thankful

I am very, very happy.

small talk

I vomitted twice today, once in the morning and once around noon, after I tried to eat lunch.  I still feel pretty awful, but I think eating dinner helped.  Stomach settling, I guess.  I hope.

I’ve been cooking with Devin and James in James’ room. His roommates are nice, always offering to help, offering to share meals, share groceries.  It takes some getting used to, eating meat again, but I think I am doing okay apart from the occasional upset stomach.  Tonight we made lemon-garlic chicken over spinach risotto.  The chicken was tender but flavorless, and the risotto was flavorful but textureless. And kind of mushy.  None of us are great cooks, but we like trying different things.

I’m working on my summer routine.  My room is unbearably hot during the day, but cools down at night.   My bed is next to the windows and I like leaving the blinds open, so I can see the river and the lights before I go to sleep. Seems romantic. A little trite. It’s still nice.

I wake up around 7am every morning to close my blinds, and try to sleep until 9:30.  Around noon, I take the dogs out.  I look silly and small trying to hold onto them, and they get a lot of attention.  I work until 6, maybe 7 on a bad day.  My friends like to cook. They like video games and movies and basketball.  I play sometimes.

I’m getting used to being alone.

I appreciate the company.

I hope I write again. I hope it keeps me accountable.

spring

today was so warm.

i’m so relieved.

keys!

yesterday, i received a package and got really excited.

but it was only my new keyboard. in the process of installing it, i learned what the insides of a laptop looked like, and destroyed my old keyboard.

but now i have one that works!

!!!

i learned also today that i have no willpower. and that kung fu hustle is a great piece of cinematography.

paper planes!

a lot earlier in the summer, i discovered that my friend nathaniel flies planes. this is probably one of the coolest skills ever, and after my parents told me that i wasn’t allowed to go flying with him, we made plans to go anyway. unfortunately, the first time we scheduled had to be cancelled due to weather, and the rest of the summer was bust because i kept leaving on the weekends.

we kept remaking plans, until finally last weekend, nathaniel made me wake up at 7am on a saturday to go flying.

was it worth it?
SO worth it.

the day started with nathaniel laughing at my sleepiness. turns out i didn’t need to wake up that early at all, because when we finally got to the airfield, we were told we couldn’t go up for an hour. to make up for it, nathaniel drove me to various touristy parts of boston suburbia. there are no pictures to document this because i didn’t think this through and hadn’t charged my camera. didn’t want to waste batteries. we saw the old north bridge again, concord, the alcott house, and cows. boston is so historic.

an hour later, we were back at the airfield and good to go. when we saw our plane, i almost decided not to go. this photograph is deceptive, because i used angles. it is a very very small vehicle.

luckily, i saw a similar plane doing well in the air, and that the inside of the plane looked real like a plane should

unfortunately, when we finally got in the air, it was too foggy to get good pictures of the skyline

but i did get a good shot of our shadow

and i didn’t throw up.

in addition, i also learned the phonetic alphabet.

alpha bravo charlie delta echo foxtrot golf hotel india juliet kilo lima mike november oscar papa quebec romeo sierra tango uniform victor whiskey x-ray yankee zulu!

i’m learning to say it quick.

unfortunate

these are the worst fortune cookies i’ve ever seen, ever.

best to worse:

1)

so this one wasn’t actually too bad, and if we add “in bed,” it’s fairly acceptable.

2)

my cookie was in 2 pieces. what does it MEAN?!

3)

Q: What is contained in everything?
A: Wisdom.

it’s a riddle cookie!!! riddleculous!

despite our bad luck with fortune cookies though, we got really good soup dumplings, peking duck, and other asian dimsum. we ate a lot:

yay food. i’m a fatty

visitée

i liked my livejournal. i liked reading through it, and remembering things. but i was sad the other day, couldn’t figure out what i was talking about half the time. too cryptic, bad writing. so the goal of this blog is to be more eventful and less mysterious!

i hope it’ll be more exciting this way.

so joy came to see me from canada and that was exciting!.particularly after i had to spend a week with a surprise visit from my smelly friend jeffrey. i use the word friend loosely because we haven’t really spoken to each other in about three years, but he was backpacking across atlantic canada (he didn’t do laundry, he was smelly), and thought boston was close enough to halifax that he would “drop by.” after three years, we still didn’t have that much to talk to each other about, and spent a good amount of time examining his love life. apparently all the girls he’s dated have been 3-5 years younger than him, and he managed to date a girl for six months without actually seeing her, ever. power of the internet! i have lots to learn.

actually jeffrey wasn’t that smelly, was really nice, and i had fun having him here. also, he left me canadian paraphernalia! beth models one particularly attractive piece for us here, as she simultaneously achieves one of her lifetime goals of wearing an umbrella hat:

if you look really hard, you can kind of see joy’s elbow in the background, sitting on my bed. she spent a lot of time there in the next few days, when i was being a bad friend and working. left her in my room, without AC, as boston weather rose to highs of 100 (38 in celsius!). unfortunately i told her that the weather had been pretty cool the week before, so joy showed up with sweatshirts, long-sleeved shirts, and jeans.

this led us to take refuge with shi deng, a friend of joy’s who lives in boston suburbia. this was one of the sketchiest things i’ve ever done, as i found out that shi is joy’s friend from playing online dance games , and she’s never met him IRL before. turns out though that not only was shi not going to rape or kill us, he also provided us with air conditioning and a spare bed, drove us places, and took us to minado, which was legitimately delicious. he also good-naturedly played along when i proceeded to introduce him as “shi, from the internet” for the rest of the weekend. again, power of the internet!

shi’s house was pretty.

the weekend continued in sketchiness, as shi, joy and i got caught in a storm with no umbrella (ella ella), and beth and i found ourselves walking to my office at 3 in the morning to sleep on the office sofas like hobos. at least there was air conditioning. it was unfortunate circumstances. lea and andre were visiting and bed space was scarce!

the next day, joy and i left to go get our ears pierced and go shopping while everyone else left to see art. it was my first piercing and it hurt.

the results?

haven’t been able to sleep on my right side for a week now. is it worth it? i hope so!

later that week, to celebrate our matching piercings, joy and i made a trip to cambridgeside galleria, where we tried on 20 dollar prom dresses we couldn’t fit into. joy tried on hooker clothes and i tried on a trenchcoat. neither of those were purchases that worked out, and as the dressing room lady got really angry with us for taking so long, we took pictures of ourselves.

notice how joy has a very malleable face, i have a receding hairline, and we switch sides in the middle of this. crazy!

because my fridge had been freezing everything put in it, we were surviving on just cereal and tortillas during the day. so in the evenings, we treated ourselves to expensive appetizer pizzas and french desserts at our favorite place in cambridge, finale desserts.

Mediterranean Pizza Red roasted tomatoes with fresh mozzarella slices, fresh basil leaves, and drizzled with a balsamic reduction Gruyere Garden Pizza Roasted eggplant, zucchini, Portobello and gruyere cheese

Créme Brulée Vanilla cream glazed a la minute, garnished with half moons of orange butter cookies and a medley of fresh fruit.

crazy delicious!

the rest of the week was fairly uneventful. we stayed home, i learned to webchat, and joy watched me skype. because joy is scared of getting lost, she never really went out during the day, so friday night, i took her downtown to limelight, a place i’d never been to because i wasn’t particularly fond of karaoke, and because downtown is scary!

we sang a lot of bad pop songs, and there was a lot of journey. journey brings people together! unfortunately the room was dark, full of flashy lights, and there’s no good photographic proof of our good times, just a blurry picture of me looking afraid:

scary.

afterwards, faced with the prospect of having to be in my AC-less room, we opted to stay at IHOP instead, where sketchy mid-thirties mexican men hit on us. but we found out that they make fish and chips, which totally made up for it! who knew? but we were still hungry, even after we replaced the chips with onion rings, so we ordered a second round.

….there was a lot of food. joy loves onion rings. i love breakfast!

after our exciting friday night, we spent saturday eating even more food in beth’s house. she made her famous dip, as per her grandmother’s secret recipe. it was tremendous and we all gained 5 pounds. on full stomachs, we brilliantly decide to go swimming, but nobody cramped and drowned because we decided to play clever word games instead of swimming. david stumped us all with “conifer.” he’s so clever.

so somehow, we had managed to not actually go into boston the entire two weeks, and with joy leaving on tuesday, we thought we’d better go on sunday. unfortunately, we’re not good planners and woke up around 1 in the afternoon. we decided to get our nails done. the last couple of weeks have been a lot of firsts for me; first internet friend, first piercing, first manicure!

i think they may look better IRL. internet fails me.

we then walked around boston, picking out key landmarks like boston common, whose gate was closed to us.

sad ;(

after the common, we got became more and more steadily lost, until we finally caved and called anand to look up directions for us to azure so we could eat. on the way we found a castle but couldn’t figure out what it was. ideas?

boston is so pretty sometimes.

joy’s last night here was sad. we ended the night by spending more money, contemplating our fattyness, and ordering shakes and burgers, and making one final run to finale.

it’s nice to be visited. it’s nice to have someone who will check the escalator to make sure that it’s going the same direction as the railing, forget the color of regular coke cans, draw inappropriate analogies between herself and transfomers, and teach me important lessons about being an internet rockstar. even if it means having people judge me for talking in third person.