Lawrence, Mandy and Michael! At first I thought Mandy and Michael were sharing a floating red leather hat, but that's when I looked closer and noticed Mr. Creepers McPeepers getting his L U R K on in the background.
Major controversy erupted when someone drew a "all teams compete" card and each team had to select a member to try to get their teammates to guess the clue "Jewish." Here's Meredith holding up the winning drawing, in front of her all-Jewish team.
On Saturday morning, I was (obviously) feeling a little lazy and elected to skip the whole "getting dressed" nonsense and go directly to reading cool articles on the interweb. I guess I lost track of time and was sitting there long enough for Meredith to grab my camera and take this totally sneaky photo of unaware-me browsin' in the buff. After years of posting all sorts of compromising and embarrassing photos of friends and strangers alike, I figured it's only fair to post horribly embarrassing pics of me as well!
...so a bunch of us piled into the elevator and decided to walk a couple more blocks downtown to check out some other PR-event kind of party that someone else knew about.
...but I mean, seriously, c'mon. Even if you hate vermin, there's no one in the world who can't say this picture of two rats spooning each other in a box isn't ridiculously cute. (PS - If you count the intertwined tails, you'll realize there's a third rat cuddled up in the box behind these two love birdsrats.
On Monday, I hooked up the TV and stoked to see that our previous tenant had forgotten to cancel cable! FUCKING SCORE! I was, however, quite shocked to see the new HBO On Demand line up for November. Designa Vagina? Pumping His Grundle? Holy shit, right?
Kids growing up today must have it so easy - they can just turn on the interweb or HBO On Demand and pretty much see EVERYTHING. Back when I was little, if I wanted to see some some titties I had to wait until the end of the month and then go down to the Cumberland Farms (which is the north Jersey equivalent of 7-11) every day and sneak around back and go dumpster diving - hoping we'd hit the jackpot and arrive on the day that they threw out all the n00dy mags from the previous month! (We used to sell all the extras to kids in Middle School - $5 a mag!).
It was either that or wait until everyone went to bed and stay up for hours watching the Spice Channel hoping that the "scramble" would clear up long enough to see a tit! Hahaha.
Hahahahaha. OMG. I wasn't at this party, but Leigh emailed me this photo the next day and it's so good that it needed to be posted here. (PS - Leigh, what are you drinking? Is that a giant glass of Scotch??)
...this totally dirty-by-accident photo! Holy moly! But one thing's for sure, it certainly clears up any doubts anyone had about Lisa's ability to, ummm, work the mic.
Creative costumes are great and all, but in my opinion, the best thing you can do for a work Halloween costume is to dress up as one of your co-workers! Check out Christine, who came in dressed up as Ian! She gets awarded some pretty serious "I have big balls" bonus points because Ian was her boss!
Which the locals affectionately refer to as "The D.P." (which is accidental comedy gold as far as I'm concerned).
When most people think of New Jersey, they think of Guidos and horrible orange-women with belly-jewelry. While that's certainly something that Jersey should be famous for, what most people don't realize is that if you go into any part of western NJ near the PA border, Jersey is totally filled with rednecks! The DP was the embodiment of Jersey redneckness. We walked in the place and it was filled with bearded men wearing cowboy hats singing along to the country music that was blasting over the PA. Scott looked like he fit in, but me, I looked like someone in need of an ass-kicking so we only stayed for a beer.
Animal FunTime Party House got even better when Leigh came by and dropped off Edie off with us! Look how excited Meredith is to have two little lap-weasels!
This is one of my favorite photos - we're down about 45m (~150" feet) and the two divers are floating above the dropoff of the continental shelf and staring down into what looks like an endless blue abyss. Every time I swim over an edge and look down into the deep, I get vertigo for a couple of seconds. One of the craziest feelings in the world. Scuba diving moments like this are the closest you can come to feeling like you're in space without leaving the planet.
After our max depth, we slowly started making our ascent back up around the mountain. I was feeling peaceful and relaxed, slowly swimming next to the reef admiring all the colors and fishes and then when I looked down, I saw my first "real" shark. And by "real" I mean a shark that looks just like a shark that you see on a National Geographic special that's big enough to harm you in the unlikely event it decided to bite you. Trying to calm my shaking hands, I descended to get a little closer and busted out my camera to try to get a movie!
No matter how many times you tell your rational brain that a shark doesn't really pose all that much of a risk, there's no stopping your limbic system from reacting. I'm surprised you can't hear the sound of my heart pounding against my ribcage in this video. The shark is a gray reef shark. And he was probably about 5' or 6' feet long.
After we got back on the boat, our captain moved the boat around the island to another dive spot while we were waiting for our surface time to be over. We anchored next to another group of divers that I'm guessing were practicing their underwater navigation skills. They submerged...
Here's me doing my best David Brent desk pose while double-fisting delicious wine coolers. (Man, I don't care what anyone says. Those raspberry Bacardi Breezers are DELICIOUS! Do they even sell them here in the States or are they a UK thing? I totally need to check next time I'm out at a store here!)
After our beach stroll, we were walking back to our hotel and we can across one of the the funiest bizarro dopplegangers I've ever seen! Looks like Bizarro Midget Grant Stoddard's been Big Game Fishin' again!
We all piled into the back of the truck and everyone huddled together to try to stay warm. I just have to say, nobody has more fun than Thai people. For seriously. If these photos of a truckload full of wet and shivery happy smiley people who just got finished tubing down a country river for ninety minutes don't make you want to fly to Thailand right now...
After lunch, we arrived back at our fantastic hostel a little before 3pm. Kraisak, the man who runs the place, had a bunch of people over and when we asked what the occasion was, he told us that it was Thai Mother's Day
Then he told us that a bunch of his friends and relatives were going to go tubing down the riving in the rain and asked us if we'd like to join them! Of COURSE we did! So we ran and got tubes...
After we'd finished cooling off, we went back over to the riding platform and we got to play with the elephant a little bit. She was so friendly and curious. She kept sending her trunk up to grab at our hands and sniff around. Getting touched and groped by a sniffy elephant's trunk is genuinely one of the weirdest and wonderfulest things I've ever experienced!
Check out the totally jungley mountains in the background. Can you believe that this place actually exists in the world? Even though I was there, every time I see these pictures I'm like "What? That place can't be real!"
...we spotted a series of floating raft houses built along side the edge of the island (which pretty much looked like someone had dropped the top of a mountain into the middle of a lake).
Then we rounded a corner and what we thought was the other side of the lake turned out to be an island in the middle of the lake! We entered a cove of some sort and then a couple of minutes later...
The guy at our hostel highly recommended the tour of the lake and I took his word without asking him to go into too much detail about what we'd be doing on the tour. Around this time we'd be driving across the lake for almost an hour and we were starting to wonder if the whole tour was going to be spent on the boat.
The night was really funny. The girls also LOVED Meredith's big blue eyes and kept telling her that they didn't usually "go with" other ladies but that if she was interested in one of them "that was ok." Hahaha. We ended up getting really drunk and hanging out with the girls and answering a lot of questions about life in New York City.
...the infamous Nana Plaza for my birthday! Nana Plaza is one of Bangkok's really famous red light districts (and was featured prominently in John Burdett's book Bangkok 8 that I was reading at the time). The place is sort of a mind fuck. At the onset it seems like any other bikini go-go bar, except that the girls there are all prostitutes. They each have numbers on their bikinis so you can order them (!!!).
Most of the girls there are from small rural towns in the middle of nowhere and are sent to Bangkok to work in the sex trade so they can earn money for their families. They realized right away that our group wasn't there for sex, but thought it was really funny that we were just there to hang out and have fun. (And they all LOVED the fact that Jeremy spoke pidgin Thai).
After dinner, I had to go to an international calling center and call the founder of Yodle to talk about a potential job opportunity. (I ended up turning down the job a couple of days later, but six months later after the company had grown a bit, I ended up taking it and started there in April of 2008 as their Director of Product Management. Woot!).
Anyway, while I was away on this call, Jeremy took Meredith out for a couple of buckets (he doesn't drink) and when I met back up with them they'd decided that they were taking me to...
And then I set my camera all the way across the tent and used the timer to take this awesome Hustler Magazine inspired photo that I call "The West's Corruption of the East."
...a giant air conditioned (and carpeted!) tent. We went inside and Meredith took a bunch of photos of the two of us acting like we're working out some Old Testament business deals. Hahaha.
...Faisal decking me out! I had always figured the clothing had some sort of religious significance, but it turns out that it's just the traditional dress of the region and wearing it to work is pretty much akin to dressing up in a suit in the west.
...and we saw the Simpsons Movie! Here's Faisal and Mer with the rest of the fam, minus Bart who must've been stolen! Hahaha. (By the way, they had the same exact display in NYC and someone broke Homer's arm off. Nice to see that Simpsons-vandalism is so universal).
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