I’m in a meeting this afternoon with the investment bankers helping us put together Cyan’s film investment fund. After months of crunching numbers, drafting investment memorandums, putting together an extensive investor intranet, today we’re finally ready to move ahead, finally ready for the ibank to start heading out to their investor base.

“One last thing, though,” says one of the managing partners. “Is there anything we need to know, anything that might come up in due diligence about you as individuals or about Cyan as a company?”

We shake our heads.

“If there is, we just need to know in advance, to be ready with a response,” he continues.

I shake my head again. Yoav shakes his head again.

“Well,” says Colin, “there’s the porn.”

Our banker laughs nervously.

“No, seriously,” says Colin, before launching into an explanation, me occasionally chiming in to add detail. That, while seniors at Yale, he and I and two of our other friends started a fake secret society as a prank. That the prank quickly rose to national media attention. That the prank even culminated in our story becoming a movie for Comedy Central.

The rub being, the fake secret society, like the movie born from it, was entitled “Porn n’ Chicken”.

We weren’t actually pornographers we explain, we just convinced the media that we were. But, if you Google up our names collectively, you’ll likely stumble across something about it. So we talk a bit more about the prank, the motivation behind it, why it wasn’t really a big deal.

By the end, our bankers look significantly relieved.

“Still,” one of them asks, “porn and chicken?”

“Yes.”

“You know,” he concludes, “when I’m watching porn, fried chicken is usually the last thing on my mind.”

I am not, by any means, a baseball hat sort of guy. If you see me wearing one, it’s almost undoubtedly becuase it’s cold enough that I haven’t showered for days.

The problem with falling off the blogging wagon is, the longer you go without posting, the more you start to feel like your comeback post has got to be really, really good. So you slack off for another few days, and the pressure mounts. To end the vicious cycle, I’m jumping back into the fray, despite the fact that all I have to say is:

Yesterday, while kickboxing, I apparently got punched in the eye. I say apparently, as I have no memory of it happening. Yet, upon waking this morning, I discovered a small crescent-shaped bruise at the top of my right cheek, just below the eye-socket. With glasses on, it isn’t particularly noticeable; in fact, if I had another on the left, I’d appear to simply be significantly sleep deprived. Yet, after careful examination, I’m completely certain it’s a black eye. And I must admit, I’m absolutely thrilled.

As much as I’d like to believe I’m somewhere between Ferris Bueller and Thomas Crown, I’ve recently realized I’m much more likely somewhere between Alvie Singer and Harry Burns.

God bless you, spellchecker. Without your help, I would never be able to spell occasionally, accommodate, necessary or recommend.

A good friend of mine here in the city grew up in a very orthodox Jewish community, which disallowed mixed dancing (i.e. women dancing with men); as a result, she never picked up even the most rudimentary ballroom dance skills – a distressing inability, considering how frequently her job as an assistant curator at the Met requires her presence at gala openings, fundraiser balls, and other society events. Certainly, Manhattan is full of fine ballroom dance academies ready to remedy such a situation; yet most require students to sign up for group classes in partnered pairs, to cover for the fact that, while women appear to be lining up for admission, the number of straight guys in the city who might sign up for such classes on their own accord could be counted on one hand.

To make a long story short, then, when she stepped onto the floor of Dance New York yesterday evening, it was with me, sucker friend number one, in tow. At least, I consoled myself, I’d previously picked up a small amount of ballroom experience, through a short class while at Yale, an ex-girlfriend who was heavily into the late nineties’ swing revival, and a mother (serious enough about waltzing to head intermittently to Vienna with my father to dance at the Royal and Opera Balls) who would occasionally drag my seven-year old self down the hall to strains of Strauss. Still, by the start of last night’s class, I could barely remember the basic steps of the various dances, much less perform any well enough to use side by side with royalty (or even anyone with two opposing feet).

By the end of the evening, however, two partners I danced with asked if I was an instructor, and one of the instructors asked if I’d ever considered competing. On the one hand, I was thrilled and flattered – a natural talent discovered! On the other, I was completely appalled. Ballroom dance? So far as I was concerned, it might as well have been natural talent for interior design or hair styling. Why couldn’t I suddenly discover a knack for 100 mile per hour fastballs, I wondered, or a surprising ability (considering my limited height and exceeding whiteness) to dunk with Jordan-esque panache?

Sometimes, life is so tragically unfair.

Two days back, spending several hours too many catching waves and practicing longboard tricks (nota bene: the classic headstand-on-board can cause serious board-wax-in-hair), I managed to pick up the best sunburn I’ve had in years, a burn that carried well past lobster red and deep into fire-engine. Flying home today, however, some 48 hours later, I barely look pink.

For whatever reason, I’ve always been an unusually fast healer. At a one week post-op checkup after some minor surgery a few years back, for example, the surgeon literally had to check his files against his appointment calendar to convince himself that he had really sliced and diced just one week prior – the scar, he said, appeared to have been healing for nearly a month.

Sure, I’m grateful for that quick-fix abilitiy – given the frequently injurious nature of full-contact martial arts, it’s one I often put to good use. But, taken together with a fast metabolism (two hours after a big dinner and I’m ready to repeat the meal), it makes me worry about how long my body can keep up the pace. If all my cells are sprinting along, how will they ever be able to stick around for the marathon of a life I’ve got planned?

Having arrived earlier this afternoon in Hawaii (or, more specifically, on the southwest coast of Maui), I’ve by now had chance to reconfirm at least one highly functional life skill – within seconds of entering, I can consistently and precisely estimate a hot tub’s temperature, to the exact degree. Impressive, sure, but that’s just the sort of ability you can hone if you’re willing to subject yourself to the hard work of years and years of vacationing on tropical islands across the globe.