Irrelevance Glorified

Wowsers! I’m only six months behind on my updates.

I hate crossing time zones for personal trips. The flights are always so inconveniently timed and long. So when it comes time for the year-end holidays, I tend to stay on the West Coast. For Thanksgiving last year, I visited my friends Cameron and Gina up in Seattle. Looking back, most of these pictures are of their < 1 year old daughter, Ariana (aka Ari). Partially, that's because we didn't do a whole lot of exciting, picture worthy things. But mostly, it's because she is phenomenally cute. So yeah, enjoy pictures of squirmy happy baby. Again, I was too lazy to grab my camera most of the time, so most of the pictures and videos are with my phone.

Flickr set here
Slideshow below
Pictures & Descriptions after the jump

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Today’s musical selection is from the Heartless Bastards, a rock trio from Ohio. I dig these songs, and hopefully you will too.

Back in October 2010, I traveled back to Chicagoland for the wedding of one of my cousins. Due to the frenetic pace of school/work and the time/cost of travel, I rarely see any of my relatives. Because my Floridian sister can’t stand the cold (scientifically speaking), she rarely ventures North during the non-summer months. However, all bets are off for weddings. Family weddings are generally Rao-fests, where I see the relatives that I never see otherwise. This one was nicely timed, in that it was also my birthday. I forgot my camera on this trip, so I started taking pictures with my cell phone. It is a functional camera and can take decent videos, but the still image quality leaves a lot to be desired. So I’ve supplemented these pictures with pictures from my sister and my cousin Tara.

Flickr set here.
Slideshow below
Pictures & Descriptions after the jump.

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A recent conversation reminded me of one of my dormant passions — stupidly creative writing. Specifically, it unearthed the memory of a series of stories that I wrote as a freshman in high school. I had them posted on a previous revision of my website, but it did not survive the reboot to the blog format. It was for Mr. Eichwald’s biology class, where the assignment was to define a series of a vocabulary words that were being discussed in that section of the book, via a method that was left up to the student. I chose to write a story, one that took place on a cellular level. Reading it now, it’s sorta painful. I mean, it’s really bad. And a lot shorter than I remembered it being. The first episode plays it pretty straight, with the definitions right within the text. In later episodes, we didn’t have to include the definition within the text, so it streamlined things a bit.

I have never been able to write “seriously”. Parody and comedy is what I do best. One of the roadblocks that I also come up against, stupidly enough, are names. I can never think of good “random” names that don’t suck. I don’t know how Stephen King does it. So, the following story is the inaugural story of Nano-man and his trusty sidekick, Micro-Boy, as they fight crime below the Rayleigh limit. Also, keep in mind that we read these stories up in front of the class, so you must also imagine a 13 or 14 year old Ranjeet narrating events.
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