a morning stop at the watertown home depot to get some more supplies and then spending the rest of the day at the house. i moved all the chairs from the basement back upstairs, putting little felt pads on the feet so they wouldn't scuff the wooden floors. on some of the cabinet doors i added rubber dots to prevent them from slamming close. i put a new rubber stopper in the bathroom tub (candelit bubble baths here i come!). i opened all the windows and turned on the box fan to circulate the air. i finished covering the floor edges with a new roll of blue tape. i turned the gas back on and lit the water heater (actually my father lit it, i was too afraid of getting burned). i sanded, i vacuumed. in hindsight it didn't seem like a lot of work yet i was able to spend the whole day there. i had my ibook on the whole day, in the event of an important e-mail or instant message.

joel stopped by unexpectedly after he got out from work while i was sanding the guest bedroom closet. i heard somebody calling out, "tony?" from the front steps. he hadn't seen the place since a while back, before the new lights, before the new floors. he could easily smell the newness of polyurethane, a smell i've since grown accustom to and don't really notice it anymore. he saw the place as inspiration for some potential home renovation work he was thinking about doing. we got dinner at anna's taqueria in porter square. some people swear by it, but i find anna's to be a little on the watered down side of things. i don't exactly rave about mexican food, but given the choice, i still like boca grande. we sat by the sunny window, ogling the people who walked by. after we finished eating, joel drove me back to cambridge, where i gathered up all my stuff and headed back to the watertown home depot to return a couple of items i bought today.

came close to midnight i drove out to allston to pick up dan and then down to jamaica plains to grab elias, so we could go see the midnight showing of the story of ricky at the coolidge corner theatre. allston down harvard street was just teeming with returning college students, out cruising the local scene looking to have a good time. despite the cool weather (i had on my winter coat, it was in the 50's), many girls were dolled up in their hoochiest outfit, which didn't go unnoticed, and i almost crashed the car a few times, distracted left and right. when we got to the theatre it was packed with a long line of people waiting outside. there were even people asking to buy spare tickets. later i found out most of them were there for a live concert, not there to see the story of ricky. nevertheless, in the actual screening room for the movie there was a healthy turnout. i noticed it was mostly young men with a handful of females. ricky doesn't seem to fit the traditional girl movie genre. i'd seen it before back in college and i remembered it was one wild cinematic ride into some forbidden territories.

the main character, ricky, gets sent to prison for avenging his girlfriend's death. in jail meets the sadist and corrupt prison bosses, and becomes a figurehead for the rest of the subjugated inmates when he openly challenges the prison heads. sounds like a standard issue prison drama, kind of along the lines of shawshank redemption, were it not for the ULTRAVIOLENCE. from the very first instance of violence - an old man getting planed (yes, a wood planer) in the face - the movie becomes an orgy of blood and guts. it's got practically everything: murder, suicide, implied cannibalism, using dead people as bait, skinned alive, eyeballs popping out, tongue getting cut, meat grinding, elvis impersonating, limbs broken, heads severed, heads shattered, people being crushed, shot in the ass, prison heroin plant, strangling somebody else with one's own intestines, riot police beatings, fighting with a demon, and YES even kicking a dog in the head, the new litmus test for whether a movie is good or not. i'm only scratching the surface though, there's so much more in the movie. the dubbed dialogue just makes the film that much special. the actors play their characters seriously, but you can't help but to laugh about how over-the-top outrageous some of the scenes are.

afterwards i drove all the fellows back and then returned to belmont, negotiating through a busy allston as all the bars closed at 2am.

and they say ashley harkleroad is the usta's "hope of the future." i agree. take that anna kournikova!