A Series of Unfortunate Events

- Introduction -
The day of October 23rd in the year 2010 will go down as one of the strangest days in Nathan history filled with unfortunate but memorable series events. The day’s plan was a simple one: make some food, go to New York to visit friends and go home. That’s more or less exactly what happened, but with unforeseen twists before the day even really got started.

Recently, my friends, Vivian and Cindy, had started a small business of selling corn and mango pudding to in-turn donate their profits to charity. That day they were planning on preparing some food at Cindy’s house and delivering them to friends in the city. We were all planning to visit our good friend Victor who just returned from a trip to India in the city later that night, so we decided to all go together, sell food and visit Victor as well.

- Chapter 1- Food and Menlo
After Vivian and I arrived at Cindy’s, we quickly realized we were short on Romano cheese and whipped cream for the food prep, so Cindy and I took Vivian’s car to the market to get some more supplies. While at the market we decided to go to the closest Taco Bell which was in Menlo Mall (not really on the way or convenient in any way).

Our friend Jess works at American Apparel in the mall so we went in with the chance that she might be working. A girl that sort of looked like her was working the counter, but she had some Halloween make-up and big sunglasses on so it was hard to tell. I yelled “Jess!” while hiding among the clothes racks while Cindy watched if she looked. She didn’t and we left. I double checked to make sure it wasn’t her later, it wasn’t. Good start to the day.

- Chapter 2 - Car
On the way back from the mall and just down the street from Cindy’s home we get rear-ended by a lady in a Jeep. The cops came and since we were in Vivian’s car our friend, Paul, drove her to the scene also scratching his bumper on the curb while pulling up. In the meantime we sat on the guardrail while eating 5-layer burritos and Chalupas. Once the paperwork was completed and we were set to go we got back in Vivian’s car and...it wouldn’t start.

We tried to get the engine going for a minute or so when we started hearing someone yelling “GO!!!” outside. It was the cop who had blocked the entire street so we can get back on the road safely. Vivian (as innocent as possible) said “...it won’t start...” Thankfully he had a battery pack he used to jump the car, and we finally headed back to Cindy’s house.

- Chapter 3 - Engine running and locks that work too well
Once we got back to Cindy’s house we found Paul sitting in his car in the parking lot because he couldn’t get into Cindy’s house without her there. While we headed inside to finish up the food preparations we decided to leave Vivian’s car running in the parking lot so it could charge the battery. Earlier that day we discovered that Cindy’s doorknob was broken and it wouldn’t lock. On getting back, we discovered that we managed to lock the door, but the problem was that we couldn’t unlock it now. We also discovered Cindy’s house is secured pretty well during our attempts to break-in through windows and side doors. I ended up jamming Paul’s D&B card in the door so we can actually finally get back to Cindy’s. After a couple minutes sitting in the kitchen rethinking everything that had happen so far, we realized Vivian’s car was still running outside with the key in the ignition and unattended. It was still there when we got back and perhaps our luck was beginning to turn.

- Chapter 4 - New York
At this point we assumed that one of two things can happen: 1) things start getting better and we start getting lucky, or 2) unfortunate events keep occuring and the day becomes the best story in my repertoire. We started knocking on wood (aka Vivian’s head) whenever we went through all of the horrible situations that could pan out for us, and indeed our luck began to change.

Only a couple unfortunate things happened for the duration of the day in NY. All of which involved cars. The first was when Vivian and Paul decided to walk the food for delivery when we were stuck in traffic. Cindy volunteered to take Vivian’s place as the driver, but once they were gone and the traffic started to move, Cindy was still sitting in the back seat doing nothing. Surprisingly we didn’t get honked at or anything while she frantically ran around the car to the driver’s seat.

The second was when Cindy managed to get into the most awkward parking spot on 2nd Ave. She was blocking the bike lane and everyone thought she was trying to drive in the bike lane, so the honking and yelling began from drivers, pedestrians and bikers. There was also a nice gentleman that offered to park the car for us, but we kindly declined.

Once we met up with Victor we made him drive for the duration of the night in an attempt to reduce the chances of more things going wrong, but after we left his place and started our way back we found ourselves on a road tour of NY. Bring us to our third unfortunate event in NY, we accidental missed our exit twice and resulted in our tour of Brooklyn and up the FDR opposite the right way home.

This last unfortunate event was unfortunately not unfortunate for us, but when we finally got ourselves facing the right direction we saw a Rastafarian man about to get into a cab when it took off without him. As we passed he had his hands up in the air with a face of shock and unbelief. I hate to say it but it was probably cause he was black because the same cab picked up two girls only a few yards down the same street after he ditched the Rasta.

- Conclusion -
I love stories and when things go wrong I don’t see them as going wrong. I see them as the makings of a good story to tell folks when the for some reason the conversation becomes relevant. After all that, things could have been better, but they could have been a lot worse still. Luckily God favored us and we lived to tell the story of unfortunate events that occurred on October 23rd in the year 2010.

My mom sent me an email with this photo of the Water Bridge in Germany. It's pretty much a canal/river on top of a normal river. It cost 500 million Euros.

One of the things that I've been struggling with is how I spent my money. I have a good job and I get paid pretty well, but I find myself reluctant when it comes to making unnecessary purchases. I always ask myself why I need to buy myself luxury items when there are other people out there that need that money a lot more than I do. When I see things like the Water Bridge it saddens me to think that the 10% of people that own 90% of the world's wealth (or whatever that statistic is) don't really give a hoot about the other 90% that has squat.

I have to confess that I spent a lot of money when I first started making my own income a couple years ago, but people change. Just think of what you could be spending your money on next time you make a trip to Best Buy or somewhere.

Rutgers (Part IV - Senior Year)

Senior year

It’s been a while, but I’m going to try and bring this series to a close with memories from my first and second senior years at Rutgers.

Feet for brunch

For lunch one day I decided to make myself a nice brunch complete with sunny side up eggs, sausages and toast. I love breakfast/brunch food and I was thoroughly looking forward to plopping down on the couch and eat in front of the TV. However, as I was putting my plate down on the coffee table I failed to notice the can of Coke Zero right where I was lower my highly anticipated meal. The can tilted my plate and all my food slid off and onto the ground. I frantically grabbed the fallen food items off the ground with my bare hands and back onto the plate. (Thinking back, I’m surprised the egg yolks didn’t break…) I spent the next several minutes debating what to do next. Do I man up and just eat the fallen food? Or do I throw away my meal I put so much tender care into?

The breaking point was then I had the image of my roommate, Jon, walking around our apartment barefoot. I won’t go into too much detail…but Jon’s feet aren’t particularly appealing to the eyes and mostly likely my taste buds as well. At that moment I decided to throw my precious meal away and cooked up another plate-full. Even though I ended up eating the same thing I originally planned, it was far less satisfying than I originally hoped for and very bitter sweet.

Digging Holes

At the end of every school year, my Christian fellowship would make a trip out to the beach to watch the sunrise. A couple weeks earlier we had a dinner to honor the seniors, and we all got a little play bucket and shovel. Of course we all brought our buckets and shovels to the beach that morning to do the one semi-exciting thing there is to do on the beach…DIG A HOLE. We dug like maniacs that morning. I think we got to about 6 feet deep accompanied with a ramp going down to the bottom because it was too deep to get out without one. Heading up the work effort was my good friend Paul. He had trouble sleeping later that day because he couldn’t stop thinking about digging and after he woke up from a short nap he had sore legs from the hours we spend squatting and shoveling buckets of sand. He also managed to smash his bucket into a million pieces in the process of digging and we buried it when we filled in the hole before we left. If the ’09 graduates could leave one legacy behind, it would probably be that we were good diggers.

Senior Month

Traditionally colleges have a senior week at the end of the year for seniors to hangout and finish their undergraduate careers with a bang. Rutgers decided to cut the budget and give us senior couple-of-days instead. The events I went to ended up being pretty lame and not really worth mentioning. Usually after all the events are over and everyone’s graduated all the seniors just go home and figure out what to do with the rest of their lives but since almost everyone that goes to Rutgers doesn’t live far, we refused to let senior whatever die out so quickly.

After the sunrise beach trip that I mentioned before we did nothing but sleep and hang out. I’d go back to my apartment to nap or sleep and upon waking would call someone up to see where all my classmates were at the moment. I promptly headed that way to spend the rest of day with them. This went on for a little less than a month. To conclude the senior extravaganza everyone attended my church retreat/conference on Memorial Day weekend. Being there pretty much meant spending every moment of the 4 days together. After that, everyone was so sick of each other we stopped hanging out for some time.

Looking back, there was nothing particularly awesome about senior month, but spending that much time with friends I consider family is probably the best way I could have ended my senior year at Rutgers. I miss college and I’ll never forget the good ol’ times.