stepped off the plane I knew I was in over my head.

I was warned that the cab drivers were going to try to screw me on the ride into Ramla, but I had no idea that they would do it through carefully lodged guilt trips and excessively convoluted mind tricks. The jedi behind the wheel of my late model sedan talked to me of family, of past and future, of love and learning. He asked me my opinions on the world and why I was not already living in the homeland. He questioned the status quo and engaged me in thoughtful discourse. Then he demanded three times the going fare for the airport trip, name dropped his kids at home, and reminded me that the quoted price "did not include gratuity".

Good start so far.

Even though he screwed me out of a few bucks, the cab driver had in fact brought me directly to my brother's place so I hopped out and got the grand tour of my new crash pad. The triple occupancy boys bedroom smelled exactly like you think it would, and the triple occupancy girls bedroom appeared full of laughter, hair dryers and dirty talk - exactly like you think it should. Kitchen sink full of dirty dishes and front room stacked with beater couches and food scraps, I dropped my bag, kicked up my feet and lavished in the dorm-style simplicity of my weekend chalet. It took nearly ten whole minutes to see that my brother was in fact living in the functional equivalent of The Real World house, replete with passive aggression, chore assignments ignored and unwashed shot glasses. Truly this was my homeland.

Figuring that I had a few days to help my lil bro live it up Eric-style, we wasted no time in heading straight to the local market to pick up snacks and grab some brews for the evening. Thanks to a favorable exchange rate and a currency value that I had no chance or desire to fully grasp, I was makin it rain shekels on the shook and we got out of there with a messiah's bounty of pita, hummus, halvah, peppers, avocados, and pomegranate juice that would serve as our breakfast, lunch and dinner for the next three days.

It lasted two hours.

Undeterred but slightly tired, we decided to make it a home evening and convinced some of my brother's friends to hang at the Real World house with us and share in some Goldstars and cheap arrack. One Real World roommate decided to try to best me in a drinking contest and passed out by 11:30. Much like how the NFL requires rookies to be at least two years out of high school before competing with the big boys, I will henceforth require all would-be challengers to have at least two years of college drinking experience before letting them into the ring with me. Otherwise it's just dangerous. Luckily I was able to rabble rouse a bit and me and little bro had an awesome time catching up. After participating in a relatively raucous match of "never have I ever" it was determined that my brother and I have led far more interesting lives than the other players, or at least more debaucherous ones anyway. We hung out until the wee hours and my brother said I was in "24-year-old Eric form". Eric - 1, growing old gracefully - 0.

We capped the evening off with some late night Futurama as we retired to the triple occupancy stink hole of a bedroom I was blessed with for the evening and passed out before the opening credit's stopped rolling. All in all, it was looking like a good start to my triumphant return to Israel.


For all the fans out there mad that I took like ten days to get a new post up, I can only say that it's been a big week here for a lot of crazy reasons which you will see unfold over the next few posts. But, it would appear that I owe everyone a soda pop cause (drum roll please) we topped 10,000 page views this week! That means that people have looked at the various posts, pictures and rants on Dear Lonely Planet 10,000 times...or, realistically, like 7,000 times aside from my own personal hits. But whatever I'm counting it.

And They Say That Romance Is Dead...

Old school spam message

It's here! The most romantic day of the year! It's the day that everyone stresses about for weeks, either due to the frustration of planning the perfect evening or the sadness of lamenting having no perfect evening to plan. Although Cupid's pungent pheromones know no geography and his arrow flies true even across the greatest of distances, this year was a Valentine's spent alone for the great and wonderful me. And while there wasn't a lot of open hostility being thrown around, tensions felt higher than the street hookers here in darling ol' Geneva.

The day began as any other, with me oversleeping my snooze alarm by a good half hour and rushing through my morning to try to make up for lost time. After breezing through my morning shower, including only falling into the wall half asleep twice, I slowed down only to wipe up the spilt soy yogurt that splattered on my laptop while I was trying to catch up on NFL lockout news. Unable to clean up after myself, I left the container on the 2 x 2 IKEA side table I use as my dining room / living room / study / desk / footrest and raced to the office. I kept busy all day, biding my time for my hot date that evening. I came to the office prepared to take care of business and really get my hands dirty. Yup, my evening plans were way overdue, and you have no idea how excited I was.

I was gonna do laundry. Now, I'm a gentleman, and a gentleman never tells how long it has been since he last did laundry, but I'm willing to admit it was at least two standard deviations from the "statistically acceptable" median. Needless to say, this laundry had to get done in a bad way.

This isn't a euphemism. I really really had to do my friggin wash, but I realized only after scoping out the laundry places near my office, conveniently located in the middle of the red light district and surrounded by hash dealers and prostitutes, that it probably wasn't safe to leave my stuff in the dryer and trust that it would be there when I got back. My laundry card for my building was outta cash though, and only my landlady could fill it back up...I was in trouble.

Then, as it has so many times before, I was saved by pub trivia. Yes, a random 5pm email from a coworker informed me that instead of sitting in a laundrette in sin city, I could "rock out with my reading glasses out" at pub trivia. As some of you know, I've often been the least effective member of many championship pub trivia teams, so off I went, dirty socks and all, in order to woo the ladies with my incredible knowledge of useless crap. After a few rounds, my team was still hanging tough, but by round 8 we had dropped back far enough behind the leader to know we couldn't possibly win. I don't take pub trivia too personally, so I was OK with us falling apart at the seems and figured we could skate by on clever answers and overpriced Magners.

But oh how wrong I was. I guess the Valentine's spirits brought out the edge in people! Everyone's humor seemed a bit more pointed, everyone's tongues slightly sharper. The hostess spoke is such a rapid fire English-dock-worker accent that all we could make out were her plaintive invectives against the loud revelers at the bar. "Wouldyashutupandbequietsotheregularscanplaytrivia!" she'd belt repeatedly. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for keeping quiet during pub trivia, but cmon - it's Valentine's day and they're all wearing suits, let them have a goddam party at a goddam bar if they want. And perhaps worst of all, when the trivia wrapped up, everyone just got up quietly and shuffled away. The place turned into a ghost town! What about all the ladies I would impress with my mediocre skills?

Defeated once again, I closed up shop at the bar and downed the rest of my drink with the scragglers. Not the worst Valentine's ever, I thought to myself, recalling the sniveling pity party I threw myself 2L year when I had the flu and was still getting over a break-up, then recalling further every single Valentine's I ever had before the age of 19. My night was over, but I was mostly OK with it.

So I marched my way to the tram, stopping only for two shots of rail whiskey and a late night falafel. Hey, even if I didn't have a real date, at least I know how to show myself a good time.

Train Train Go Away

Pushing is ok if you have an official looking hat on

Commuting sucks. You can have all the ebooks you want and pretend like its great "me time" to peacefully listen to the same Shins album you've had on your favorites list since 2007, but if it were up to me I'd much rather not be stuck standing next to an emphysematous octegenarian who's making goo goo faces at the bleating infant across the aisle. Knowing that twice a day I have to sardine-pack myself into a throng of potential pickpockets and gropers drives me near to madness, which is why when I was asked to commute out to Bern earlier this week I thought I was in for an extended viewing of my nightmares come to life.

My mission was simple - get out to the Chinese embassy to pick up a visa. Totes mcdoable, I thought to myself as I turned to the internets to find a train schedule. The last time I took a train was in Sri Lanka and it didn't quite go as smoothly as I had hoped, so I approached the trip with cautious optimism. The Swiss rail website lacked the idiot button marked "Schedule" that was going to make my research easy, so it took about half an hour to find out that I was going to have to get the 745am train. This meant a wake up time of 630. I was not pleased.

But I'm a trooper and I thought it might be cool to get out to see Bern, even if only for a few hours. So, after a brief battle with the snooze function on my phone alarm, I made it to the shower and out the door relatively on time. To reward myself for completing the simple task of waking up, I deserved a treat for breakfast - some o.j. and a croissant, methoughts. Ducking quickly into the news stand area I grabbed a bottle of overpriced orangensaft and made my way to the bakery. The second I turned around of course I found a counter with fresh squeezed juices for the same damn price. I was perturbed, but I continued on.

The bakery I was hoping for was actually closed, but off in the distance I saw a sandwich shop type establishment and figured they would have something tasty as well. The guilt of butter ingestion due to my new found veganism proved to be too much, and I couldn't bring myself to break the rules either this early in the morning or this early in the week. As I scanned the options I noticed a theme...every single item had cheese or meat on it! Luckily I'm crafty, so I got the ham sandwich fully intending to remove said ham. Mmmm! Bread! As I headed back to catch my train, I noticed that in the four seconds it took me to get the meat bread, the nice bakery had opened up. I loosed an audible "oh cmon!" and trudged forward angrily.

As I approached the platform, I was struck by how clean, organized, safe and quiet the whole station was. In other words, the complete opposite of Sri Lanka. And, as an added reminder that we were indeed in Europe, there was a small enclosed room marked No Smoking in the middle of the platform. Apparently the rest of the country is a Smoking zone.

Right on time, the train rolled up and I tucked myself into a corner seat to enjoy my meat bread and o.j. The ride was quiet and straightforward. There were no screaming babies and at no point did I fear flying off the tracks. It was, in a single word, uneventful. Granted in a day to day existence, this is exactly the kind of ride you hope for in the morning, but it doesn't exactly make for good television. Such is the problem with Geneva in general - its pretty and boring, just like your downstairs neighbor that always shows up at dinner parties a bit too early. It's definitely a nice reprieve from the insanity of Sri Lanka but it gets old after a while. I suppose when you really think about it, maybe it is in fact better to die of malaria than of boredom.

Are You Ready For Some Futbol?

Stand beside her...and guide her...through the night with the light from aboooove...

Being abroad for the past few months, I've had to deal with some really watered down versions of big important moments back home. My Thanksgiving was extremely odd - not once did I get the chance to lay down on my cousin's floor and sip Miller Lite through a straw that I made my brother bring me because I had eaten enough sweet potato casserole to kill a goat and could no longer sit up. I missed the birth of my nephew and thus far have only been able to watch his smudgy little face over a rather shaky Skype connection. And now, worst of all, I'm missing the Superbowl!

There's something you should know about me. I. Love. The Superbowl. Historically it was always close to my birthday parties, so often the two would be joined to form one amazing Birthday/Football fiasco. It's a holiday designed around making too much food and drinking cheap beer and hanging out with all of your friends. It's about screaming at the television at full volume and not having anyone tell you that you're overreacting.

Appropriate time to yell at the television

And it's about the commercials. OH the glorious commercials! I remember the first Superbowl party I ever went to like it was yesterday, which is impressive cause these days I actually don't remember a lot about my yesterdays. I got to hang out with Star Wars toys and Wolf 3-D in my friend Anthony's basement, checking out the Skins putting it to the Bills on a tiny black and white portable tv and laughing at, without truly understanding, the groundbreaking In Living Color half time show. I ate Doritos without parental supervision. I drank like thirty five sodas. It was glorious, and it really set the tone for the years to come. Since then I've had pizza parties, chili parties, nacho parties, and even holy-crap-we-just-make-twenty-pounds-of-buffalo-wings parties, but they've all been Superbowl parties.

Until I tried to watch it in Geneva. This ex-pst spot up the street called Mr. Pickwick did in fact have the game on the big screen, but kick-off wasn't until like midnight local time. As a result of it stretching until 4 or so in the morning, I had a bear of a time convincing any of my friends to actually come watch with me. Undeterred but somewhat dismayed, I hung tough and went on my own. "Conspire as you might, fates, you shant blow this ship off course!" I screamed to the heavens, daring the furies to stop my celebration, and they responded with a cold and ominous wind to warn me against hubris. This cold and ominous wind took the form of my Sky Sports Satellite Network telecast crew, with in-depth analysis by Jay Schroeder and Cecil Martin. Don't worry, loyal readers, if you're scratching your head and thinking, "I'm not a sports guy, I don't know who those people are," you're not alone. The former a one-time champion Redskins quarterback from the late 80s and the latter a little known fullback who had a short stint with the Eagles in the early 00s, the two hardly formed the powerhouse commentary and hi-def menswear normally exhibited by the crew of Troy Aikman and Joe Buck. This did not bode well for me.

Things started slipping away more rapidly though when I became flanked on the left by drunk 18-year-old Swiss hooligans, the right by drunk 20-year-old Swiss hooligans, and directly ahead by drunk 24-year-old Swiss hooligans who looked like trained MMA fighters. In the distance I heard an echo of hope...the soft and dulcet bitchings of an American accent. Hark! Heed the siren song! I ran headlong to the table of middle aged businessmen discussing the Packers and invited them immediately to join me at my table. In order to de-creepify the situation though, I opened with a larf - "hey fellas, you sound American and I can't imagine a more crushing Superbowl than to watch it over at that table alone listening to French all god damn night, so I was wondering if you might wanna hang out with me so I don't have to throw beer bottles for entertainment." Worked like a charm.

Next step - ordering wings. I went over to the bar dedicated on breaking veganism for this all-important event and satisfied in the knowledge that my 50 year old compatriots would watch my coat for me, and right away I ordered a dozen wings. "26 franc!" yelled the bartender. "Ha I'm sorry, it's loud in here, I thought you just tried to charge me thirty dollars US for a dozen deep fried wings with ketchup and no buffalo sauce, what was that that you said there?"

"26 franc." Fine, if that's how homie wants to play it, gimme a dozen wings for thirty dollars US. I don't care. I waited for my wings, grabbed my beer and joined the boys back at the table to talk about their sons who are about my age and about how football is different than it used to be. There was very little screaming at the television, but I was happy. Hell I'd say I was downright giddy when kick off hit, and then right after the return I was ready to check out all the new awesome...commer..cial..s... wait a minute... Lloyds TSB? Citroen? Oh god, the British network coopted all the ad time! I was going to miss every single new commercial! I was about to become completely out of touch with the memes that would define a generation (for three weeks)!

Needless to say, I was despondent. The wings were overpriced and the commentators terrible. The halftime show in no way stacked up to Men On Football. The company was great to have but it wasn't the same as watching with my friends back home. And the ads? Well, let's just say I reconsidered my plan to throw beer bottles at the screen after the second spot focusing on Barclays commercial reinsurance division. At about halftime, my body started to give out on me but I pushed through as best I could. In preparation for this fantastic event, I continued my normal streak of well intentioned but incredibly misguided attempts to get into game shape, with the following tracking my bedtimes for the days leading up to Superbowl:

Wednesday - 2am, Thursday - 2am, Friday - 4am, Saturday - 6am

By the end of the third quarter I fell apart, yawning openly and closing my eyes for a minute or two at a time, unsure if I could re-open them again. I was imploding faster than a condemned Vegas casino and I had to get to sleep. I excused myself from the table and took off into the night in search of another overpriced taxi.

In hindsight, I clearly picked the worst time of year to leave the country. I've missed a lot of key moments that normally highlight my year...but for the most part, I'm a lot happier with where I'm heading on an everyday basis, so the escapism isn't as necessary. I'm less in need of the big Superbowl party to make me forget the work week - I actually don't mind the work week right now at all.

That having been said though, you're gonna have to work pretty hard to get me to leave the states during Superbowl XLVI.