I Fought the Law and uh... I Won

Well it was actually my friend Ivan who fought the law, and he certainly won.

Ivan got a ticket from a Metro Transit Authority officer early one morning, after he put his feet on the chair beside him to take a nap while riding home. I hear stories about such disgruntled cops all the time who look for ways to turn a great night into a minor inconvenience for us happily drunk, mid-20's aged people.

Instead of paying the measly $25 fine which would eventually get tossed into the bottomless black hole that is the massive debt incurred from years of wasteful spending, Ivan both literally and figuratively put his foot down.

After having gone to the NYC Transit Adjudication Bureau Ivan came in late to Price Theory class, and he had on this priceless grin that, despite the professor's efforts, no derivation of any consumer utility function will ever be able to explain.

After class Ivan showed me this:



(I held a mirror in front of my computer and took a picture of the reflection so it wouldn't have to be read backwards, but I guess it doesn't really matter since it's still illegible)

The above is a copy of Ivan's Notice of Decision and Order after Ivan appeared in court to contest his ticket. The officer did not show up, and Ivan told the hearing officer standing in as a judge his side of the story. In the soon-to-be landmark case of Ivan Khilko vs. New York City Transit Authority (2009), the court's decision is as follows:

"TA rule 1050.7j(1) prohibits a rider from occupying more than one seat when to do so would interfere with transit operations or the comfort of other passengers. I note from the details of violation that this incident occurred at 4:15 am on a Tuesday morning. I credit the Respondent's [Ivan's] testimony that there were only two riders in the car. I find that at the early time of this incident, it is more probable that the train would have few riders so that the Respondent's conduct would not have interfered with other passengers or with transit operations. Accordingly, I find the Respondent is not in violation and the Notice of Violation is dismissed."

In other words, I made a copy of this notice so that the next time I am stretched out across the seats of the subway at 4 in the morning and an officer tells me to sit up, I will calmly refer them to the section that basically says he or she can go to hell.

Black Trek

Apparently I'm not the only one who thought of this. I need to collaborate with this guy.




The best part is the intro. I don't really understand what's going on after that.

Black Trek

I spent the first half of my Mathematics class thinking of a script for a TV series similar to Star-Trek, but paralleled with what I realize are gross misrepresentations of what were already gross misrepresentations of generic black stereotypes. In case you may be wondering, I had already read through a significant portion of the chapters in which the professor had structured the first hour of class, so my time was spent doing something much more valuable in my opinion.

(I'm actually more of a Star Wars fan, and in fact, the average Trekkie will probably scoff at my superficial command of Star-Trek knowledge, but the parallels to black culture were so much more fun and easier to make when applied to the Star-Trek series..)

Black-Trek: Deep Penetration 69

[Scene 1: The $tarship Hypnotize is being chased through a time warp by a Bling-on warship] (if you're not already laughing it would be hard for us to continue being friends)

Deck Officer Wanda: Captain! Muthafucka's shootin!

[Captain J.L. Rashard henceforth referred to as Cap'n Pinkie sets his cranberry vodka on the ship's navigation control panel and furrows his brow]

Cap'n Pinkie: Blast on those fools! Full powah!!

[Enter Ronnie on the intercom, the high-yellow dude down the block who grew up in the Midwest and talks with a funny accent]

Ronnie: All the ship's power is being concentrated on keepin' the shields up. We cain't hit 'em with that stanky stank unless you wanna take some blows.

[Cap'n Pinkie to the ship's navigator, Young Jeezy]

Cap'n Pinkie: Young Jeezy got skillz! I seen him roast Po-Po after we done rolled on some niggas last week! Wanda! Tell Ayeesha to get me some ice for that drank!

[Wanda pauses for a bit, noisily purses her lips, turns and walks away in no hurry, like a disgruntled post office employee after you hand her a parcel slip]

[Cap'n Pinkie and Young Jeezy watch Wanda walk off and silently mouth 'Damn' while staring at her voluptuous booty]


Unfortunately this is as far as I got before my Math professor started a new topic on Taylor and MacLaurin series, which unfortunately I had not done before. I had to stop scriptwriting and take serious notes.

North Korean Diet

The situation here is pretty stable.

Halloween was a sloppy mess. Whatever enthusiasm you feel when walking outside for the first time with your costume is automatically shattered when you see some idiot wearing the same thing you are. Within the span of the time it took me to get to the bar where I was going I found about 7 or 8 other Where's Waldo's.

Since I'm cheap and didn't want to spend $20 bucks on the authentic red and white striped sweater, I bought a brown and white, boys aged 12-14, striped zip-up from the ABC Super 99 retail outlet down the street from my apartment, at an economically priced $6.99.

I wore it with my brown corduroy pants and brown winter hat. I told everyone I was going for a more festive, Earth-tone Waldo, and there lies the solace I managed to salvage.

And now to explain the meaning of the title of this post...

My recent employment has left me considerably less paid than when I was a paralegal taking orders from extremely overworked associates. Still I am able to pay all the bills and have a little left over for causing mischief and mayhem. This goes without saying that I've obviously had to make some sacrifices, beginning with the food I consume.

We have staff meals every day at the Japanese restaurant where I work, so its dinner that I'm left to fend for myself. After reading a recent article on how the North Koreans creatively dealt with famine during the mid 1990's, I was inspired: I am not going grocery shopping until I've expired all the edible things in my apartment.

Tonight's dinner:

Curry Grits
Stale Olive Bread w/ Honey and Butter
Pancakes w/ Nutella (1/2 of the actual Aunt Jemima mix for the flavor, 1/2 Flour to add substance)


Tomorrow's Potential Dinner:

Regular Grits
About 8 Rotini Shells w/ stale Ragu sauce (pour water in the bottle to make it look like there's more in there...)

Math Galore

So I will blog about something soon. I'm studying for Math midterms and see nothing but differential equations floating through my weary mind.

For Halloween I'm dressing up as the black Where's Waldo.

Lost and Found

Recently thought lost notepad was found in the back pocket of an old pair of pants I wore a few weeks ago. Along with random Japanese words I heard at work that I wanted to look up later, I found a few more thoughts I'd like to share in addition to the few from the last post.

1. New Iphone Application called "Cell-Phone Signal Jammer"

Some friends asked if I had any good ideas for an Iphone app, and I immediately thought about a bus ride I had one early Saturday morning on the way to a make-up Micro Theory class. A portly black girl sat next to me with a phone to her ear and I immediately knew there was going to be trouble. I prayed she was only checking her voicemail, but when she started cackling I knew it was one of those, "And I was like... and then he was like.... and then she were like....." conversations. And it did play out to be one of those conversations.

Anyway I thought to myself, how nice would it be to pull out my phone and emit a jamming signal that blocks cell phone service within the confines of a small radius about the size of a bus.

2. Medusa's Period

On one entire page of my notepad there were only the words "Medusa's Period" written, and I can't to this day remember what I could've possibly been thinking.

Lost Thoughts

After several unsuccessful attempts to write in and not lose a small pocket journal for my notes, I'm trying to record some things that came to me within the past few weeks. The following is my hope to recover a few lost valuable thoughts.

1. A poem I wrote while waiting for the A train to take me back home late one night:

Waiting for a train.
Waiting for A train,
waiting for my life.

2. When I call customer service regarding an inquiry for my bank account, they make me type in a bunch of personal information which they say is supposed to help speed up the process. Then when I speak to a representative they make me repeat my information all over again.

3. There was an article about the newly crowned tallest man in the world, Sultan Kosen, who hails from some Anatolian plateau in Turkey. In the article they listed in no short order all the negative consequences of his abnormal pituitary excretions which included, an enlarged heart, a short life expectancy, a dependency on crutches to stand up straight, and the general feeling of being a freak. You get a sense of his unenviable disposition in his own words,

"I can't fit into a normal car, I can't go shopping like normal people, I have to have things made specially and sometimes they aren't always as fashionable. The other thing is that ceilings are low and I have to bend down through doorways."

Then, not to make the reader feel too bad for the guy, the article gives you something to lift your mood with,

"But he [Sultan Kosen] noted some advantages too, including the ability to see people coming from far away.

In conclusion, on one side of the scales of life we have the negatives (1) a short lifespan (2) heart problems until you die (3) being crippled, and (4) a general feeling of being a freak, whilst on the other side we have a positive (1) the ability to see people coming from far away.

That's all from my newly lost notepad #4 that I can remember. The next one I buy will have a proximity sensor attached, that way when I am outside of the 2 foot radius it will emit an ear piercing shriek louder than Medusa scraping her teeth against a chalkboard.

Japan Revisited

There has been an upsurge of Japan-related events in my life right now. Recently I started working at a Japanese restaurant in the Tribeca (TRiangle BElow CAnal street) area of Manhattan. To say that communicating with the waiters in Japanese, and having to wear a portable intercom system with random Japanese commands and orders shouted over the airwaves is but a small distraction would be an understatement.

In other Japan-related news, my friend Sachi who got me a sweet part-time job at a beach bar in Hagi just sent me photos of the time we went surfing near the coast in Abu-chou. It was also a time for her to showcase her new dog, Bunta, to her friends. Sachi has a blog, whose main purpose is to show the world thousands upon thousands of photos of her dog, which could not possibly be any more adorable, yet I sometimes wonder just what is so damn special about the connection Japanese people have with all the cute things in this world.

Anyway, to the pics!


When they told us we were going surfing here, the first thing I noticed was the incredible lack of danger of the 2-foot waves that came crashing--or should I say came massaging the continental shelf, and kissed the shore ever so gently after the swells broke.


This is me and Bunta. I decided it wasn't worth it for me to get cold and wet on an especially chilly day in order to ride a 2-foot wave for a couple of seconds and have people cheering me on like I had been Kelly Slater.


Instead I spent the afternoon watching dolphins play, hoping that one of them would get close enough to my friend Kawashima and scare the shit out of him. Since he's Japanese, he would probably have tried to eat it.


This is my friend Sachi who lives in Hiroshima now. And for some strange reason all the people in the pictures on her blog have their faces blurred out. Only mine, and her dog Bunta's aren't afforded the same treatment. I've presaged that there is going to be a new horror movie with pictures of people with blurred out faces that die all of a sudden, and then come back to life as zombies to terrorize the still living.


Here are some more friends from Hagi trying to skateboard in the parking lot... Which adds a new element to my movie idea, because I'm pretty sure it would be the first time anyone used the theme, ZOMBIES ON SKATEBOARDS!!

More Awkward Running

After my class in Mathematics for Economists, I found myself straying to a nearby friend's house, Leo, to eat some carne con platanos and to watch Raphael Nadal lose to some Chilean dude in the U.S. Open.

This is my friend Leo who lives a few blocks from my school. In this photo we were enjoying some beers and looking at women at a bar called the Half Pint in the LWS on the corner of West 3rd and Thompson Street.



Unfortunately, ominous-looking clouds during the second set tiebreak gave way to a rain delay, and after a few minutes of flipping back and forth between the Steelers game I gave my friend Leo some departing words and was on my way home. Since I inevitably have to pass through Harlem to wait for a bus, I thought it best to not let it get too dark. I'm all about bravery and all that nonsense, but there are still certain parts of NYC that make me feel just about as tough as Red before he gets knocked the fu** out by DEBO.



Anyway once on the bus we shot across the RFK bridge, and I got off at Astoria Boulevard and walked home. It started to drizzle a bit, and that's when I decided to run the rest of the way home, while still wearing my bookbag.

That's when I discovered it. No matter how hard you try, its impossible to not look gay while running with a backpack. Accelerating your walking stride into a lively jog causes the contents of your bookbag to shift awkwardly from side to side, whilst you, in your pathetic attempts to counter the shifting weight, swing your arms wider hoping desperately for a more even and controlled rhythm. Despite your commendable struggle, all that gets accomplished is that you successfully look like a jackass.

The only good thing about running with a backpack on is that at least your name isn't Tyler and you're running with your backpack on, like the kid on the left in this picture probably is.

Wedding in LA

My sister got married a few weeks ago, and I'm totally jacking some of the photos from the website of the company that was hired to photograph the event. Most companies usually have some sort of code embedded into the HTML that prevents you from right-clicking, but obviously this was not the case. Even when they do prevent you from right-clicking you can always just hit the 'prntcscrn' button, open the image in Microsoft Paint, crop it, and save it as a *.jpg file.

Here is a picture of the temple where they tied the knot. While we were driving, we came around a bend on the highway and nestled in the gently sloping foothills of Southern California we see this crystal-white grandiose temple that looked like something from Willow. I swore I heard harps and angels playing God's sweet overture as cherubs circled my head when we pulled near.



The area for the reception was quite nice. Behind those palm trees in the background was a lovely vista of the Pacific Ocean. I got a yearning to go down to the shore and stare out at the horizon because people feel reflective when looking at pretty things, and I am no exception. Once that activity had lost its ability to make me reflect, I'd had enough of staring at the ocean and went back to join the crew.



Here is a picture of my 1-year-old niece Maya, who knows how to do nothing but look ridiculously cute all the damn time.



Here are some more ridiculously cute children from the groom's side of the family. My first impression struck me a little nervous because for some reason they reminded me of CHILDREN OF THE CORN!!


They say that its difficult to look at something that's too beautiful. I agree with that, but it also doesn't help if you have immaculately blond hair and wear all white when the sun is beaming down on us with a cloudless sky overhead.

Because this is my blog it goes unsaid that I can post a picture of myself whenever I see fit.

Notice how everyone is looking at me and laughing. I can't quite remember, but I like to think that I just said something clever or witty, which is why I'm the one with look of incredulity that says, "My God, how did I get so damn funny??...."