by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
My birthday is coming up and I am mulling different places I could go to “celebrate.” I think it’s possible I’ve come to the conclusion that what I want is a relaxing few days of sitting near a beach in my swimming trunks, watching hot chicks in string bikinis walk past. I was thinking about going to Austin for no other reason than I know someone who lives there, but after giving it some thought, I realize I probably would pretty bored. Austin, while great, is a little too much like Richmond for my tastes and I want somewhere hot, wet and exotic. L.A. is cool because it’s got great weather right now, but it’s so enormous that I don’t know how much fun it might be if I went there without someone to hang out with.
What I really want is to make new friends, eat Korean food and sing in a Korean singing room. But it seems as though that is nearly impossible. There’s just no way to meet strangers in a city without hookers getting involved. It’s a sad state of affairs when basic human interaction is so atomized that you can’t meet new people without people demanding money or something else from you.
So, as I keep suggesting, this a problem that if you could fix it with an app, you probably could make a lot of money. There is no single app that does what I want — help me make new friends. I want a location based app that if I was at a bar, I would see other people were using the app and, maybe, I could send them a video message as an ice breaker. As it stands, I’m going to fly into Miami not knowing anyone and simply sit on the beach and watch hot chicks walk by in bikinis. That’s if everything goes according to plan, and it may not.
