t
o
n
y
a
n
g
'
s
 
w
e
b
l
o
g


i had a bout of melancholy in the late afternoon, but i got over it. all it took was some human contact to reaffirm my place in the world. if nothing else, four years of college has given me the skills necessary to rationalize myself out of any difficult mood swings. coupled with a powerful new episode of SVU (guest starring kyle maclachlan), that's the antidote for despondency.

for lunch i finished off two hard slices of leftover pizza. alex huang (my godmother's son) dropped by with his girlfriend around noontime to pick up his flying daggers DVD and to show her the place: she was thinking about painting her room green and wanted to see it in action as demonstrated in my apple green living room. after they left, i went out, first to deliver some mail to my former roommate mike, then to harvard square, to buy a caterpillar book (nothing like spending some money to make me feel better). the air was brisk and i wore gloves. the book i was picking up was the golden guide to butterflies and moths ($7). the golden guides nature series first started in the 1950's, usually sold to kids. the butterflies and moths guide first came out in 1964, filled with slightly-fuzzy drawings of 423 species of butterflies and moths. what's unique about this guidebook is that half of it is devoted to moths, a much neglected group of winged insects in a very butterfly-centric world. what's also most notable is the caterpillar info, something that most guides usually gloss over. while browsing, i also decided to pick up the peterson first guide to caterpillars ($6), featuring 120 most common caterpillars of north america.

i came home, showered, then played an hour of diablo ii. nerdspeak alert! i'm currently a level 8 barbarian who does double-handed damage with a sword that freezes monsters and a mace that burns them! i repeated a whole level just so i can kill more monsters, rack up my experience points, and collect items. diablo ii is crack!

a weird thing started happening, i noticed it as soon as i got out of bed this morning: my right eye started twitching involuntarily. stress? not enough sleep? or am i just going crazy? perhaps all of the above. eventually i succumbed and decided to call an expert in the form of eliza, an eye twitch specialist, only because i remember one time she had a bad case of it, and i was just curious to learn how she got rid of it. she told me it'd go away eventually. happy with her over-the-phone diagnosis, i resumed my regularly scheduled programming.

by 6pm i turned up the heat again. i had some more "bing" for dinner, before julie came over to watch a brand new episode of SVU at 10pm. she fell asleep towards the end (there's just something about my place that makes people fall asleep) and left soon afterwards. i brought out the trash, did the dishes, and checked out the caterpillar photos my father sent me of a larva eating up his habanero pepper plant. turns out it was a cabbage looper (moth), they're considered a pest because they eat a wide range of crop plants.

i woke up at 5:30am this morning to catch the crescent moon and the planets jupiter and venus gathering together in the eastern sky. catch it again tonight, same place and time, as the moon moves below the planets.