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even though i'm currently unemployed, for some reason i still adhere to the old work times of 9-5 even though there's no reason for me to do that. i could just as well work at nights and sleep during the days. old habits are just hard to break i guess. the modern working man has been trained to view the period between 9am and 5pm as work time.

so this saturday morning i woke up at 9am to go work. "work" for me means renovating the house. work for me is everyday, weekdays and weekends. my father and i cleared out the living room and started to sand and paint strip, in preparation for painting. i came to the decision that i want to get the floors done as soon as possible, or as soon as the rooms are in good enough shape to paint. originally i was going to prime everything first, then the floor guys would come, then i'd paint colors. now i think the floors come first, then priming, then colors. once the floors are done, everything else in the house i can do on my own. the original reason to hold off on the floors was because so we could prime and not worrying about dripping on or scuffing the floors, but because i still have two more rounds of color painting after the floors are done, i still have to be careful, so might as well get the floors out of the way. i would be very surprised if all this planning excites you some how, dear reader!

after 4pm i caught the 66 bus from harvard square to dan's place in allston for game day. brian and elias were already there, and when i finally arrived, they were in the midst of tikal. brian, john and dan's former roommate, i haven't seen since the "band" broke up early this year. now that dan's girlfriend cymara's back in the states, there was a feminine touch to game day, a bowl of courtesy chips sitting on the table. after brian left, the rest of us went next door in the cold rain to buy some wings. we watched access hollywood on television while eating our food, saw a clip from undisputed where ving rhames bitch slaps wesley snipes.

at 9:30pm elias and i left dan's place, elias going back to his apartment, me going to eliza's party in jamaica plains. although i was physically close to where i was suppose to be, i had to take the green line back into boston and catch the orange line back out to jamaica plains. i always feel awkward at parties, especially if i don't know anyone, which was exactly the case here tonight. the ratio of men to women was also skewed, it seemed like more guys than gals. my strategy is to find that one guy or girl sitting by himself or herself and strike up a conversation. as for remembering names, i think i'm pretty good with normal names but if you have an exotic name, i will forget it right away even if you spell it out for me. besides eliza, who was naturally swarmed by a wall of men in the kitchen, i knew nobody else except for scott, who showed up after i got there. for some reason i sat by a lot of lawyers. i don't have one single lawyer friend myself. all my friends are either programmers or designers, people who depend on computers for a living, people who aren't affectionately referred to as vampires or sharks. the lawyers were trying to talk scott out of possibly going to law, offering him many examples of their own friends who've gone into law and hated it, but the weird thing is these people are lawyers themselves, and if they despise their profession so much, why don't they just quit? maybe the $150/hour rate might have something to do with it. i stayed no more than an hour, leaving at the stroke of midnight to catch the last train out of town. i left with this interesting chinese college student from hong kong who goes to school in scotland. he got off after two stops on the orange line, i took it all the way to downtown crossing to pick up the last outbound red train to harvard square.

tonight left me with a weird feeling. at dan's i was one of the centers of attention, but at the party, i was a wallflower that barely registered on the social radar. it's very humbling.