The above "Shazam!" is deceptive, actually. I fully intend to mosey back into blooging at a reasonable pace. I apologize for my laxity. The only reason I haven't been bulging is --

Hey! Look! Over there! What's that?

[ Points to rear of audience. Runs away. ]

Err. I'm back. Anyway, in this brief hiatus, I accomplished the following:
I started doing capoeira seriously again. I've been taking it easy the past few months, but that's really quite dumb. There's so much to learn, and I am now in my twenty-eighth year, so I had best get cracking. Also, there's really no point in wasting time, since that time is, err, wasted.

I also turned twenty-seven, as you may have guessed. I didn't really celebrate; I never do. My birthday methodology consists of (a) not telling anyone, (b) hoping they'll somehow figure it out anyway, and (c) waiting around increasingly despondently for someone to call me up and surprise me with a "Happy Birthday, Saurabh!", thus providing me with enough validation to exist for another year. Thanks to all of you who did wish me; my lack of appreciation was only apparent and not actual.

I took this opportunity to get totally hammered. Four shots of gin, Hendrick's, straight up, did it for me, since I weigh less than insouciance and had eaten precisely nothing that day. I did reasonably well, despite that - I think my gaze was only slightly unfocused when I said good night to the attractive female server on leaving the bar.

Ah - I started a diet to cure my insouciance weightlessness. It more or less involves me eating a shitload more. I'm skeptical of this working. (See above note about capoeira, for example - I can burn through calories like Sherman in Georgia.)

I went to New Jersey for my cousin's wedding. It was a Christian ceremony, which I've never attended before. In fact, I think I've only been to Hindu weddings to date.^* Somewhat instructive. It was an Episcopalian (Anglican) church, which means it's exactly like a Catholic church, complete with no Bibles in the pews and the rite of the Eucharist, plus silly-looking gowns for the priest deacon. Ah - the major difference being that the deacon was a woman. Her sermon was interestingly constructed, in that it was coherent and engaging almost exactly in the inverse of when she was talking about God.^†

The highlight of that particular excursion was, of course, the reception, where I was officially designated as "guy who must light up the dance floor", everyone else apparently being either (a) white or (b) Indian uncles/aunties, and therefore unable to dance. This turned out to be not quite true - my sister-in-law loves to dance and can hold her own, and many people were at least committed, if not able. But I'm proud to say I definitely knocked that one out of the park, at least for songs that had desi beats to them, when I could trot out a pretty substantial battery of bhangra moves. I was more or less useless on the seventies disco-esque stuff and the like. How do you dance to that, anyway?

Well, there it stands. What have y'all been up to?

---

^* This is not as bad as my roommate, who is twenty-two-ish, and has not been to a SINGLE wedding, to date.

^† Plus Eddie Izzard has made it impossible to take any mention of the Holy Ghost seriously, per his bit:

GOD: What's the Holy Ghost doing these days?

JESUS: Oh, he's useless, Dad. Goes around with a sheet over his head.

HOLY GHOST: [ spookily ] Holy Ghost! Holy Ghooost!

GOD: Holy Ghost, this is not an episode of Scooby Doo.