At this point, I will digress momentarily to narrate some facts that are not necessarily relevant to this story. Back in the day, when I was younger, and some might say a lot smarter, I had a very volatile relationships with the medical community. Once my doctor had to call in security to hold me down while she was giving me a flu shot. Even with two big guys holding my arms and legs wasn’t enough. It’s not like they were burly bouncers (and possibly former marines) now working at a New York nightclub from which I had to be escorted out (ahem.. not that that’s ever happened). Those regular mamu’s were no match for a 10-year old boy possessing abnormal amounts of adrenaline-fueled strength. I struggled and kicked and thrashed around like my life depended on it. I escaped from the clutches of the security/bouncer dudes and ran out of the clinic. That moment gave me a deja vu-ey feeling similar to that scene from Terminator 2: Judgment Day where the Sarah Connor is trying to escape the psych ward and the Terminator and John Connor, and T1000 chasing her. I was eventually cornered in the hallway, pinned down by three men and given the shot as I contorted my face in unimaginable agony all while holding my breath and honestly believing that if I stopped breathing, the syringe penetrating my epidermis wouldn’t hurt as much. However, coming back to my point, my body never had the ability to pee at will. Does anyone’s body do that at all? Once, when I was doing the whole-pee-in-a-cup thing, I couldn’t produce enough specimen to fill the cup to the line. So I decide to fill the cup to the line by diluting my produce in water. I was very pleased at my brilliance.

And as I walked into the Health Center, I chuckled thinking about that incident from several years ago and hoped that my body supported me and that I wouldn’t have to pull such underhanded measures today. I walk in and start gulping down glasses of water. The nurse gives me a bunch of instructions and I walk into toilet. And here’s where it gets rough. As much as I try, I cannot get myself to pee. Nope. Zilch. Zero. Nada. Not even a drop that I could dilute using my aforementioned tactics. I try thinking of running water, but that doesn’t help either. I jump up and down (quietly), but nope. It’s been close to 3 minutes in there, and I haven’t done a thing. Another 2 minutes. The nurse knocks on the door asking I was done. I tell her that I’m almost done. I focus all my energies on the job and manage to squeeze a few drops out of my bladder. And I wash hands (inspite of explicitly being asked not to by the nurse until I’ve handed over the cup!). Finally, after 5 long minutes, I emerge with my head hung in shame as I hand over the cup. The nurse yells at me because I wasn’t supposed to use the damn sink. And without much ado flushes my hardwork down the toilet. I reschedule and get the hell out of there. So now here’s what happened. Apparently, water takes its own sweet time to trickle down to your bladder. That and the fact that I was mighty dehydrated after my super long flight, required at least a couple of gallons to cover. 10 tiny cups just just wouldn’t cut it. It’s all science.

After spending the weekend getting rid of jetlag, I walk into the Health Center at 10 am sharp on Monday morning. I had been prepping for 3 hours, drinking water non stop. I grab the cup, do my business, emerge vindicated and walk out like a boss in under 2 minutes!

PS: I realized much later that I overdid my prep for the drug test, because I spent the next 2 hours in and out of the restroom emptying the remainder of my bladder.

I swear this is a clean sfw-ish blog

Yo Google,

What kind of shady porno shop do you think I’m running here. Keep all the porn obsessed people away from my site! This place is for clean family stuff. Mostly. And digs at my family blaming them for my lack of any love life and the fact that I might die alone. And poop and puke. Fix your shit please.

Love,

me

And then at work, I’m talking to Lil’ m about the gazillion weddings, engagements, hookups and one night stands taking place around me and I suddenly start freaking out. I go like, “Yo m, what if I end up spending the rest of my fucking life completely alone! What if I never find someone? What if I’m the creepy 65 year old with a grey ponytail and cheap sunglasses that buys your kids candy floss, lives with 3 cats and shows up in pictures like this? Sure I could also be a badass oldie like Gandalf or one of these guys. But lets face it, the odds are slim.” And then I decide to take matters in my own hands. BOOM. Just like that. I know that Lil’ m has a boyfriend so, OBVIOUSLY, I decide to make her my plan B. You know plan B? The one where if neither of us are married by the time we’re 30 (or 35 or 40), we marry each other.

But I was still in panic mode. I needed a plan A. Like yesterday. So I decide to con(vince) Big M into marrying me. Except that it wasn’t going to work. Because she works out like every fucking day, and the last time I stepped into a gym was back when MSFT traded at nearly 60 bucks. I wasn’t always like this though. Back in the day, my prowess at tomato racing was rather legendary. Tomato race no comprende? The one where your hands are tied behind your back and you race to the middle of the track, grab the tomato with JUST your mouth (twss!) and sprint to the finish line. However, my moment in the spotlight came to a crashing halt a few years later. I was participating in a 400m relay and comfortably cruising to the finish line. And in true Bollywood fashion, the world around me slows down. Everything and everyone begins moving in super-slow motion. I can hear people chanting my name! And I’m thinking, “Wow! People just love me. I’m quite the superstar here. The crowd just can’t get enough of me.” Except that it wasn’t the crowd yelling my name. It was another runner hollering and swearing and cursing at me because I was in his fucking lane. And as I stealthily move to my own lane, he promptly overtakes me and subsequently wins the race. Yes. Not my proudest moment on the track. And that fall from grace was directly responsible for the end of my career as an athlete and resulted in me embarking on a new career as a crackerjack slouch.

I thought of putting this up on the blog as I was walking back towards Grand Central Station this evening. But I was rudely interrupted by my coworker N who yells out loud that SOMETHING in her bag is vibrating. This would have been funnier AND infinitely more awkward for her had I not known apriori that she was carrying her boyfriend’s electric razor in her bag.

Are you fucking kidding me?

Now in an effort to give y’all an optimum blog-reading (bleading?) experience, I decided to conduct some stellar research and saw that cardamom is often used as a masticatory. Except that I didn’t know what a masticatory is and Firefox clearly agreed with me as is evident with the dotted-red-underline-thingy.

And since Wikipedia is editable by pretty much anyone, I was convinced that I was a victim of Wikipedia vandalism (it IS A REAL word, look it up), and that word is actually masturbatory, which kind of makes more sense, since this cologne is expected to seduce ANY woman, and hence its ingredients would have such prurient uses. Also the more I tried to imagine the use of cardamom in any sort of multi-person conjugal act, the more my brain spun out of control and the smarties at Google image search couldn’t help me out with this one either.

And then I took another quiz that concluded that was an alcoholic and in desperately need of help which is totally bullshit because all I got was like 3 questions right out of 20. And another that said that I look 62% like Ludacris which is a bucketload of crap because I don’t even have a moustache. And then I took another quiz that would tell me what Twilight character I am but before the goddamn site would give me the answer, it made me fill out like a gazzillion forms and subscribe to another gazzillion newsletters and even then it wouldn’t tell me what I was and then I was so FRUSTRATED THAT I WANTED TO KILL SOMEONE but I didn’t. Instead I finished my drink, closed the computer, drifted to sleep in my wine induced haze, and dreamt about innovative and slightly disturbing uses of cardamom as a masturbatory device.

Really? I don't think so!

It was only after I got to the ground that I realized the devious ways my Mum’s mind works in. Well, I shouldn’t have been surprised. She is after all MY mother! Mommy was totally pimping me out for all the eligible girls present there. Here’s how it worked. I was standing with my Dad on one side of the ground checking out the food stalls (obviously!). Ma goes about socializing and networking like she’s one of the girls from SATC. But truth be told, her hawk eyes were scouting for nubile, young women to pitch to me. And after she’s done with her recon mission, she calls me over and introduces me to her friends AND their daughters. She’s goes like, “Here is my son. Engineer. NRI. And doesn’t he look like Abhishek Bachchan?”. Obviously, she couldn’t tell me anything straight up, but one look in her eyes and I knew what her end game was. She’s cute na? She’s well educated, has a good job, comes from a good family and can cook! Why don’t you call her sometime? Of course, if she had it her way, she would have probably had me engaged then and there. Thankfully though, I managed to drag her by the hand away from all the madness. She was quiet, but her body language was yelling, “I AM NOT GETTING ANY YOUNGER. I WANT GRANDCHILDREN! AND I WANT THEM NOW! THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT, EVEN IF I HAVE TO KNOCK YOUR ASS UNCONSCIOUS AND MAKE YOU TAKE THE GODDAMN PHERAS”

.

So the thought that popped up in my dream this morning, I think, is one of the things that I find extremely annoying and inappropriate and completely wrong with the universe. Guys who use the word ‘dear‘ in conversation with other guys. And not in a grandfatherly ‘my dear‘ kind of way. More like in a ‘yes dear‘ sort of ridiculously schmoozingly castrating way. Every time I hear a guy use ‘dear‘ in written English, or even worse spoken out loud, my respect for them plummets to the depths of the nether world. Nothing is worse than a guy chopping his own balls off and serving them with bolognese sauce.

On other more delicious thoughts, I was recently introduced to the orgasmic pleasures of eating sushi. It was lil’ m’s birthday last week, and big M, lil’ m, Mixie and me celebrated it at Komegashi, a rather fancy joint in Jersey City. I’ve always been a little skeptical about sushi, well, because it’s RAW FUCKING FISH! But lil’ m did a fabulous job of introducing me to the cuisine. Maybe it was hormones or maybe she’s just getting all maternal on my ass, but she’s like, “Try this Morty. It has cream cheese. It’ll mask the taste of the fish. Or try this one- it has avacados in it. A little high on calories, but that’s alright.” And I was all but salivating with my puppy dog eyes wide open. Almost like when I was learning to ride a bike. Or when Dr. Bhonsle, the sex-ed consultant in 9th grade showed Mrs. Sanghamitra’s class of 40 curious, overly enthusiastic and horny boys a diagram of a vagina.