There But For The Grace Of Google...

"All my life, whenever it comes time to make a decision, I make it and forget about it."

~ Harry S. Truman ~

Should I take the bus or the subway? Should we order Chinese or Thai tonight for dinner? Should I in solitude suffer the crushing weight of a miserable job that pays my bills or risk everything by throwing it all away and starting from scratch with no guarantees or safety nets to break my precipitous fall? Life's full of little choices, and every time we commit to one option we're forced to weigh the opportunity costs of not making the opposite decision. You analyze, take accounts, sketch it out, draw conclusions, ponder results, pray to various gods, rub rabbits' feet, and eventually, when all else fails, you Google.

And lately I can't shake the feeling that my Googling is actually deciding way more of my future than I ever anticipated. When I'm just trying to figure out which Italian place has the best gnocchi in the East Village, the effects of search engine optimization don't really give me pause, but this goes well beyond that. As noted in my recent birthday post, my lone wolf days of Sri Lanka have been finally put to rest - I've been taken in by a pack of law interns who like doing shots and making Lawrence v. Texas references.

So the lone lawyer never has to be alone again

Fortuitously, I met these guys because they happened to be in the lobby of my hostel when I arrived in Geneva and I happened to run into them right as they were talking about plans for the evening. And you know why I ended up picking that hostel in particular? When I Googled for hostels in Geneva, it popped up as the first result. Now, barring me taking a joke too far and alienating everyone I recently met, a huge portion of my memories for the next few months will be shaped by that random search result. This goes way deeper than ending up with sub-par pumpkin ravioli thanks to a bad restaurant suggestion - this completely reshapes the face of my Swiss experience.

Odd how the search terms you clickity-clack into a Firefox window might totally define your future, hmm? For some, this kind of I-don't-like-meta-tags-determining-my-fate divination might feel a bit daunting. "But Eric," you proclaim, "it doesn't seem right to me that the interwebs is going to pick out my friends!" Then angrily you stomp off to check your OKCupid account and shake your iphone violently to see where Urbanspoon wants you to eat tonight. As I do all within my power to refrain from telling you that saying interwebs isn't cool anymore, and in fact probably never was, I nod to myself chucklingly as you ass-backwards stumble into raising an interesting issue. All this technology is giving us the power to have unlimited choices while completely eviscerating the need to choose for ourselves at the same time!

After struggling with the notion that Google has totally taken the reigns away from my somewhat capable hands, I choose to reject the premise that my future is defined by some marketing geek's SEO terms. At the end of the day, making a decision doesn't really change just because you have a million options to pick from, and it certainly doesn't change because you only have two options to pick from. Whether Google spat out a random suggestion as number one on a hostel list or some smartphone app figured out that I like red sauce and not leaving my neighborhood, when I pick something and go for it, I'm the one making the decision. More options, less options, it doesn't matter. I pull the trigger. Or click the mouse, as it were.

So I'm telling Google that it deserves a nice pat on the back for pushing me in the right direction, but I opted for the hostel. I promise not to yell at Yelp because my penne arrabiata last night sucked - I chose to walk into that restaurant after all. And if this whole life-changing-gamble I'm working on doesn't pan out, I won't blame anyone but myself.

And if it succeeds, I'm not giving Google any credit. 

On The Celebration Of Birthdays Abroad

"We grow neither better nor worse as we get old, but more like ourselves."

~ Mary Lamberton Becker ~

Let's be honest here people - I'm a pretty awesome guy. I'm funny, giving and deeper than the Indian Ocean. But all too often my kindnesses go unnoticed, my witticisms ignored. So each year, in order to trick every single person I know into lavishing me with praise and attention, I throw a birthday party for myself.

Selfish? Probably. Gauche? Undoubtedly. But goddammit its a good time for all involved and I get to bask in the glory of your unyielding fanaticism. In years past, my m.o. has been to invite a lot of people over to my place to pig out on some cardinal-sin-level gluttony followed by dancing at a hipstery dive bar. This all started with my Bucca di bulimia party when I turned 24, and continued straight on through to my Belligerent Burrito Birthday Blowout a couple years back. Last year I took things soaring to new heights for my completely misunderstood Dubo Dubon Fritopie party, wherein I took a day off of work to slow-simmer 15 pounds of chili which party guests were then able to enjoy as 'walkin tacos' that evening. For that tiny sliver of the population that doesn't yet know what a 'walkin taco' is, its when you open up a small bag of Fritos and generously dollop in chili, cheese and toppings. Best enjoyed if eaten with a spork while drinking cheap beer at a NASCAR race.

I spent six hours creating this masterpiece of a joke, and literally not one of the 200 people I invited got it

This year however, I found myself away from my usual throngs of well-wishers who tolerate my benign stereotyping and occasional tickle attacks. Luckily, a few weeks ago I slyly infiltrated a coven of U Mich Law students interning in Geneva as well, and they took pity on my wayward soul and have adopted me in as one of their own. To reward them, I wanted to let them buy me drinks and pay me compliments for a few hours.

The easy-bake-oven brand hot plate I call a stove isn't really able to handle 15 pounds of chili, so the plan was to meet for some cheap falafel and then go booze it up a bit. My meticulously crafted email invitation was hilarious. My hair looked awesome. My jeans were super tattered. I was ready to roll. For my pregame celebraccion, I sat down in my chair at home with a hunk of baguette and a few glasses of vin rouge. Nothing says "Eric getting ready to go out" like thrashy punk music, so I revisited the past decade in song. Brand New's Jude Law and a Semester Abroad kicked things off, to which I added a dash of Lagwagon, a pinch of Misfits and just a light dusting of Bad Religion (my favorite band of all time). As I kicked my legs up on my Ikea coffee table, a sip of Swiss Pinot Noir freshly trespassing my lips and trickling towards the fire burning in my belly, I listened to Sid Vicious' version of My Way and thought to myself, "truly this is how the Sex Pistols envisioned their fans enjoying their 30th birthdays."

I topped up my flask with some cheap bourbon and stormed off into the night. A swig or two on the tram kept me warm, as I was wearing my beater jacket and a tshirt that would allow me to show off my arm ink when the time was right. My birthday, my outfit choice, ya dig? The party guests were running just a smidge behind schedule, so I cracked open a tall boy outside the falafel shop and enjoyed the Paquis with all its wretched-hive-of-scum-and-villainy charm. In true Eric form, I finished off the 24-oz'er before my crew arrived, thus ruining my entire plan to have people roll up on me at the start of my 30th birthday party and find me drinking alone in an alley. But we all have to grow up sometime, so instead they were forced to find me huddled with a Camel Light in the corner of a graffiti ridden door frame trying to avoid getting busted for loitering.

Soon everyone showed up and we got crack-a-lackin. With a sturdy foundation of red wine, nicotine and fried chickpeas in my belly, I strode confidently to the saloon to test out 30-year-old Eric's drinking stamina. Forgoing all things advisable, I alternated between Carlsburg, caramel vodka shots and swigs of cheap bourbon, doing my best to clear my plate so that people could keep buying me drinks. Like Uncle Ben reminded America back when I was a young whippersnapper, with great flask comes great responsibility, so I sip-sip-passed it around the circle so that my friends could all get tight right along with me.

And I think it worked. The night was a friggin blarst. We took over the dance floor at ex-pat hot spot Mr. Pickwick and for the second week in a row a girl told me, "wow, you're a much better dancer than I would've expected!". We sang out of tune and out of time, but we sang so loudly that the cacophonic chorus rang to me as angel's bells. We. Kicked. Ass. As the night drew to a close, I engaged a sympathetic ear with the over indulgent emotional birthday meltdown that I have every year, wherein I alternate violently between the screaming highs of unadulterated, tearful joy and the crushing lows of unadulterated, tearful self-loathing. You know, the uze. Jewish god smiled upon me and left open a Turkish place just long enough for me to score a late night shwarma and roll on home. Happy birthday, Eric, a free pass on your veganism!

My boastful proclamation that I planned to have 30 shots in the evening was, in hindsight, overly bombastic, but I still managed to damage my brain cells enough to show that I had a great time. As final proof that despite my age I am still an steaming locomotive on its way into a mountainside, a runaway truck barreling unstoppably over a switchback, I realized at around 4 p.m. that not only was I wearing unmatching socks, but the left one was inside out. You can tell everyone you know that a birthday party with Eric is a sloppy good time, but let it never be said that growing old equates to growing up.

Taxi Troubles

Woah...this acid is making me see crazy stuff...are those PALM trees?

After two years of overpaying for cross-town taxis, I was pretty cheesed off at the cab situation in NYC. Sure, I could go 80 blocks straight north to visit my brother in under 10 minutes for about 12 bucks, and yeah, I could avoid an hour and a half train ride back from god-knows-where-Brooklyn for like 20 bones, but it just seemed like a totally unnecessary expense! So when I was in Sri Lanka, and now Geneva, I thought there was no way that the cab situation here could be any worse than back home.

And it wasn't. It was totally better in every way, so end of story. Not buying that? Too anti-climactic for you? Well, you're an astute observer of the human condition, because right now I'm literally seething with anger about the taxi troubles I've been having abroad.

In the Lanka, of course, you're mostly dealing with tuk-tuks instead of actual factual taxis, so you're already taking your life into your hands when you hop in for a ride. These rickety-shaws are little more than a motorcycle with a bench bolted onto its back and the driver's training consists of little more than just buying the tuk-tuk. My dream of driving one of these babies sadly never came to fruition, but I can't imagine I would've done much worse behind the handelbars than any of the locals.

I'd explain to Driver where I wanted to go, and then we'd putter off down the highway seemingly confident in knowing how to get to my unpronounceable destination. After about 30 minutes of somewhat directed ambling, we'd stop on the road side and Driver would hop out to snap some quick Sinhala back and forth with a local police officer or shopkeep, and we'd continue on our way. "Wonder if they're friends," I'd think to myself. Moments later, after executing perhaps one or two soft lefts around drastically complicated traffic circles, we'd stop again and a similar exchange would take place with someone new. "Wow, Driver sure has a lot of friends!" After five or six more of these incidents, it dawned on me that Driver had no frigging clue where we were heading, and that basically all the people he was talking to were providing him unhelpful or conflicting directions. The result of course was a good hour or two of driving in circles, constantly missing our target and driving me slowly insane.

Based on the clock-work precision of everything in Geneva, I figured my taxi situation would improve once I got here. Luckily though the tram system is so great that until just last week, I haven't had to take a taxi at all. Then of course I went out on a weeknight, and the trams for the most part stop running by like 930 at night on Tuesdays. After a couple of ciders at the way funkier than me Alhambar, I walked my intern friends to the tram stop and watched as they ran to catch their ride home. Silly interns, I thought, running for a tram. Since I was heading in a different direction, I didn't bother to hurry. Mine will be along shortly, unless something crazy is happening, like their tram keeps running until 2 am and mine stopped exactly four minutes before I got to the stop.

I bet you think you know where I'm going with this. But you're wrong. My tram stopped running almost two hours before I got to the stop. There was no minor frustration with staying just past my curtain call...I had taken a full-on nap on stage and slept right through it, as well as most of the after-party! Frustrated and cold, I snapped up a cab and got rolling. Despite Driver speaking no English and me only having a basic grasp on French, I managed to guide us to my corner in just under 5 minutes with zero complications. Then I got the bill...15 franc for a five minute ride. I was paying over $3 a minute for this cab service! I was sick to my stomach, and just thinking about the sheer cost of this stupid cab ride was driving me slowly insane.

All in all, I know that dealing with New York cabbies can still be a big headache. They might refuse to pick you up when their shift is ending, and when it's raining you might as well just give up your afternoon cause you ain't getting a ride anywhere. But considering the sheer distance they cover with GPS driven accuracy and the overall comparative cost for said service, I'm promoting NY to "best cabs in the world" and will refuse to hear any arguments to the otherwise. Such mild irritations, in my humble opinion, are way more tolerable than being driven slowly insane.

The Thing About First Impressions...

 "Not even the creator of the universe knew what this man was going to say next."

~ Kurt Vonnegut ~

Being essentially on the road for four straight months has some pretty sweet upsides. For instance, I can tell the same story over and over again and each time I have an entirely new audience to bore half to death. While the spinning of my "that time I climbed Machu Picchu" yarn has grown to me both tired and hackneyed, its crisp, rehearsed delivery keeps it at the top of the charts for first-time listeners. It's nearly impossible for people to get sick of me because we only have a handful of potential social interactions before it's time for me to skip town and set up shop on a new continent. And possibly best of all, each stop is a new chance to reinvent myself and make up all sorts of cool and interesting facts about my past that may or may not be true.

Reinvention Fail

Such perks however come at a cost. With each chance meeting and new introduction, I'm faced with the all important 'first impression' at least seven or eight times a week. While my short time at each volunteer post might mean never having to say I'm sorry for my generally skittish behavior, life is generally more enjoyable when everyone around me doesn't think I'm entirely out to lunch, so I have to continually be on my toes lest I send the wrong message to my new acquaintances.

Normally I do fine in these situations. Ask anyone who has ever come with me to a law firm meet & greet - I can press flesh with the best of 'em! And my track record of success as a kick ass plus-one at company holiday parties speaks for itself. Recently though I think the stress of my sixteen week status as the new guy is catching up to me. My introductions are getting briefer, my self-descriptions more terse, but through it all I've done a bang-up job of staying sharp. Then last Friday at my first social event with all the interns at my office, the wheels came off the bus.

For dinner, we hit the legendary Bains des Paquis for fondue and white wine, dining in style while overlooking beautiful Lake Geneva. Having recently sworn off all dairy (owing in part to my new found, half-assed veganism, and in majority to my crushing lactose intolerance), my drinking base consisted entirely of five pieces of doughy bread and a bottle of cheap Chardonnay. It was still early in the night and I was on a tear, so I remained at all times entertaining and kept things pretty lighthearted. If anything, there were some minor fault lines creaking across my friendly surface but nothing too damaging.
First Impression Rating: 7/10

Being the cash conscious consumer that I am, I purchased a hip flask late last week in order to help save money whilst engaging in brown-liquor-based self destruction. With a glass of cheap bourbon clocking in at about 15 Swiss Francs, and the flask itself setting me back a mere 45, I figured it would pay for itself within about an hour of casual drinking. Despite careful stock being taken of my bank account during the planning stages of this debacle-in-the-making, I failed entirely to consider the toll my secret shots might have on my sanity. When the wine at dinner was finished, I turned to the flask to get the party started. I offered some of my delicious Four Roses brand bourbon to my coworkers but received few acceptances. I would later polish off the flask in the bathroom of a sports bar nearby.
First Impression Rating: 5/10

The time then came for us to hit the clizub and get our dance on! I was entirely excited to rock out a bit, having celebrated my one week anniversary back in civilization with the aforementioned wine, whiskey and two additional pints of Carlsburg for good measure. I was so excited, in fact, that I walked directly into a wall on the way out of the bar. Now, bear you well in mind, when I say walked into a wall I don't mean brushed shoulders with the corner or clipped my wingtips on the crown molding - no sir, in mid sentence I went nose-to-brick with a half ton of mortar and clay that I honestly did not see coming. My momentum carried me a good foot or so back off the surface, and amazingly I did not spill a single drop of my beer.
First Impression Rating: 3/10

Last stop: dance club. In my seven-year-old Banana Republic button down and ratty jeans I marched past the bouncer like an I-banker on bonus day, too stoked about his hair gel and opportunity to test out his new Johnston & Murphy's to even consider that there might be a cover charge. "Not now chief, I'm in the zone," I thought to myself! I set up shop near the dance floor and got to work. That is, I got to work doing the only thing I know how to do on a dance floor - skank. That's right bitches, Eric's visceral response to music of any kind is to pretend I'm at a New Found Glory concert and hope for the best. Needless to say, I made few friends this way, and managed to obliterate the last inroads I had made with the interns by Irish-Exiting to catch the last tram home. Like the Millennium Falcon escaping a Death Star explosion, I blasted out of the club door and picked a direction. "West!" I thought to myself while running at full speed in worn out loafers through the red light district at 2:40 A.M., my coat hanging pathetically off my left arm and the cigarette in my mouth casting ash about the crosswalks. "West is the way to the tram!" Drunk Eric's hippocampus took over and guided me to the tram station where I caught the very last ride back to my apartment.
First Impression Rating: 0/10 = *TOTAL FAIL*

Of course, when I got into work on Monday, I got a little ribbing for my semi-ridiculous approach to first impressions, but all in all people still seemed to like me just fine. I suppose the only real loss here is that I tipped my hand a bit earlier than anticipated. Ideally you want to lay down a foundation of normalcy before letting everyone know that you're actually a one man wrecking crew, but since when do I do anything the normal way?

Please Pack Your Knives And Go

Imagine yourself at a bar, chatting up some hottie that not ten minutes ago your friend said was way out of your league. Normally you might heed the warning and hang back, choosing to forgo the imminent rejection in lieu of a few quiet sips of whiskey and a non-threatening staring contest with the television. But tonight you feel confident. You're kicking ass and this gorgeous stranger is attending furiously to your every word. They ask the all important question - "Can you cook?"

"Absolutely," you incorrectly boast.

Up until yesterday evening, whenever I found myself in this situation I proudly claimed the ability to cook like a champion and by gummit I meant it. The wool, however, has been lifted from my eyes and I realize now that I couldn't cook my way out of a paper bag. If my life literally depended on me being able to properly make something as simple as rice, I would say a few hail mary's and text my family that I love them one last time.

It's possible that I'm just a bit rusty though. Thanks to the incredible convenience of New York City and my incredible desire to never do dishes, I don't think I've actually cooked anything since like 2004. Even then, "cooked" is really a generous term for what I was really doing: assembling sandwiches, grilling sausages or microwaving lean cuisines I bought at the 7/11. My kitchen in Sri Lanka was where my good friend Kasparov lived, and he was a rat. I made a deal with my furry flatmate very early on - I don't go into the kitchen, and he doesn't shit in my food. This arrangement worked just fine considering how cheap the food was, so eating out every night was a simple, sustainable affair. Trying to dine in style in my new hometown of Geneva is remarkably more costly, and as a result I've resorted to grocery shopping and a trumpeted return to the kitchen.

I woke up a bit early one morning and hit the local food mart, picking up the basics that I will need to make all my favorite dishes for the coming weeks. This of course included rice, peanut butter and bananas, because everything I plan to eat for the next three months will include one or more of these ingredients. Having suppered on peanut butter and honey sandwiches for four straight days, I decided to face my demons and make some delicious fried rice.

My buddies during my London semester used to lovingly call me "Iron Chef Fried Rice" back in the day and my Asian delicacy was the foodstuff of legends. Imagine if you will a bucket of gelatinously sticky white rice, crudely diced peppers and some chopped up bangers for protein, drowned in soy sauce and shoveled into your face with a wooden cooking spoon. I know what you're thinking and yes, it was heaven in tupperware. Apparently since my "Iron Chef" days in 2001, I have failed to develop any real talents in the economics of the home, and I still manage to screw up even the simplest of recipes.

Artist's rendition

Unwilling to google the directions on how to make rice, I attempted to follow the German instructions on the side of my box of basmati with deadly precision. Clicking on the hot plate, I dumped an unmeasured portion of grains into the pot, guessed roughly as to how much water would be required to make the dry rice into cooked rice and turned the burner on Max. My approach to rice making is a lot like my approach to love making - start out by intensely heating the situation up, get dangerously close to boiling over and then reduce the fire to a dull roar for about 10 or 15 minutes. Everyone wins. Just like in my college days, the rice gooed-up into a thick, paste-like slurry. I added in a slightly burnt fried egg and some almonds for protein, and then, to really put a ribbon on this turd of a meal, folded in some canned peas and carrots.

What was staring at me from the cookery was what I think despair would look like if it were a food. It's taste, on the scale of deliciousness, fell somewhere between pancake batter and gruel served to Russian orphans, and the presentation would've given Padma Lakshmi a heart attack from sheer disappointment. Luckily though I made enough so now I have leftovers and will get to enjoy a cold, three-day old version of the same when I finally get desperate enough to polish it off. I think from here on out I'll be sticking with the peanut butter and bananas.

I'm (Occassionally) Lovin' It!

Literally everyone loves McDonalds fries

 The world is a glorious place full of wonderful new foods to try. I fancy myself an adventurous eater, so I like to partake in the local cuisine of every land I visit. Fried grasshoppers in Vietnam? Pass 'em here. Roasted guinea pig in the mountains of Peru? You bet your ass I had seconds. Deep fried pigeon blood cubes in London? Ordered it...but definitely switched to the chicken fried rice after I realized that the pigeons were collected in a net from Trafalgar Square. Even I have limits.

But as anyone who's ever spent too much time on the road has learned, after a while even the most delicious foreign delicacies lose their appeal. You miss potable water that doesn't require antibiotic ice cubes. You dream of a turkey sandwich that doesn't have a random pink sauce coating each layer of under-toasted, bleached-flour white bread. You crave the steak-and-potatoes lifestyle that has coated your arteries so thick with plaque that even a stiff breeze might jar loose the clot that ends it all. You want what any good red-blooded American boy or girl craves after a tough day on the baseball diamond - Mc-friggin-donalds.

Nothing drudges up those post- little league memories like a couple of reheated burgers and over-salted fries. It's comfort food (quite literally) on hormones, and it hits the spot harder than Bill Romanowski hits practice squad running backs. So after three months on the road in Asia and still reeling from the emotionally trying recovery of my now sullied laptop, I said screw it and had myself a lunch date with the clown. Malaysia kept tempting me with its New Years themed "Prosperity Burger" - an oblong shaped football of reconstituted chop beef smothered and covered in what could only be described as "a viscous, oil-like deluge of peppery filth". I was mad at Asia for having so rudely and abruptly jacked the fun out of my last day in Kuala Lumpur so I caved and ordered a supersized helping of make-Eric-slightly-happy meal goodness.

Satisfying is not a word I would use to describe my dining experience. The curly fries (which are hard to screw up) were passably tasty, but my Prosperity Burger brought shame upon my ancestors with its failure to not slide out of the bun and fall onto the counter top. The highly touted "Prosperity McFizz" turned out to be nothing more than Sprite and Minute Maid mixed with an improper balance of syrup to flavor and quenched neither my thirst nor the fiery disappointment now burning in my belly. Of course, the gastrointestinal irritation may well have been from the whole peppercorns generously distributed across the porous surface of my lunch meat. Either way, the meal was an epic fail.

Lessons learned from this catastrophe? Absolutely none. Given how I felt at the time, even knowing that my meal would spit in the face of all things holy, I would do it again given the opportunity. Hell, out of 100 chances to redo lunch, I would've done the same thing 100 more times. Granted, I didn't go to Asia for the burgers and it seems obvious in hindsight that I was rolling the dice a bit, but after a while you just want the chance to feel like you can grab onto something familiar when in an unfamiliar land. I wanted McDonalds. I needed McDonalds. And damnit, I didn't care if it was the worst fast food in the world, I was getting McDonalds. So be careful what you wish for in Asia - you might just get it.

The Malaysian Job

Dramatic, albeit culturally inaccurate, reenactment

I been robbed.

No sword-toting-triads cornered me in an alley in some kind of vendetta-based street fight. No stealthy street urchin picked 'part my pocket whilst I was distracted by fireworks at a harvest festival. No drugged out thug snagged the camera from my hand as he was jonesing from opium withdrawal. Nope, nothing quite so dramatic. Instead, I get robbed by a security guard at the hotel where my bags were stored in the locked, CCTV monitored bag check room that was theoretically the safest possible place for my stuff to be. WTF, universe!

For my trip 'round Malaysia, my good buddy Shwa and I decided to store the majority of our baggage (emotional and otherwise) in a luggage room at the first hotel we were at in Kuala Lumpur. In theory, a genius play on our parts, as we drilled down to having one bag each with just enough in it to survive. Or, in Shwa's case, just enough tshirts to always have them smell funky. After carefully picking out which knock-off Eastern Mountain Sports bags we wanted to purchase from the shady street vendor, we set out prepared well for the rigors of life on the road in the Orient. By this of course, I mean we had gym shorts and cough syrup and stayed at hotels nicer than my apartment in NYC, but we were goddam well prepared for it, for certain.

A couple of sunny weeks spent at the beach later, we returned to KL to collect our gear at just after midnight only discover that from my pack had been pilfered my brand spanking new macbook pro and my precious, precious iphone. As any iphone owner knows, life without your iphone is dull and meaningless, so this incident sparked in me a rage and despair more typically experienced by Greek gods and jazz musicians. But I kept it all in check...remarkably well, I might add. Instead of flipping shit I went on total emotional lock-down and marched down to the front desk to demand either blood or the return of my vitally important electronics. I didn't care which at the time. After meeting with the security guard, I was assured that he would look through CCTV tape and see what he could find out, then we would proceed from there, but things didn't look good. Shwa wisely added the line "if the laptop just happens to show up somewhere, we'll be happy about that and probably won't have to file any complaints, ya dig?" This indicated that even if jackass mc-guardface knew something about it, we'd probably not have to box his ears so long as I got my laptop back.

After about twenty minutes we got a call. "We think there is a laptop that was found in the housekeeping pantry. It might be yours." Instead of screaming "SO BRING IT THE F UP HERE YOU MORON" I said, "OK, please bring it by and I will confirm whether or not it is my computer." Frantic pacing ensued, relieved only thereafter by the ominous knock on the door and presentation of a laundry bag containing a computer. I sat cross-legged on the hallway carpeting and tore through the bag to reveal a macbook pro. My macbook pro. Joy washed over me in crashing waves but my dead-inside approach to dealing with stress left me feeling no relief. But even steel-for-a-heart Eric is not invincible, so for effect let's say that a single tear rolled down my cheek and splashed victoriously on the keyboard.

Happy about not losing my entire digital life to nothingness, I tried to sign online to warn ATT that the precious was still on the lam, but instead found a few souvenirs left behind by the culprit on my desktop. Intrigued, I clicked through to learn more about my technophilic picklock only in shock to discover a picture of the security guard himself! How could this possibly get any weirder, I thought to myself.

Then, it got a whole lot weirder. Now, I'm sure you've heard that seeing is believing. But this is a family restaurant so I can't feasibly show you what I discovered next without having to change my page access to 18+, so let my thousand words paint you a picture. A shaky handycam pans across what appears to me the landscape of a man and woman in the throws of passion, quickly catching only a glimpse of our sticky-fingered lothario atop his lady friend, in flagrante delicto. The picture is grainy and the sequence of actions jumbled enough to make me wonder how he pulled off a "let's switch so that I'm on top" maneuver without dropping the video camera, but there is no doubt in the world that this jackass made a sex tape and put it on my desktop. This alone was nearly enough for me to forgive the whole ordeal, but frankly the eight seconds of blurry video wouldn't even hold the interest of the most tactless and desperate thirteen-year-old who just discovered auto-erotica, so I filed a police report and tried to get the guy arrested.

Things I have learned from these events. One - I am too trusting. I immediately thought there was no way that security guard could be the culprit until I saw him sex-taping his ladyfriend, and I doubt I'll get that much evidence to adjudge future potential transgressors. Two - I think my iphone days might be over. I won't be buying a brand new iphone, thanks in part to having no job or income, until at least April and even then my contracts up just a short time later. Dare I go droid? Three - Malaysian women have yet to discover the joys and pains of proper waxing techniques. This was more of a pet interest than a life lesson, but still I felt like sharing.

And four - getting robbed sucks. It's demoralizing and you feel helpless. Even with the cops involved, there's no way in hell I'm getting my iphone back, and its a bloody miracle I even got the laptop back (big ups to g slash d on that one). I'm happy I was able to comport myself with as much reserve as I did throughout the affair, but it comes as little comfort to know that some asshole is using my phone to make sex tapes of him and his girlfriend while I'm left with a 6 year old Nokia to get me through. On the other hand, it's uplifting to know that even in a predominantly Muslim country, people still like making sex tapes. Perhaps the real crime here was not making it a good one.

You Say You Want A Resolution?

It's that time of year again. Time to shake off your hangover, brush the cigarette ash from your favorite jeans and pray that whatever it is that's on your nice shoes can be cleaned up in time for the work week. The post-New Years recovery is seldom an easy one and almost always involves a laundry list of ways you plan to improve yourself in the coming year. These resolutions, while well intentioned, seldom make it past Passover and almost never survive the summer months. Will we ever learn to stop making them and just resolve to be better people on balance?

No. And me being no exception, I've made a few new "fix up Eric" resolutions for the coming year. I figure through public announcement I can be held to task for their completion by my literally dozens of followers, and I fully expect your disappointment and anger should I falter along the way.

Resolution 1 - In 2011, I will do 10,000 pushups. This is all part of the get fit plan that I've had since I was a fat 5th grader, but I got a good feeling about this year. On average, I will need to do 50 pushups on each of 200 days throughout the year, which seems entirely doable (barring shouder injury or drunkenness).

Resolution 2 - Keep forcing myself to try new things, even if they fail 90% of the time. No matter how sick I get from random foods or how f-d my career ends up from my various life choices, I pledge to continue making ridiculously misguided decisions in the interests of exploring the world around me. Recent failures, such as my "steamboat dinner" set back may make me question why I branch out so widely, but you apparently learn as much from failure as you do success. This makes me a veritable professor emiertus when it comes to ordering at restaurants. This steamboat of which I speak consisted of two pots of boiling soup and a tray of raw seafood which I was trusted to cook in said soup - unable to know how long to actually cook seafood though, I ended up with a few mouthfuls of raw squid and an upset tummy. Worth it? Perhaps, if only for the story.

Resolution 3 - Convince my friends to come visit me in Europe. Whilst traveling alone, I realized that I frigging hate traveling alone. I will thus be working on various attempts to get people to visit me in Europe while I spend the next three months in Geneva. Brush off that Italian phrasebook, break out your worst French accent and get a flak jacket for Kosovo - it's EuroTrip 2011 with yours most true!

Resolution 4 - Find my purpose in life. Ok, so usually this takes a long time and just sneaks up on you when you least expect it, but I've been doing all kindsa soul searching and what not so I want to keep this going into the new year. Whether it means getting a new job or a new tattoo, stumbling upon true love or stumbling home from the bar, I'm hoping to have it all figured out by the stroke of midnight on Jan. 1, 2012. I figure if the world is going to end that year anyway, I might as well have my shit together when I have to face the Mayan gods in the underworld. Best part is, this is a really grandiose goal so if I fail this one but succeed in any of the others, I can call the list a win and not feel like I failed myself in the new year. Then I can be the guy who has no direction but can do a shitload of pushups.