But I just want to be your friend.

One of the pick-up lines that infuriates me the most is when I tell a guy at a bar that I have a boyfriend and he responds with “Well, just give me your number anyway and we can just be friends.” 

I swear I hear that at least once a night when I’m at any bar, whether in Philly or NYC or AC or Vegas. Where do guys get this ridiculous line from? Do girls really encourage the repetition of this line with responses like, “Ok! Cool! I need more friends anyway and you seem like an ideal candidate!”?  Do guys then take that statement and share its success amongst each other all over the country? If there are girls that respond like that out there, please introduce me to them so I can kick them in the face (Just kidding, I don’t promote violence).

The next time this line is used on me, I vow that I will take the guy up on their offer and I will make him wish that he never asked to be my friend. 

This is the scenario that is currently playing out in my head:

- First, I am going to pretend that he is just like my best friend, Julie and I am going to talk to him exactly how (and in the same frequency that) I talk to her.

- I am going to call him at 7 am on Saturday mornings when I wake up to tell him all about my feelings regarding a situation that happened the night before. If he doesn’t answer, I will leave him a several-minute long voicemail detailing the aforementioned feelings. 

- I will then text him a few hours later telling him how painful my cramps are and how Midol just doesn’t cut it. And how sometimes I feel like I want to tear my uterus out and throw it against a brick wall (I apologize if I just lost a lot of my readers with that visual).

- I will then text him a few hours later and ask him if he thinks my highlights make me look too blonde, or like I’m trying to be something I’m not, or if I’m just being crazy because sometimes I overanalyze things…. And from there, I’d proceed to transition into a conversation about Eric and if something he did recently meant that he doesn’t value my feelings.

- Maybe a few hours later, I’ll email him a Facebook message that I received and ask him to decipher the true meaning of this message… If it was a friendly message, or something more, or maybe I’m just overanalyzing again….?

…You get the point. 

Basically, this will continue until he blocks my number on his phone – with the ultimate goal being that he will never attempt to ask a girl with a boyfriend if they can just be friends. 

Oh, he will learn.

Turning over a new musical leaf.

I used to be an avid R&B fan.  When I say avid, I mean that I probably know every word to ever R&B song that has been released between 1990 and 2010. However, over the past year, I stopped listening to the entire genre altogether, mainly because current r&b songs can be summed up in one word: trash.

First of all, I’m tired of hearing about sex. Every single song that any R&B artist puts out nowadays is about sex – Between Trey Songz, Kelly Rowland, Jeremih, Chris Brown, Rihanna (her genre is questionable), Ciara and Lloyd, they might as well start directing pornographies.  It’s not even like their songs are romanticized interpretations of sex, where you could get somewhat of an impression that these artists actually have emotions (e.g. the Boyz II Men’s classic, “I’ll Make Love To You”); rather, it’s the trashy, raunchy version that appeals to hormone-raging pre-teens/teens. When I hear my thirteen/fourteen year old students reciting every Trey Songz lyric aloud, it makes me nauseous.

I’m not sure when this transition happened, because of course there used to be the sex-crazed R&B artists of the 90s (e.g. R. Kelly & Jodeci), but there were also enough artists that were putting out songs about actual emotions like love and sadness and anger like Boys II Men, Jagged Edge, SWV, Xscape, Destiny’s Child… I can go on and on.  On the other hand, today, there are twenty Trey Songz artists for every one Ne-Yo out there.

Secondly, it feels like these songwriters have half a brain. I’m not saying you have to be a college graduate to write music because obviously you don’t need a degree to have an innate talent for songwriting. However, when you have to resort to spelling out the letters of a word because you can’t figure out anything else that rhymes with the preceding verse, I think you need to re-think your career choice.

Anyway, I can go on and on because this is a topic that I’m very passionate about, but I won’t bore my readers. So instead, I will just conclude that I have just added 92.5 (Country) to my radio presets because until Ne-Yo can write some more quality records to balance out the current mainstream playlists, I will resort to Taylor Swift, Brad Paisley and Lady Antebellum to get my emotional fix.

Don’t judge.

All the girls standing in the line at the bathroom...

Waiting in line at the girls bathroom at a bar can be a very stressful situation. I never really paid much attention to the emotionally-charged dynamic of the bathroom (probably because I'm too drunk to notice or care), but this weekend in AC helped bring some of the ridiculousness of the girls' bathroom to light.

The bathroom is like the unregulated section of the bar - there are no bouncers, employees or any form of security within eye-distance (except for the occasional powerless lady that hands out paper towels). In crowded bars where girls have to wait on line before getting into the bathroom, drunk females are responsible for having enough integrity to not cut in line or to not make obnoxious comments when someone is in the bathroom for 30 seconds longer than one female thinks the other should spend in the stall.  If these few simple rules are not followed, the actions are met with several consequences that can range from dirty looks to screaming matches to the physical expression of female anger - the hair-pulling-and-scratching cat fight (all of which I have witnessed).

Then there are the less interesting, miscellaneous actions of crying (and the resulting consoling by a fellow female) and vomiting that also occurs in the bathroom.  Occasionally, a female will be friendly enough to another to let you know that there is no more toilet paper in the stall, or that she thinks something about your outfit/hair/makeup/face is cute, but more often than not, the interactions are negative.

A recent example of a negative interaction in the bathroom of an AC club:
A girl, wearing something she ought not to be wearing (i.e. a dress that is so short, that it probably is meant to be worn as a shirt) is washing her hands, while her dress is constantly moving higher and higher up her thighs.

Lady handing out paper towels: Excuse me, miss?
Inappropriately-dressed female: Yeah? (acting clearly annoyed)
Lady handing out paper towels: Your dress is riding up.
Inappropriately-dressed female to friend: (rolling eyes and with an extreme attitude) Who does this b--- think she is? My mother?

I would have interjected at this moment in the lady's defense and to tell this girl that "no, she's not your mother, but I applaud her for figuring out a polite way to tell you how ridiculous you look," but had I done that, one of the aforementioned negative consequences most likely would have ensued.  Getting into an unnecessary, drunken fight in the girls' bathroom at the age of 27, would probably have meant that I have just hit a low point in my life...and that is currently, not a part of my '30 Things To Do Before I'm 30' list.

Taking it back old school...

So this morning, I did my routine sign-in of Google Talk in the AM to catch up with my fellow 9-5 friends and when I logged in, I noticed that someone added me to their chat list.  I didn't recognize the name, but nonetheless, I clicked 'Accept' just in case I did know the person. The conversation went something like this:

XXXX: hey u!
Amara S.: hey, who's this?
XXXX: i'm really bored. not much going on.
Amara S.:  yeah, i guess not much usually goes on at 7 in the morning
XXXX: 22/f, u?

...and that's when I blocked her.

So there were a few things I didn't understand about this situation:

1. This is 2012. Not 1996. I haven't heard the reference to "a/s/l" in like fifteen years. Who randomly looks for people to chat with anymore, outside of chat rooms (if those even still exist...?)? I was almost shocked that she didn't write with alternating capital and lowercase letters...
2. How do you even find someone on Google Talk? Is there some directory that everyone is listed in, like back in the AOL days?
3. Even if there is some type of name directory on Google, what on earth would provoke someone to chat with me? I don't even have one of those cutesy or provocative names like "KoalaBear123" "TooHot4U." My user name is "asriranganathan" which is as unappealing as an ethnically South Asian name can get.

If anyone can provide me with some insight regarding this perplexing situation, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks.

I hate headhunters.

Ok, I can't say I hate headhunters because when you actually do need a job, they can occasionally be useful. However, I feel like LinkedIn is just promoting daily unnecessary contact with recruiters and there needs to be some type of polite profile option where you can select that you are "currently not interested in speaking to unknowns."

Here are excerpts from a recruiter email I received today via LinkedIn:

Recruiter X: Your educational background is SO impressive. It reminded me of a real talent who I couldn’t help many years ago.

A talent you couldn't help? Does that mean I shouldn't waste my time talking to you? Needless to say, I didn't respond.


Hours later, I receive another email from the same guy:

Recruiter X: Also, I didn’t know engineers were so photogenic =) 

Okay. Seriously? I don't understand what is happening here. 


Anyway, I'm going to take this as a sign to deactivate LinkedIn until it's time to start job hunting...  

The day I outgrew THE city...

Growing up, New York used to be THE city to me. I would cut school to drive up there for the day, wander aimlessly through the streets before picking up my latest favorite cd for $2 on Canal Street (obviously this was the pre-iPod era), happily eat two slices of phenomenal pizza, and drive back home to make it just in time for my parents to not realize that I hadn't been in school. Then, in college, I repeated the process - but this time, my trips would involve long nights of intense dancing and drinking in the LES, eating a $6 lamb-and-rice platter afterwards (with extra white sauce and hot sauce, of course) at 53rd and 6th (the one across the street from the official "Platters") and then driving back home to Jersey at sunrise. Every major event HAD to be held in NYC and every weekend involved a rotation of who would be the driver. It wasn't until this year that I realized that the thrill of NYC for this Philadelphian-female has come and gone.


When I first graduated from college and moved to Philadelphia, I was miserable. All of my friends were either still in North Jersey or had moved into Manhattan.  I could count on one hand how many times I had been to Philadelphia (although growing up, I was equidistant from both NY and Philly). As an engineer, there were no jobs in NYC and Philadelphia was as close to the major Northeast metropolitan area that I was going to get. I took the offer and moved into my Philly apartment, but spent every single weekend driving back up to NY. As I started making more friends and establishing my own life in Philly, my trips to NY became more and more infrequent, until I realized that before this past weekend, I had not been to NYC in over six months.


My sister wanted to celebrate her sixteenth birthday in NYC (of course), so I took her to spend the day in Manhattan with her friend and my little cousin. I let them wander around while I spent the day with Priya. It was, at this point, when I realized I was over the thrill of the big city.


First, I had to drive around for forty-five minutes to try to find a parking spot in Midtown because I refused to spend over $75 to park my car in a lot for six hours. The only spot I could find was a two-hour metered spot that was two AVENUE blocks away, which meant that every two hours, I had to walk these two blocks (which seemed painfully longer and longer each time) to put more money in the meter. Of course, the walk isn't just a normal walk because it's 60 degrees out in January in Midtown West, which means EVERYONE and their mother is out on the street - it's a dodge-people-and-bicycles-and-children-and-rollerbladers-and-strollers-and-dogs-walk, while trying to maintain a steady pace. As I'm making one of these unfortunate walks back to Priya's apartment, I notice two guys yelling at each other as I try to speed-walk past, and just when I feel as though I'm comfortably past the argument.... I get nailed in the back of my head with a rogue CD case that one of the argumentative guys had thrown at the other [sidebar: this is in the midst of the iPod era, by the way, which makes me question the quality of individuals that still carry CDs] . I respond with a "WHAT THE [insert multiple expletives here]?!?!?!" And of course, because it's Manhattan, and people here don't have the general social etiquette that regular human beings have, they don't even look twice at me, and just proceed on their way like nothing happened.


The second incident of the day involved Priya and my attempt at getting our eyebrows done.  As we walk back from the nail salon to her apartment in search of a salon, we see a sign that says "Eyebrow Threading" and we decide to go in.  Upon first glance, the place looked a little questionable, but nonetheless, this is Manhattan and 'questionable' is not an unusual adjective to describe ethnically-owned local spots, so we went inside. We climb up a flight of stairs, which lead up to another flight of stairs, plus a row of deadbolted doors that look like they hadn't been opened in years.  A sign, that looks like it had just been printed on an old inkjet, says to continue upstairs for the spa. So we continue. Up 7 more similarly labeled flights of stairs, at which point I am gasping for breath and sweating profusely - because again, this is Manhattan, and central air in the questionable hallways of 'spas' is not expected. The final door to the 'spa' is also deadbolted and locked. We knock on the door and an Asian lady cracks the door open and looks at us, puzzled. We ask to get our eyebrows done and she firmly says, "We don't do that here." As I look behind the cracked door, I notice a "massage" chair, and a security camera outside the front door, and I simultaneously realized, this was not an eyebrow threading salon.


So, in conclusion, the thrill of living the fantasy life of Carrie Bradshaw, has now passed. I want to live somewhere where I can walk freely down a city block at a normal walking pace, with minimal concentration required and little consequence, and where I can just find out if a "spa" is a "spa" before painfully climbing a mountain of stairs without air conditioning. After having realized that I can no longer make spontaneous trips into NYC and that I need to mentally (and physically) prepare weeks in advance for any potential visit, I also realized that I have now surpassed the bright-eyed-bushy-tailed-and-whimsical-era of my early 20s and am ready to settle down in a much more manageable, and less-stressful city like Philadelphia.