we were so hype. or was it fly??!!!

• slightly askance trucker hat - check
  
• fanny pack - check
  
• wispy stache - check
• moppy hair - check
  
• disaffected stare - check

not sure if this was five years behind the times, or fifteen years ahead.
if only i hadn't tucked that shirt in ...

yes - that is indeed me!
"back in the days when i was a teenager /
before i had status and before i had a pager"

Trying Not to Sweat the Details

Since when did I become such a pedant? Why, not so long ago, I was talking about wanting to lead a less regimented, more organic existence [see old slackers site, 2003.03.19 entry ... hmm - i guess that was a while ago]. These days I seem obsessed with internal consistency, to the point of, well, pedantry. I almost sound like the spelling bee kid sometimes:



Mmm ... my first YouTube link. I am now officially entrenched in Blogosphere 2.0.

Can I just say this again?

I really don't like The White Stripes.

Bike2Work

Well - after years of agonizing, I finally rode my bike to work.

While I'm super excited about the personal and environmental benefits of this choice, it brought to light some interesting societal divisions among bicyclists. On the one hand you have your gear heads (we'll just call them hedz, shamelessly borrowing from RPM culture). The hedz are your hardcore bike nuts - they will often own several bikes (where several can span double digits), will pretty much *only* ride in spandex, and have several miscellaneous bike parts just floating around their garage to fuel what is now an obsession that easily costs them a few thousand dollars a year. Oh - and they're predominantly male. To these people I say, more power to you. Why, some of my best friends are ... ok - forget it. I will almost certainly never be one of them. There are things I get obsessive about - bike gear is just not one of them.

Which places me in the other camp. Utilitarian commuters that understand the ecological and economic benefits of riding, along with the loads of sexy indie cred it carries. Not sure if I've mentioned this before, but I've always found hipsters on bicycles terribly attractive. So yes - I'm riding to boost my cred. This is actually not dissimilar to vegetarianism - it just felt like a good idea on a number of different levels, even if there was a girl involved in the initiation.

Gossip

So apparently, The Arcade Fire stole this guy's basketball.

No wait ... they didn't.

Such is the blogosphere.

kiddie cred

you know the hipsters are breeding when rough trade puts out a kid's record.

and yes - satya has a copy (thanks shal) - duh!

Managed to get out to Club 6 last night to check out Badawi. Dark freaked-out dubby stuff - quite nice. This was my second show post-Satya. Caught up with some folks at the show, showed sissy around the "scene" (whatever that even means these days), lost my voice trying to talk over the music, and heard an Egyptified version of Walk Like an Egyptian. Overall - a good time.

We are overflowing with stuff in the house. If there is anything that you want to take off my hands, let me know. It doesn't even matter what that something is. We desperately need to purge - At this point I'm perfectly happy giving away stuff we may not even possess.

Satya owns two monkeys now - We've named them Fibonacci and Roadkill. She appears to like teh monkey brainzzz.

Oaklandish

Baron Davis is a G.O.D.! Did anyone see the Warriors last night? Ohmigod they pummeled the Jazz. Firebombed them, even. And that dunk ... mmm mmm ... that DUNK!

I have never seen a team having this much fun playing ball. They had no business even being here. These are the Golden State Warriors, fer chrissakes. They haven't been to the playoffs in 12 years. Eliz didn't realize that Oaktown even had an NBA team until now. But yes - these same Warriors are playing with a fuck-you attitude and swagger. Don Nelson doing interviews with a can of beer. B. Davis and Stephen Jax acting like the baddest mo fos in the world. And the beard! This is how we do it, Oakland style.

funny thing - this has never happened to me

Why is it that I have never woken up in the morning thinking, "I am a shadow dancer"?

Here's the Question ...

would you rather be an uncle-chod or a potato-fucker?

daily dump

I just realized that this blog thing is more rewarding when I'm updating regularly. The idea being that the more I write, the more I will have to say. Even if I don't have anything to say.

Speaking of which (not really, but it was a convenient segue), Google now lets you blog in हिंदी। If the Hindi text does not render properly on your machine, you may need to turn on multilingual support, as described here. For some reason, the default rendering messes up the little ई मात्रा, and does strange things with compound letters. If you cannot read Hindi, then just admire the roundy-ness of the letters.

Speaking of which - and this time we actually have a sequitur - I have this weird recurring nightmare where I find myself having to take a Hindi test the next day (or sometimes a Gujarati test, in a variant of the same dream) and I cannot seem to remember anything other than a few basic words. My life somehow depends on this test, but I can never find the right words for anything. I've actually been having this dream for years now, and is the closest thing I have to a recurring nightmare. And yes, my hindi has probably deteriorated to the point where I have a pretty hard time not reverting to English semi-regularly. For example, I cannot remember the word for "baby". Looks like someone will be joining Satya in her Sunday Hindi school lessons. Gads - then I might actually have to take a Hindi test. Noooooo .....

no cat no cradle

When the last living thing

has died on account of us,

how poetical it would be

if Earth could say,

in a voice floating up

perhaps

from the floor

of the Grand Canyon,

“It is done.”

People did not like it here.

Kurt Vonnegut - you will be missed. Dearly missed.

Flashback

Six months ago I was in Austin, TX. I rented a little red Chevy Aveo, which pretty much screams cheap-o economy rental. I peeled out of the parking lot and drove down the drag, windows rolled down, volume cranked up to 11, with the radio blasting: "You are tuned into Fresh Air with Terry Gross on NPR".

Stephen Elliott

I read this little piece in last month's Believer and it made me cry. And it made me happy to think that beauty is alive and well.

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200703/?read=article_elliott

My Friend

My friend is very nice. He comes over and does the dishes for us sometimes. He has brown hair. My friend has two cars that don't run. I am glad that my friend is not a brain surgeon. My friend is very good at many things like bicycles and dogs. My friend has a very nice girlfriend. He writes songs about his girlfriend. He also writes songs about me, like the Shrey Doggie song and the N. Shrey Dawg song. I like my friend very much. My friend is 34 years old.

Written by Shreyas D., age 30

cell division

At the risk of turning this into a running baby blog, which has never been my intention, I have to say this - we reached a significant milestone yesterday. Satya outgrew her newborn diapers. This means that she is probably growing.

Alive

Satya just slept through the night for the first time. That was my first contiguous 6 hour block of sleep in 37 days. Yippee!

If I had one of those tardoid mood icons, a la livejournal, it would say: "Current Mood: Awake"!!

Food, Sex or Cars

Ok - not really, but the old SNL skit, did some pretty funny stuff with Hobson-esque choice, where each alternative is equally attractive (or unattractive). My version from last night:
- Guinness, Gordon Biersch Pilsner or low-fat organic yogurt.

We also used to play this idiotic game in college that went along the same lines, but with a "who would you rather bang?" bent. It was mad fun. For example, who would you rather bang: Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jesse Ventura?

I'll occasionally bring this feature back, as I think of better examples.

TV Funhouse

One of the perks of early babyhood (the catch-all term for the baby experience from the perspective of all concerned parties) is the amount of unstructured free time you must spend at home. Don't get me wrong - there is a lot of work involved (diaper changes, feedings, keeping everything else in the household at least minimally functional), but there is also a lot of down time, given that babies tend to sleep for around 16 hours a day. This is the perfect excuse to catch up on all the useless pop culture that you've missed out on in the past several years since you've sworn off television. And Netflix makes this available to you in convenient, easy-to-digest chunks. In glorious Technicolor*. Commercial free. Without the annoying inter-episode cliffhangers that leave you irritated and unsatisfied for weeks, possibly months. TV on DVD, here I come! Now watching:

• Lost - Season 1
  
• Dr. Who (The new BBC series) - Season 1
  
• The L-Word - Season 3
  
• City of Men
  
• The Office - Season 2
  
• The Office (BBC) - Series 2
  

*Why do people still use the term "Technicolor"? What does it even mean?**
**Yes - I could look it up in Wikipedia, but that's not the point, is it?

your moment of zen