V-Day Reminds Me Of Stupid Times

The first time I ever came to Tahoe was exactly 17 years ago. I remember because it was the first Valentine’s Day after I met Yinh and I totally ditched her to fly to SF from NYC to enjoy a ski weekend with my college friends. And I don’t even ski. I also remember bringing poker chips on that trip and being stopped by security who literally flipped through each of the 500 chips. Why so thorough? The TSA agent told me poker chips look like pipe bombs when passed through the scanner. Better than being stripsearched for being an “Abdelmessih” I guess.

[My father was actually stripsearched in a pre-9/11 world and a few men in my family changed their names after 9/11…nevermind the fact my last name is aggressively Christian translating to “servant of the Messiah”. When you consider my first name, I’m a walking recursive loop. Anyway, the men in my family weren’t going to count on racists to split hairs on brown people and the etymology of names.]

I’d say those were stupid times, but we still take our shoes off before we fly which is a comically overfit, closing-the-barn-door-after-the-horse-escaped policy. I’d like to see a risk to cost analysis of the millions of lost minutes due to that one. Anyway, nothing is stupider than me circa Feb 2004.

(I actually thought Yinh avenged me in the most voodoo way…it took 8 hours to drive back to SFO from Incline Village. Of course now we know that is not unusual. It’s just a holiday weekend.)