welcome to bat country

Woo-hoo! Brian's site is back up. Let the online stalking resume. :)

Today is creeping along pathetically slowly. I'm waiting for a guy at work to send me some necessary inputs to my code, and I've done just about as much of the editing / commenting / cleanup as I can without actually changing any of the math, so I am now quite bored. My homework is (mostly) done, so the only productive thing left to do is read for my classes. Oh, the excitement.

Is it Wednesday yet??

Black and white

Carlos and I went to the Ansel Adams exhibit at the MFA last week, and I was inspired to poke through some old photos I've taken that I photoshopped into black and white.

Snow Lake, Washington

Smith Tower, Seattle, WA

I like turning some of my pictures into black & whites because, for one, I don't think my camera captures colors as well as it used to (or maybe I've just gotten pickier), and also because it somehow makes my pictures seem more like "real photographs" instead of just snapshots. I don't think I have the eye or the energy to ever become a serious amateur photographer, but I like being pleasantly surprised every now and then when I get one that turns out okay.

Today has been a lesson in "how to procrastinate from doing homework." Step 1? Stay out way too late the night before, and consequently, wake up at noon. Shower, eat breakfast, laugh with roommates and out of town houseguests about the previous night's barcrawl, talk on the phone for a couple hours, go out shopping for a friend's birthday gift, then come home and prolong eating dinner/watching TV until the only choices left are Entertainment Tonight or reruns of Friends that you've already seen four times. Then, think about doing homework, but convince yourself that you won't really get anything accomplished between now and aforementioned friend's birthday party, so it's really not worth it to get started.

~sigh~

I think writing about this has made me feel guilty, so I guess it's time to get started.

Sunday blues

Yet again, I've been facing the Sunday blues today... I don't want to go back to work tomorrow, I'm not smart enough to finish my homework by myself, I don't feel prepared for my test this week (which I really need to pull up my grade in that class), and there's been some other personal stuff going on this weekend that's been on my mind.

I wasn't really looking forward to go to the Tech meeting tonight because I still don't really know many people there, so socializing is still an effort, and I don't feel like I have much time this week to dedicate to photo assignments. At the beginning of every meeting, we go through the "mocks" (the previous week's issues of the paper) and critique the photos, and I wasn't really looking forward to that because I wasn't very happy with my most recent photo in the paper (it was posed, not very exciting composition, etc.), so I was extremely surprised to get some nice comments from the other photographers there. It was a very well-timed ego boost. :)

The earlier part of the weekend was a lot more fun - I saw Jarhead on Friday night with the regular collection of roommates and their significant others, and then last night I saw The Squid and the Whale with a friend of mine from high school (plus roommate) who's currently living in Boston, working on her master's degree in children's literature. We hung out for a while at her place after the movie, just catching up on the high school gossip that we knew. The only problem was that we both have the same gossip source, so I'm not sure that either of us really learned anything new... It came up that another girl from our graduating class is trying to put together an informal five-year reunion this Thanksgiving though, and neither of us are really interested in going. We want to know about all of the crazy things that people from our class are up to (which, at this point, mostly means getting married to other people from high school and having kids, although not necessarily in that order), but we don't really want to actually talk to them... A newsletter would be much better!

It's interesting for me to remember who I thought I would keep in touch with after graduation and then compare that list to who I actually keep in touch with now. The number is about the same as what I thought it would be, but the people aren't. It's a little unsettling to realize that the same thing will inevitably happen with some of my current friendships.

TV and Veteran's Day

Last night I watched 3.5 hours of TV. Three and a half! It started out gloriously, but by the time I went to bed, I felt sort of disoriented and had a bit of a headache. Oh well... In case you did not watch TV until your eyeballs fell out last night, here's how it went: teen angst on the OC continues as usual, more people got fired on The Apprentice, and more people died on ER. At least I got some emails written and other miscellaneous things accomplished while I was parked in front of the tube... having a laptop is nice.

I'm mildly annoyed that I had to come to work today. It seems everyone in the world has Veteran's Day off, except us. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating a little, but it's a federal holiday! I guess this is one of those reasons that people work for the government...

At the gym

After work this afternoon, I went to the Z Center for some much-needed running and lifting. As I was walking into the main part of the gym, a couple of guys stopped me to pitch their "Bike for Charity" program. All I had to do as a volunteer was bike for 10 minutes, and for every mile I biked, they would donate $1 to the charity and pay me $1. It seemed like a reasonable offer (although I couldn't imagine I could bike a respectable number of miles in only 10 minutes), except when I asked about the charities that would receive the money. The guy told me he would roll a 4-sided die (do these exist?) and the number that came up would dictate which charity would get the money. I was still on board at this point, until he showed me the list and I saw that the last charity was the NRA. I am not interested in raising money for Charlton Heston and the National Rifle Association. However, I also wasn't interested in confronting this guy about it, so I begged off by explaining that I had just signed up for a treadmill slot. It's a very handy excuse actually - I used it to get out of filling out some sophomore's survey a couple weeks ago. I dunno... I'm not opposed to raising money for charitable causes or participating in a survey that could improve the athletic facilities at MIT, but whatever happened to just being able to go to the gym to work out?

Rate My Life

Inspired by Becca and some passing boredom at work, I took a quiz to rate my life:

This Is My Life, Rated
Life:	7.4
Mind:	6.2
Body:	6.8
Spirit:	5.9
Friends/Family:	6.8
Love:	7.7
Finance:	7.7
Take the Rate My Life Quiz

Apparently my spiritual life is lacking.

Saturday

Yesterday I was supposed to shoot photos at the MIT sailing race on the Charles River. It ended up getting cancelled because there wasn't enough wind to actually sail, but I had some fun taking random photos while waiting for the wind to pick up.





I got some other shots of womens crew practice earlier that morning, but I downloaded them at the Tech office, so I'll have to post them later.

The rest of the afternoon yesterday didn't involve anything really exciting... I finished my astrodynamics take-home test, cleaned my hamster's cage, vacuumed, Swiffered, and went grocery shopping. Later that night, I went out with the roomies (plus Kartik, plus assorted girlfriends) to Pourhouse for dinner, a bar that is well-known for really only one thing: half-off burger night on Saturdays. Their burgers are between $4 and $5, so Saturday nights mean you can get a burger and fries for less than a Coke. The food isn't fantastic, but it's hard to complain when you can pay for dinner with the change you find in the couch. Needless to say, in a college town, the line to wait for a table on Saturday nights is very long.

Afterward, Phil and I went down the street to Cactus Club. Soon after Glenn met up with us again, I left to go find the restroom, and when I came back, I found both my non-single roommates chatting with a couple of flirty girls, so after several minutes of feeling like the fifth wheel, I decided to go home. I was exhausted anyway and didn't really feel like having more to drink, so I was ready to call it a night. I felt awfully lame though when I glanced at my watch on the walk home and saw that it was only 11:00...

gobble, gobble, boggle

Got my ticket to go to Houston for Thanksgiving... is anyone staying in town?? :)

The tall and short of it

Last night I went out running for the first time in a week. I did one of my regular loops around the Charles River, and on my way across the BU Bridge, I passed a hand-holding couple that must have had at least a 30-inch difference in height. I think it was the dude who was ridiculously tall, and the girl was just regularly Asian-sized, but it was hard to tell since there weren't any other normal people around to provide a reference. But seriously, she barely made past his elbow. The logistics of how they work together are just mind-boggling, sort of like when you see extremely overweight couples together, or hear those stories on 20/20 about adult conjoined twins that share one digestive tract and are both married.

How do they do that?!?