Important Announcement

ATTENTION:
This is an update from Justin Shilad, concerning a disturbing new trend that has been noticed.
In this fast-paced day and age, when all of us young twenty-somethings are distracted and distraught by so many things, it is important that we take stock of our relationships, specifically our friendships. Of course it's normal to fall astray of our responsibilities to each other in this day and age. However, sometimes it crosses the line into something different...
The Flaky Friend.
Yes, the flaky friend, the eternal source of misery and sapper of dignity. You'd be surprised how many genuinely nice and good-hearted people have unwittingly strayed into the hinterland of the flaky friend. Therefore, you should keep up to date with yourself, and ask yourself these questions:

"Do I keep plans with my friends, or do I have a habit of regularly breaking plans?

"Do I have a habit of canceling dinner plans with friends at the last limit, oftentimes while offering lame excuses?"

In turn, if you think that you may be the victim of a flaky friend, you should ask yourselves some questions also:

"Is it a normal and expected thing for a certain friend to routinely cancel plans at the last minute, while offering vague or lame excuses such as 'I have to do laundry'?"

"Has every last bit of my dignity been sapped away in vain attempts just to meet up with a friend with a couple of hours?"

A yes to any of these questions would indicate what we would refer to as a flaky friend.
There are many reasons why someone might become a flaky friend, or why someone may become a victim of one. These are irrelevant. A flaky friend is a dangerous situation, and must be dealt with promptly. If you think you are a flaky friend, stop and ask yourself why you are treating certain people around you as if they were canine fecal matter. Do you simply not have a desire to speak to or see the person in question? Is there some sort of underlying insecurity at play? Or do you simply have your head up your ass? If, on the other hand, you find yourself at the wrong end of a flaky friend's hijinks, you must take more severe measures. The first one should be an immediate and stern warning towards the person that such behavior will not be tolerated. While it seems like many people who are victims of flaky friends are reluctant to do this, pleased be assured that a polite but firm confrontation is an essential step in combatting flaky friends. If this doesn't work, proceed to isolation. Do not respond or acknowledge their empty apologies, do not say hello, call or e-mail them for any reason, and act as though they do not exist any more. After a sufficient amount of time has passed, you may approach the person and see if they have realized the error of their ways, and more importantly, if they value your friendship to begin with.
This concludes an important announcement from Justin. Thank you for your time.

Mah baaaaaaby

For a whole month, I've been embroiled in a long-running drama with a somewhat unscrupulous bike dealer in Dupont. Originally I was looking for a hybrid bike, that I could ride around town while not decimating it on one of DC's legendary potholes. I wandered into the store one Sunday afternoon, and the owner did his hard sell while I stood there passively and let him push the one bike he had in my size for me, assuring me it'd be perfect.
It was, of course, not perfect. It was a lumbering monstrosity of a bicycle, supposedly a mountain/road bike hybrid but resembling a Harley more than anything else. The thing rode at about the speed of a snail, it came almost to a stop when riding into the wind, and my legs would turn to rubber trying to take it up even the most modest hills. When I finally managed to haul it across the Woodley Park/Kalorama bridge, a pedestrian chuckled and said, "You need to put a motor on that thing!" Better yet, I should've just sprung for a Vespa.
Anyway, I lugged the bike back to P St., where I was informed that the store "did not do refunds on bikes." Of course the whole mess was partially my fault, since I didn't even think to ask about the return policy. The owner assured me that bike dealers generally can't do returns or refunds on bikes, owing to the general nature of the product. (This, I might add, is complete and utter bullshit: City Bikes in Adams Morgan has a 30 guarantee on their bikes, according to their website.) Luckily I managed to tap into my India experience and "negotiate," and he eventually agreed to take it for store credit.
So fast forward a couple of more weeks to today, when I walk out of the store with this:

Ohhhhh MY GOD. This creature is simply brilliant. As soon as my foot hits the pedal, I'm practically gliding through the streets. It corners like a sports car and it chews through hills like they're nothing. Hooray!
I just wish I'd bought a light for it, so I could be riding it right now. Maybe I'll roll my ass out of bed early tomorrow, just so I can ride it before heading to Delaware.
In the mean time, let us have one more admiring glance:

Mmmmm. Yummy.

It's been a while.

See, this is what I love about living your life online. You can pour forth all the trivial personal details for months on end, and then disappear for half a year. Then, you resurface and start blogging again like nothing happened.
I managed to make it home just in time to avoid getting clobbered by a massive thunderstorm that seems to have snuck in over the beltway. I love thunderstorms, not even because of some juvenile attraction to "danger" (honestly, do you know anyone who's been hit by lightning?), but just because of the pure spectacle they provide. My favorite thing to do is to just gaze out over the landscape at a cluster of trees in the distance, and watch the space illuminate completely when lightning strikes.
Maybe I should've been a physics major. Maybe I just should've stayed in college and collected majors.

Hope amidst the heartbreak:

After being barraged by stories of bombings in Sharm Al-Sheikh (one of which went off right next to the Hotel I stayed in last year) and the famine in Niger that the world is ignoring, it is encouraging to see a story such as this one. Here's to hoping that there will be more.

Sleepy-bye

Starting tonight, I will be getting no less than seven hours of sleep a night. I have been sleepwalking through a large portion of the summer, and it is disorienting and unhealthy. After a weekend of getting healthy amounts of sleep, I can now say that I am committed to this new goal. Wish me luck.

Utter ignorance

This is a fairly ridiculous editorial from a man who is one of the most widely respected "experts" on global politics today. The content of the editorial is typical: all of the world's problems are due to some flaw or shortcoming in the Muslim world today, and apparently 1 billion members of the world's population are simply not performing up to Friedman's standards.
As a quick reaction to the editorial: Friedman, give me a break. Every single religion has gone through evolutions and continues to do so. They have the same problem in India with Hinduism, in Sri Lanka with Buddhism. It's just that it doesn't effect the U.S., Canada, or Western Europe, so of course these problems don't exist.
And, once again I reiterate, MUSLIMS ARE NOT THE ONLY PEOPLE IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD WHO HAVE EVER COMMITTED TERRORISM OR SUICIDE BOMBINGS. People act like what happened in London last week was the first time the city was ever targeted by terrorism, apparently forgetting about that little group known as the IRA. And do we remember the early nineties, when the Prime Minister of the world's largest democracy, India, was assasinated by a Hindu suicide bomber?
No, of course not. Mr. Friedman, get a grip.

A plea for true resolve

This has been a great week. It's hard to make a comment like this when your week includes pondering the fate of your missing checkbook/social security card, getting an average of 5 hours of sleep a night, the tragedy in London and the fears of what further tragedies will be deemed "necessary" in response, and seeing the sleazy nature of my gender, uh, up close and personal.
I would like to offer my thoughts on the word "resolve". After all, it's a word we've thrown around a lot this week, and it needs to be truly pondered before it becomes as hollow and meaningless as the word "freedom".
Resolve is often used in a way that makes it interchangeable with words such as perseverence, endurance, and steadfastness. I think that there is a big difference. If one looks at those three words that I just mentioned, they refer to withstanding some sort of extended conflict or challenge. Resolve is usually used to refer to the end of a conflict; it is similar to "resolution" after all.
So the way I see it, the true meaning of the word resolve, in the noun form that we've heard it thrown around in this week, is the state of resolution of some sort of conflict or challenge. That can be any conflict, internal, external, whatever.
This is so important, because I think that the deepest internal conflict is figuring out who we are, as members of the human race and how we fit in with other members of the human race. Every one of us is connected, every one of us is necessary for that vast quilt that we call humanity, for a purpose that affirms and yet ultimately transcends humanity to a much higher level. It is a challenge to believe this, in the face of everything that we are forced to confront every day. But resolve means that we stand by the resolution of that conflict in our mind, and we believe that there is nothing immovable that separates us from our true selves, and from others. It is when we don't see this that we become terrified, isolated, confused and hateful, because we know something is wrong, we see the conflict, and we don't see the ultimate resolution to that conflict as existing. So we put up our walls and we strap on our blinders. We fight our wars, holy, just, or necessary as we see fit. And like a person who sacrifices their legs for the sake of their car, we surrender our souls for the sake of our lives.
Or not even our lives, but their lives, their power, that of our lives. It is those of us who fight the mundane and everyday struggles that suffer in today's world. For as fragile and fleeting as life is, it is too precious of a gift to be taken away in the pursuit of power, something so fleeting and meaningless even within the scope of a lifetime. Yes, we want things like "democracy in the Middle East," and "Islamic states," or maybe just "an end to terror and WMDs" or "the end of the U.S./Israeli presence in the Middle East". We also want it to not rain today, we want things to cost less, we want our secret love interests to see how wonderful we are, and we want jobs that pay us enough money to take the family to Cape Cod, Mass or Alexandria, Egypt for the weekend. But until we know why we want those things, then we are enslaved by them. We are captives to their fulfillment or denial, and our very being is molded accordingly. These things are important, but they should never be allowed to guide our souls.
So I ask that we find true "resolve." I ask that we have faith that this inherent conflict of our human race already has been resolved, in a way much outside the boundaries of space and time. Then we will be free, of our anxieties, of our wars against terrorism, of our wars of liberation, of our holy wars and our spreading of democracy. We will be able to navigate those every day dramas and know why we do it. And our lives, whether fleeting and tragic, long and uneventful, pained and inspired, will transport us to places that hover above the edge of our imaginations.
"Have no fear for atomic energy, 'cause none of them can stop the time."