Last weekend, during a traffic-filled driving trip past the NYC Waterfalls (cool, btw) to Brooklyn to check out the new Ikea (fucking shitshow, btw), I learned of a relatively new service called ChaCha. Similar to Google SMS, the service lets you submit a question via text (to CHACHA, or 242242) and then responds to you with an answer. Unlike Google SMS, however, these responses are generated by human ChaCha ‘guides’ with perky personalities, and this human-to-human aspect creates opportunities for both random questions and amusing answers.

A sample of actual ChaCha exchanges from our drive…

Is there an Ikea in Brooklyn?
Lucky you, there sure is! It’s on Beard St. Their number is 718-246-IKEA.

How do I tell a girl I like her?
Start out by making the transition from “stranger” to “that guy I see around.” As you flirt with this girl, find small ways to [cut off].

Should I buy white jeans?
If they look good on you, and you like them, then I say, go for it!

Should I shave my beard off?
Yeah, facial hair is overrated.

Does size really matter?
In basketball, it seems to. But, in all other areas, ability, attitude, performance, & technique count for a lot more.

And of course…

Does Amish Shah have a blog? If so, is it any good?
Amish Shah has a page, I don’t know if it is any good or not because I don’t know what you like

Well played, ChaCha. Well played.

Of course, after playing with this throughout the day and into the night, I just had to know what it was like on the other side. I had heard that becoming a guide wasn’t easy, that there were a lot of steps that I needed to complete, but I wanted to see for myself. I scoped out the website, and after thoughtfully crafting a 500-character response to the question “Why would you be a good guide”, I submitted my application.

The next morning, I received an email with the subject “You’re invited to become a ChaCha Guide.” I was elated at the thought that they’d bought my lines about wit, technical-savvy, love for writing, and appreciation for trivia. But when I opened the email, I realized that I had only merely passed the first part of the process. Next, I had to..

1) Fill out tax forms
2) Take a series of three tests on general problem solving, typing, and SMS/research
3) Learn how the guide system worked
4) Take a simulator test and respond to 15 incoming questions

Only after completing and passing all of those would I become a live guide. The simulator test worried me most…As I soon learned, the guide process is rather challenging, as all questions - no matter how odd - must be responded to with a legitimate source (Wikipedia does NOT count), and must be responded to within a certain timeframe. Would I be able to find an answer to “Does size really matter” and cite a source within 3 minutes?

I completed the simulator test with a medium level of confidence. Most of the questions weren’t too hard to deal with, but occasionally I got stalled finding a non-Wikipedia source to back up an answer I already knew (”What company is Warren Buffett the head of?”, for example). The response-time monitoring really got to me, and I found myself just barely getting answers in with only the facts, and no witty ChaCha “magic” sprinkled in. Sure I was accurate, but I wasn’t very “fun”. Would they accept me?

Yes. Yes they would.

After a full day of waiting, I received notification that I had been accepted as a ChaCha guide. And now I am here, world, ready to answer your questions at the whopping rate of $0.20 per pop. Ask away!

(click for full size version which - though not very sharp - shows the Pepsi-Cola sign to the left in Long Island City and the lights of the Verrazano off to the right.)

More substantive post coming sometime soon maybe.

While traveling in Buenos Aires with friends last March, we befriended a number of locals and other travelers we encountered while partying, sightseeing, and roaming the city. Some of these interactions were not but a few minutes of conversation, while others ultimately led to Facebook friendships. (And yes, I wish that sentence had a better ending, but sadly it does not).

Earlier this week I met up with one of these friends, a girl from England wrapping up a few months of traveling the Americas with a final stop in New York. She brought along one of her travel buddies, and we all chatted like old friends about our travels prior to and since meeting in Buenos Aires.

It was only when her friend asked me how we’d met that I realized - three months later - the absurdity of our initial encounter.

My response: Uh… in a cemetary.

(click for full size)

I’m lucky to live on a high floor in my apartment building, a situation which, though not cheap, provides me the luxury of a pretty decent view from my bedroom window. Its not great, mind you, since I’m really only just looking over Murray Hill and Queens, but I guess I can’t complain.

Last weekend, I was home in Florida for the wedding of my best friend from high school, John. It was an awesome wedding - a small gathering of about 100 people (99 white folks, and one brown dude) at the Baughman Center at UF, followed by an afternoon reception at the Thomas Center in Gainseville.

I was one of John’s groomsman, along with his brother, Andrew, and his close friend from college, Kellen. It was my first time being a groomsman, and it was incredible. Basically, you get to dress up, be as close to the center of attention as possible, and then get congratulated and thanked for doing nothing other than standing around and drinking a lot. In any case, the weekend was one of the funnest I’ve had in a while, and here are just a few of the reasons why.

We drank a lot.I mean, that’s what weddings are for, right? And I’m not talking about just drinking at the reception. John gave us our groomsman gifts - flasks with gators on them - before the rehearsal. I drank en route to the chapel, at the rehearsal dinner, at the family desert thing at the hotel afterward, at the hotel bar, and at Gator City, a typical college bar featuring 80’s night on Fridays and a bevy of girls surprisingly receptive to the “Haaaaave you met (name of friend)?” line from How I Met Your Mother. At one point, one girl even told me I was “the ballsiest person in [our] group”, a statement rather surprising given what most of you know as the nightmare that is any interaction I have with women. So yea, when a girl calls ME the ballsiest person in the group, its safe to say we drank a lot. And that was the night before the wedding.

We were borderline predators. I mentioned before that it was a small wedding. 90% of the guests there were the bride (Robyn, by the way) and groom’s extended families. A whole lot of aunts and uncles, and no eligible bachelorettes. With little to work with, Kellen and I tried to focus our attention on whatever we could, which turned out to be some of the, uh, underage cousins in the family. Cousins who - um, how do I say this delicately - had not yet become fat or ugly.

Mind you, we did nothing beyond make conversation and later have discussion on relative rankings, but try as we might to remain uncreepy, our cause was not helped when the sister of the groom, who’d been listening to our rather loud conversation, turned to another gentleman seated nearby at the hotel bar and said, “By the way, they’re talking about your daughters.” AWK. WARD.

But just to clarify, Dateline, nothing happened.

We were goofballs. Weddings are supposed to be a formal celebration of the most important day of two people’s lives, but us groomsmen wanted no part of that. Though we obliged in the traditional bridal party pictures, we took it upon ourselves to suggest ridiculous pictures at every point. Pictures like this one, where we tried to mimic the pictures of olden times where no one smiles, but rotated the groom’s glasses around the bridal party (I’m wearing them in this one):

Or this one, where we stole someone’s bike outside the chapel, simply because it was there (they were not happy about that):

Or this one, prompted by I’m not sure what:

Or this one, which is when things just got ridiculous:

And these are the tamer ones. There are countless more that have yet to be seen, many of them involving Kellen and I doing things so ridiculous that the photographers were convinced we were more than just friends.

We were assholes. The bridal party arrived back late to hotel after the afternoon reception, having made some pit stops in the limo on the way back to take some additional pictures. When we got back, several of the other guests already there told Kellen and I about some other event going on in the hotel. “There are a bunch of people in tuxedos and gowns milling around, you’d fit right in.” Not believing them, but nonetheless still in our own tuxedos, we decided to check it out and found our way over to a silent auction taking place in the hotel corridor, with the well-dressed guests making their way into the ballroom. We followed suit, made a beeline for the open bar, grabbed drinks, then decided to figure out just what it was we were attending. As guests took their assigned seats, we stood shamelessly along the wall. The ceremonies kicked off, and we realized we had in fact crashed a $150/plate fundraiser for the American Heart Association. Woops. Not that our guilt stopped us. We refilled our drinks twice while there, and came back again later in the evening for another round.

We were shamless. (Or at least I was.) The majority of the other wedding guests had been spending the evening socializing in a patio area near the pool, and sometime after our second trip into the AHA fundraiser, I decided that - right at that moment - the pool needed swimming in. Since Kellen and I had been staying at the groom’s house on campus, and thus had no clothes available, I decided that the only reasonable course of action was to take off running, strip off my tuxedo, and dive into the pool in only my boxers. Yup - in front of the bride and groom’s entire families. This set off a ridiculous chain of events - Kellen jumping in wearing almost his entire tuxedo, the cousins going back to their rooms to put on bathing suits, the groom’s mom being tossed in, the groom being tossed in, etc. All in all, a three hour late night pool party, all because I decided to get near-naked and take a swim.

We were assholes. Again. At some point in the night, the pool party started winding down. The older folks went to bed (except for one, who we later found out, was there to keep a watchful eye over Kellen and I), and eventually us younger ones decided to call it a night as well.

Slight problem.

Kellen and I were staying at the groom’s house, but had forgotten to take a key to the house with us when leaving in the morning. And the only person with said key was, well, the groom. So after loosely putting our tuxedos back on at 1am, we did the only thing we could, disturb the newlyweds on their wedding night. Man, that conversation was fun.

[Bang bang bang bang]
Kellen: “John, open the door! We know you can’t last this long!!! We need the key to your house!”
[bang bang bang bang, groom eventually opens door wearing nothing but jeans]
Me: Dude, you naked under those pants?
John: What? No.
Me: [holding up wet boxers and grinning] I am!
John: Get out of here.

Lastly, we were stupid. Lacking any foresight, we rode around in a limo all day not realizing that at some point we’d have to find our way back to the car parked at the chapel. Lacking any cash at all, we couldn’t call a cab to pick us up from the hotel. And so we walked. Like a billion miles across campus. There we were, a dry-heaving, freeballing Indian guy, and a bare-chested, one-shoed white guy, roaming endlessly through the deserted streets of Gainesville back to our car. Like complete idiots.

I’ve spent a lot of time with my own extended family lately, and like folks from the motherland often do, they constantly ask me why I have not yet gotten hitched myself. Its weekends like this that demonstrate that I’m, quite frankly, years away from achieving the maturity level necessary.

—

(Quick disclaimer: The first two pics above - the ones with the blue border - were taken by the wedding’s official photographers, IMJ Photography (see their post on the wedding here) and are in no way any works of my own. Just want to make sure I’m not stepping on any toes.

Yes, this is me using a shamless plug to avoid upsetting them for using their pictures.)

From my roommate:

i have an alternate ego i use for spam and signing up for crap, and linkedin just suggested i may know myself

Last weekend, I went home to Florida and attended the bachelor party for John, my best friend from high school. We held the festivities in Jacksonville, John’s future home and also where a bulk of the attendees lived. While the day started off with a round of simulated golf at Urban Golf (fucking amazing, why aren’t there more of these?), an afternoon riverside barbecue with a little JUI (Jetskiing…) action, and an epic evening preparty of four-on-four beer pong and suicide flip cup (everyone flips at once… games go MUCH faster and everyone gets to drink), the real fun was had at Maverick’s, the country bar where we decided to close out the day.

Some of the group were worried about how I might handle the bar, thinking that I had become a fantsy-pants New Yorker and was also, you know, NOT a redneck. However, I couldn’t have been more excited for the evening. I insisted that they teach me the line dances before we got there, so that I’d be ready to bust moves as soon as I got in, and in fact I DID BUST SOME MOVES. Over the course of the night, as each line dancing song was played, I would race out to the floor to get in on the action. I was hit or miss, missing more as the night went on and the jack and cokes kept flowing, but I enjoyed every single minute of it.

There was one dance in particular that was amazing. I can’t remember what song it was set to, but it involved girls and guys pairing up and forming two rings around the dance floor. Girls in the outer ring, facing inward. Guys on the inside, facing out. The song starts, and the next few minutes consist of performing a little 10-second line dancing jig with the girl in front of you, and then rotating. It was kinda like speed dating set to music, or for you Indians/Gujratis, the circular Raas thing with more physical contact. Essentially, the dance enables you to dance with/shamlessly hit on every single girl on the dance floor.

COWBOYS = FUCKING GENIUSES.

Now, this was a country bar, and that meant there was one other activity to also participate in. The mechanical bull. I had ridden one once before, at a work event held in a hotel four years ago. This time, I was much more inebriated and thus much. more. excited. Up I went, and by some dumb luck, someone remembered they had a camera phone to capture the ride.

Witness Exhibit A.

This is me riding the mechanical bull. I love this picture for so many reasons. The blur, though mostly just a fault of the shitty cameraphone, so appropriately captures the moment. This is pretty much what it looked like to the guy taking a picture, and I’m sure that’s what my vision looked like at the time as well. Also, although the pose isn’t bad, it seems pretty obvious from this picture that I’m terrible at this. Which is a true fact. I did not last long.

Witness Exhibit B.

Another phenomenal picture. This picture more clearly shows my ineptitude when it comes to riding mechanical bovines. It is pretty obvious here that I am just, quite simply, failing. However, an important distinction to make between this picture and the one before it is the differences in blur. If you look closely, you can see a little bit of motion blur in my arms and torso. However, there is very little blur at all in the actual bull.

Yes, my friends. This is not me failing to ride the bull. This is me failing to GET ON.

Extremely drunk and giggly from being thrown off during my first ride, I could not summon up the energy and hand-eye coordination to jump off the bouncy surface and back onto the bull. Even when they tilted the fucking thing toward me.

Eventually I made it back on, and lasted another few seconds before I was unceremoniously thrown off. As I picked myself up, I saw a group of girls unanimously giving me thumbs-down review of my performance. Embarrassed, I tried to redeem myself the only way I knew how, shrugging my shoulders, pointing my finger back and forth between the bull and I, and saying…

“Hey, I’m brown. We don’t really do this.”

I’ve talked about How I Met Your Mother quite a few times here on this blog. In short, I think its one of the best sitcoms on television right now. The characters seem like people I’d actually be friends with, and in fact, a lot of the events of the story do parallel things that have happened in my life.

Like that one time I had a ridiculous conversation with a friend and then saw the same conversation take place on the show LATER THAT SAME DAY.

Or, how McLaren’s (the fake pub that the gang always hangs out in) is based on a real life pub in New York called McGee’s.

As in, the McGee’s pub that was literally next door to the apartment building I lived in for my first three years in New York. The McGee’s that I hung out in on a weekly basis. Whose bartenders I was friends with. Whose super bowl pool I joined. The McGee’s I always try to get people to go to when we can’t think of anything to do (and still do sometimes, even though I don’t live there anymore).

Years from now, I will tell my kids about the TV show that was based on my life.

[Discovered via Midwesterner, confirmed via IMDB and TV Guide.]

I was just at ticketmaster searching for tickets and came across what is arguably the best CAPTCHA I will ever encounter in my life.