Well, it turns out that the bus left every 2 hours, once at 12:30, then again at 2:30. I couldn’t wait for the 2:30 because that would be cutting it WAY too close for comfort. So, we decided to inquire about the chinatown bus that leaves every 30 minutes, no go.

Then Roy suggested the amtrak, PERFECT idea. Wrong. The quick ticket counters were all shut down and the line was long as all hell to purchase tickets. So, we tried to find internet service to print tickets and check myself in .. everyone kept on telling us to go to STAWbucks, but all we found was Starbucks.

At around 2 pm, the terminals went back up and we ended up purchasing tickets ($68) to ride the 161 to philly. Just my luck, the train was 20 minutes delayed. THEN, when it finally showed up, we got delayed another 45 minutes because some genius parent decided not to listen to the guy that said “watch your step, there is a big gap between the train and the platform” and had the kid fall through to the tracks. Mother fucker. Roy just looked at me and laughed! Everything was conspiring for me not the make it. The worst part was that if I missed the flight, I was going to have to pay $400 to change the ticket and catch a 5:30 am flight to get to Vegas by 11 am!

So, we landed in Philly at 4:45 pm. I have exactly one hour to get to the airport, check in, go through security, and make the plane. I ran out of the station, hopped in a cab and told him “buddy, we have 45 minutes before my plane leaves, get me to the airport as fast as humanly possible”

Of course, on the way there there were not one, but TWO fucking accidents on the highway to the airport! GREAT! Somehow this guy ended getting me to the airport at 5:05 pm. I checked in and RAN to security. This was the moment of truth, how long could the line possibly be for me to miss the plane?!

Well, the line went all the way from the security check point to the END of the moving walkway. I HAVE NEVER SEEN A LONGER FUCKING LINE IN MY LIFE! HOLY SHIT! I started to panic. I ran to the VIP line and told them “my plane leaves in 45 minutes, can you let me pass?” Bitch said no. I contemplated paying someone to let me cut in front of them, when an angel saved my life. I went up to her and said “my plane is leaving, will you let me pass?” She smiled, signed my paper, and off I was, saved by the goodness of a wonderful woman!

I ran past security and barely made it on the plane. 6 hours later, here I am.

Total cost for Sat: $500
Total cost for Sun: $160

What a great fucking weekend, I LOVE NEW YORK! But holy shit, you spend more money in NY than LV!

We ditched that piece of shit waste of time and headed to meet up with Roy’s friends at this bar. Edward & Baha were going to join me there and head out to party NYC style. We get to the bar and there was this short girl with a clipboard surrounded by 4 bouncers. She looks at us and says:
“What’s your name? Are you on the list?”
“Nope, not on the list”
“Well, who do you know?”
“Umm… we know each other.”
“Why the hell are you here?”
“We are drinkers”
And you know what! It worked! She looked at us like “with what nerve did you just do this” and let us in, no cover! WOW! We met up with these people, and almost immediately Ed & Baha showed up. They asked me how the place was and I said it sucked major cock. These girls overheard me and asked me why.

“If this were your last night in NY, this would be the last place to go to”
“Why, are you a tourist? Who said anything about our last night”
“Fuck no, I live here. I just assume everyone is a fucking tourist, just get the fuck out of here.”

Ha! Baha was laughing his ass off. Something about that 80’s thing had me doing different ‘characters’. We ended up at Bulgaria Bar, finally, and had a delicious shot called the Bulgaria Shot, highly highly recommended! We started drinking and fucking around with the bartenders. We even got a hooka and I kept blowing the smoke in the bartender’s face. This place, imagine being transported to Bulgaria. That is what it is like. Roy said it best, ‘i was expecting some bulgarian decore, but it turned out to be bulgaria itself’

I went outside and for some reason pretended to be an immigrant that couldn’t speak english too well. I was talking to some guy about stuff and he ended up giving me his card. I am going to email him and figure out what the hell we were talking about! haha! We drank some more, and circa 3 am everyone bounced. Ed & I kept bar hopping around places and met with some of his med school friends. This is where the night gets blurry. I remember being extremely belligerent and just holaring to everyone and everything. I was in FULL FORM BABY!

We went to KATZ, where they filmed when harry met sally, and has the MOST DELICIOUS roast beef sandwhich and kept on bar hopping. At some point we ended up at his place on 86th and lexington. i don’t really remember much, but around 4:30 I decide to go back to the hotel room.

HA! to my delight there were champagne glasses outside in the hallway. GOLLLLLLLL I shattered them by playing futbol Perfect end to a perfect night….

We basically wasted the entire day aimlessly walking around Union Square & Washington Park. Why? For some reason Roy & I let them guide us. We grabbed some dinner at a Korean BBQ place that was half decent near Makers Mark, then booked it to the hotel. We were going to catch an off broadway show called “My 80’s Prom” .. i already wasn’t liking this idea!

Well, it turns out I was right! The ’show’ was a real fucking prom. They had everyone in character, and they NEVER EVER broke character once. Even if you went up to them to talk to them. It was strange. The place was a dance hall, all decked out in 80’s stuff. By the way, Roy & I were the only ones not dressed in 80’s gear. The night was strange because there were a total of 5 guys there, the rest were cougars & chicks. We concluded, when the host called for all the bachelorettes, that this is where they go to have their parties.

Well, we saw a group of cuter girls and decided to spark a conversation with them. That opened a can of worms baby! One girl stole a bottle of water and while talking to us, ended up throwing the water over her shoulder at a group of older, fatter bachelorettes. The first time was funny, the second time even better… but then, I don’t know, she lost it, and kept on doing it. Obviously the fat old people got mad and came to ask us if we saw anything.

Nope, sorry, I don’t know what you are talking about! Whoops, ROY! Why did you say anything?!?! Well, they ended up blaming Roy, and after more bickering and an almost cat fight, one lady bought a beer and spilled it all over Roy. I was amazed, never had I ever seen that before. The room full of women was making a turn for the worst.. and we were done with it.

Highlights of My 80’s Prom:
- The fat guy with BEEF 89 written on his back, and me chanting “BEEF BEEF BEEF BEEF” every time he walked by
- Going to the bathroom with Roy to clean the shirt and passing by the changing room for the girls of the show and catching 2 of them topless
- One drunk cougar with cups in her dress to make fake tits.. but she wasn’t wearing a bra?! Strange.
- Ditching everyone to go have a good time

We got to the hotel to meet up with the rest of the group and got rushed for some restauraunt for reservations. We were staying at the Doubletree on 51st & Lexington, which was NOT worth the $320 a night. Sigh, this is what happens when you let others make decisions!

We got to the restaurant, Leelah’s Lounge, which served the shittiest indian food I have ever eaten… ever. Then I started to complain about why the hell we were eating indian food before going out drinking and dancing! I already felt the runs brewing in my belly!

A group of 13 people headed out to go bar hopping around that area, which quickly grew old. That is when the magic started happening. The people finally decided to go to the Lower East Side and bar hop around there! I wanted to start at Piano’s, but they decided to start and FINISH there too! BOO! BOOOO!

Piano’s was a decent place, upstairs had a dance floor with hip hop for $5 cover. The bartenders where fucking morons though. Apparently, they were doing it for 15 years and had never heard of the shots I was requesting. We were there until 4 am, when we decided to have some khap kalash and crab juice kebabs and cokes in front of the place. For some reason being in NY made me feel like I owned the planet. When this black guy came up to order kebab, I told him:

“Sorry buddy, you have to go through me first if you want to order kebab”
“What are you, the guy who heads the kebab industry around here?”
“Actually, I am. And since you are standing there in front of the BBQ, enjoy Eau Du Kebab, on the house”

The moron actually was buying it.. None of us were drunk either because, well, we had indian stew in our bellies.

Total Cost: $400 (why didn’t the rest of the group buy shots too?!)

The photo albums are down because all the pictures got corrupted. I won’t be putting them back up until my entire site goes through a re-design.

Also, some of the links to my stories don’t work. Look at the right hand side under CATEGORIES. Rants & Raves has a bunch of my random writings.

Insecurities force us to not want to be rejected and when one seeks many for acceptance, it draws on the fact that those who will ‘accept’ do so on a superficial, what you see is what you get, level.  You can then conclude that this person seeks this level of acceptance because that is the depth in which they understand themselves, to the extent where they are comfortable and secure with themselves. The deeper one dives into the self, the less acceptance they seek, the more narrow the pool of people from whom they seek acceptance becomes.

There are four groups of people you would want to accept you; strangers, family, friends, and lovers. Those on the most shallow end seek acceptance not only from friends, but also mostly from strangers. They care what people they don’t know say about them. I feel that when you seek acceptance from family, you do so with a knife at hand, ready to cut the umbilical cord and become an adult, break free and become an individual to suffer in the adult world.

You seek acceptance from lovers because you share something sacred, something intimate, something that makes you feel special and yet very vulnerable, from your body to your heart, you let them in hoping they take better care of what they find than the owner. Acceptance from a lover is hard to attain, easy to lose, and more valuable and meaningful to the self than anything else in the world.

And finally, we reach what we deal with in a day to day basis, what we question day in and day out. Why do I care if my friends accept me? The answer is a very interesting one and ties in all the other ‘acceptances’ together. Although there are many ‘types’ of friends, the essence is still the same. When you attain a friend, you “let them in” less than a lover and not quite like family. They are visitors whom you tread your path of life with, they are your allies against hardships we all face.

Do you know what happens when you let them in? They walk with you, sometimes they push you forward, sometimes they carry you forward, but no matter what they do, the leave their imprint on your path of life, an imprint sometimes so deep that you can never forget or erase it. An instantaneous view of that short path with a friend can be said to add meaning to that part of your life. You tell the friend “You have augmented tremendous meaning to my life and it is something that will stay with me until my last breath. And in this instant, you have helped give this section of my life a more defined meaning with your imprint”

When one sums up the ‘instances’ of their life with the friends that left these never-ending marks, that is when they attain meaning to their existence. And thus, this is why we seek acceptance from friends, to help give the time we have a touch of spice by accepting their imprints as they accept ours. Mine, yours, your neighbor, it doesn’t matter who passed by. In the very end, at our funerals, if you could sum up the memories all these imprints that are being relived in mourning, you would end up with a movie of what that person meant to the world, to those people, no matter how deep nor shallow.

This is why we endlessly seek acceptance, to exponentially increase the value of our life, maybe selfishly for ourselves, maybe selflessly for the family itself, or maybe altruistically for someone we don’t even know, as a beacon of inspiration. In the end, Memento Mori, remember death, for that is when the movie of your life and your imprints will be relived. Make sure they play the movie you seek to be re-lived by living as if you are recording.

So, naturally, she was on the guest list at Tao and was staying in a pretty pimp suite in the private tower of the Venetian. They, apparently regardless of anything, are very strict on guy:girl ratio, no matter what list you are on. So, when we got there, it was a chaotic, to say the least. Whoever designed that was pretty stupid. We couldn’t get in, so we had to wait for Tamar’s friend, a group of really well off Saudi guys (11 total).

When they got there, they dropped $10,000 for table service. We all got escorted via private elevator to the tables, they had 5 bottles of champagne, and I think we went through about 15-18 bottles of Grey Goose Vodka. We stayed partying there like rock stars until around 3:30 am. We had our own waitress that would serve the drinks for us, we had about 3 bouncers that would guard our area and make sure only people we wanted to get in, got in. We also had a guy who came around and made sure the floors were clean all the time.

It was, to say the least, a very interesting night. The main Saudi guy was a great guy. I was lost in the VIP etiquette,  so I just stood around and did nothing. He invited me over, started chatting with me, and started the lady on my drink. The rest of the guys were pretty down to earth also. They were really mellow, really fun guys who just so happened to have a lot of money. Apparently the night before they dropped $500k gambling!

I had a couple of girls pick up on me, obviously because they wanted access to the VIP lounge, but the weird thing is, I also had 3 different girls pinch my ass! THAT NEVER HAPPENS! hehe, women will do ANYTHING to get what they want. There were 3 girls that got in and got crazy drunk and basically started having dry-hump lesbian sex next to us. They then decided to violate Tamar too! It was good times.

We went to gamble at Barbary Coast, which is now called Bills because they were bought out by Harrahs. We gambled with an armenian dealer until around 6 am, which is when we hit up the local Denny’s on the strip. At around 7:30 I dropped Tamar and Sako off … and now I’ve come to realize that I had one too many Redbull Vodkas and probably won’t be able to sleep for a while.

Total cost of the night for me: $50

Total money spent that night: $30,000-$40,000 minimum

Tao Rating: 4 Stars (the dancers & bathtub girls were hot, the women in general weren’t, and people there seem to go to get laid)

It all started in Brasil in 2003. I had an 8 hour lay-over in Sao Paolo, it was the only book in English and cost $35. I had watched the movie in 2000 or so and wasn’t too impressed, but man o man, when I picked up that book, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t think, all I could do is read, and read, and read.

I landed in Los Angeles with blood shot eyes, in that one plane trip I was done with The Goblet of Fire. What next? BOOK 5! I had 24 hours in LA, the very next day I was to go on a flight to Frankfurt, connecting to Athens for my engagement. The first thing I did was drive to Price Club and pick up Order of the Phoenix for $15!!

I spent the ENTIRE trip to Europe reading that book also. I couldn’t sleep, all I could do is read, analyze, break everything apart, it was a GREAT book. JK does a fantastic job honing in on the innocence of childhood with the problems we face growing up… that mixed in with a fantastic imagination and great characters!

I had to wait 2 YEARS!! TWO!! Then in July, I skipped out of a class to go buy Book 6. Luckily I had some time off, or else I would have missed a lot of class time reading the book! It was so… amazing..

And since that day in July in Brasil, I have been eagerly waiting for the last book.. what really happens? How does it end? Will my theories play out the way I think they will?

In the end, it doesn’t really matter what happens. All that matters is that a woman who had left her husband had a magnificent idea and cared so much to share it with the rest of the world, that she provided people with an adventure outside of the internet, outside of television, and in our own minds. It has been about 10 years for some of the people that were on the band wagon early on, less for most of us.. but WHAT AN ADVENTURE!!

Tomorrow I will be really sad.. There are about 4-6 weeks of Harry Potter mayhem left. No more changeling theories, no more reading up on the vector physics of spells, or any other crazy rendition of who RAB is and who will die and where Snape’s loyalties lay… It will come to an end..

This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes

“It isn’t neither the beginning nor the end of the road that matter, only the path taken”

Which brings me to the people at NY Times & Sun and the other American companies that just plain didn’t respect the embargo. THESE BOOKS WERE WRITTEN FOR US FANS, WE ARE THE ONES THAT BENEFIT FROM THEM! We took the journey, we engulfed our lives in the magic. We could care less about spoilers, we could care less about what really happens… it is the anticipation that matters, it is knowing that there are millions of people waiting .. EAGERLY WAITING for the clock to strike midnight tonight.. it is the fact that hardly anyone will sleep this Friday night and that as soon as they are done reading, we will all meet up on the internet .. some to cope, others to brag, most for company.

JK has brought the world together through the magic of her writing, she has crossed over into the realm of innocence and childhood and given children what they have been lacking, what our governments, parents, and schools couldn’t do. She has given people a passion for reading, she has opened imaginations world-wide and has grouped people from all aspects of life together.

Was it strange when I went in for happy hour at the local bar to hear adults talking about July 21, 2007? No, not at all. It brought a smile to my face..

Thank You JK…

It is very much safer today than it has ever been in my existence of knowing the area, but that still doesn’t mean one shouldn’t partake without caution. There is no point in leaving the house before 2 am. You won’t find too many people out, you probably won’t find too many places open either. But after 2 am, the place is bumping right up around 7 or 8 am!! That is when the REAL fun starts.

So, my cousins take us to Cuidad Vieja, we find one of the few places in Uruguay that serve beer that actually tastes good and after a couple of rounds, we decide to go out dancing. Like I had mentioned before, Latin America celebrates the 6th of January as the “3 Wise Men” day because it is believed that they set out to find Jesus on the 6th of Jan (and for those that wonder why we celebrate Dec 25 as Christmas, pick up The DaVinci Code). It was time to return to Almhoda Bar, a place I had visited last year to watch childhood friends of mine (The Snakes) perform live, except the show I found there in January had NOTHING to do with what I had seen last year in September.

There were 3 chip & dales and one hot blond all ready to strip down to nothingness. The 3 guys were dressed as the 3 wise men and the woman as the virgin mary. They all came out and did their show, I obviously turned my head for the men, and was greatly devistated when the woman just stuck around for very little. It was so not fair!

The women in the crowd where going WILD. The guys would pick them up, throw them on a chair, and give them lap dances as is expected. The difference? One girl asked for a curtain/cloth type of thing, the guy covered his package, and she began to suck him off! He grabbed her head and kept on shoving it in. I looked at my cousin and said “WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE HOMMIE?” He looked at me and said “wow.. no idea!”

One of the other guys got a girl and started dry-69ing on the floor… the last guy got a girl, stripped down to a thong, lubbed up his chest, then rubbed her hands all over his chest, dropped them into his undies, and she started the reach around!!! When the shows where over, they all came out, and the women were going CRAZY. I felt disgusted at their reaction, made me lose all respect for these whores… they were all fighting with each other to grab their balls and stroke it a couple of times…

Wow.. i went home and wished to only have boys when I have my family….

And that was how I spent the 6th of January….

They have two beaches, La Brava and La Manza. La brava is similar to zuma, lots of waves, deep water, but very warm Atlantic water as opposed to Pacific. That beahc is usually full of the people that are staying around Punta Del Este centro.? La Manza is the calm beach, there usually isn’t a single wave, the water is mostly dead like a lake and rather shallow. This area is usually occupied by the people staying in Maldonado. Unfortunately, topless sunbathing isn’t and hasn’t ever been a fad in South America, althought I did find two women partaking in such pleasures. Fortunately, the women here tend to have smaller breasts than the American counterparts, but lucious, curvacious butts that they are NOT afraid to show off. Most women are in thongs at the beach, or really tiny itty bitty bikinins that might as well be called thongs!

Makes for some good times.

We left today to go pick up my sister’s boyfriend from the airport, but the dumbass missed his flight. He was flying on Copa Airlines, that has flights that leave at midnight. He was told to go to the airport at midnight on the 4th, which would be the 3rd at night going into the 4th. The dumbass misread everything and ended up thinking his flight was on the 4th at night leading into the 5th.

We are staying in Montevideo for a couple of days? to show him around. I had made reservations at Mercado Del Puerto for the 6th of January, the ‘three wise men’ day that they celebrate here in south america, but since the dumbass lost his flight, he wasn’t there. We got hammered yet again and went to pick him up with the worst hang over of our lives. We left to go dancing at 2 am, but I’ll leave that part of the story for later.