thoughts

two pieces of hilarity, and one story to completely sober you up.

the last two or three nights have been great. i think i like the holidays most because the people who are in boston are forced to create their own sense of family and togetherness. for most of us, home is somewhere else, and sometimes going home for the holidays is like leaving our real home. similarly, when others leave to go home, we're left here in boston to find someone to be family. and to get mightily drunk with.

Monday

yesterday i met up with one of my best friends from high school, george. we had grown apart a bit in college after going to different schools. and although he did come and attend MIT (a goal for both of us as innocent high schoolers) we never did get to hang out much, and despite several high school friends now living in the boston area, i had lost touch with that aspect of my life. but we did finally get together (although under worse circumstances) and it was still great.

i joined george and his wife and coworkers for their 9th day of the 12 drinking days of christmas. we went to the highly pretentious liberty hotel, where the restaurant "clink" failed to serve us satisfactory food but didnt seem to mind charging for it. so when we left we headed straight to the closest, divyest bar on charles st, and with no one else inside but us we proceeded to order the cheapest beers and play all their arcade games. and that's when we started having fun. i spent about $2.50 for a pint and about $5 on games each round. there was a boxing strength game, and after a few sincere punches we all started trying to figure out how it worked - whether it was an accelerometer in the base, or a force sensor in the bag itself, and we spent a dollar just testing different ways to move the bag and seeing if it registered. we got 5 out of 1000 for each of those tests.

then we played a basketball shooting game, and after going head to head for about a minute we realized that one side gets 80 seconds and the other side gets 40 seconds, yet megan (George's wife) still got 45 points in those 40 seconds to mark's 48 points in 80 seconds. he was excited that he beat her before he realized that she had half the time. at some point we wanted to power cycle the machines to see if we could reset the timers. but the most money of the night was dropped on Terminator Salvation - we had a great system of switching off when one person died, and a drinking game based on killing streaks. at the end of the night as the bar started to fill up, we had gotten enough of the cheap miller high life and gotten our fill of bar video entertainment.

Tuesday

tonight, after CW practice, we all went out to middle east to have a drink/food with mike bartending. the crowd was jay, his dad, fredson, amy, dan, ana, cwilli and me. as we're sitting there eating hummus some very very drunk, skinny white guy stumbles and crashes into our table. so we're like hey are you ok? he starts muttering something about islam and was being a bit belligerent, so we told him "have a good night" ie leave now. as he's walking toward the door, he turns back, puts his hands down on the table and leans over me and cwilli, and starts muttering "have a good night? have a cheap night!" of course it makes no sense what he was saying but he kept looking back and forth at us, and i really expected him to start swinging. but i have to say at this moment i was the least scared i have every been in my life, even compared to a situation where nothing threatening is happening. because at the table there were probably about 50 total black belt degrees, and about a thousand pounds of muscle, and this guy is trying to start a fight totally drunk off his ass.

but basically the guy gets thrown out, and keeps trying to get back in the bar, but was barred from reentry by various people. i really wish he had a sober friend who would tell him in the morning, "look, you really picked the wrong people to start a fight." and it was a bit of excitement but i realize that our community is full of very dependable people.

final thoughts

so i guess the sobering thing is that this holiday season i met up with george because one of our friends from high school just had a terrible stroke and ended up in the hospital. we visited him but basically he was no longer going to live without life support. today i found out that he had passed. it's a terrible thing to happen, especially with the holidays. and it's cliche to say it but these things happen so quickly and without warning that it is making me appreciate every kick, every drink, every conversation with people in my life now. and maybe i'm even beginning to reconnect with my own past, which kind of disappeared when i moved away from nc, but now to find out that not only george and chris were in boston, but many others from my high school class are now in boston. maybe i should make more of an effort to see them, to get to know them, not as the high school stereotypes we all were but as real people now. because i've come to appreciate the real people in the world.

goodbye chris miller, we'll all keep living for you

music

started listening to a tight jazz playlist on youtube and it's slowly morphing...here's some cool stuff

from the jazzanova mix

bike mania

edit: yea...posted at work so i'll have to take pics when i get home

i did a bit more work on my huff puff bike this weekend, as christine puts it (my motorcycle is my vroom vroom bike). i took out my old schwinn roadbike, which is old, scratched up, the seat post is permanently rusted inside the frame, the pedals and gears are a but unsmooth and will probably break sometime in the future. but recently i cut the handlebars into bullhorns (see tutorial here) and suddenly the bike is highly awesome. i'm not sure what the exact appeal of bullhorns and single speed bikes are, but they're popular in urban areas like cambridge/boston, and i've long jumped on the bandwagon.

this week i finally got in touch with a few fellow bikers on craigslist and met up with a guy who sold me another set of drop handlebars and a set of road tires. i love meeting people and talking about bikes with them. this guy rode up on his track bike which was clean and basically simple to the point of being almost only a frame. he carried the tires, tubes, and apparently enough parts to almost make a complete bike, on his back, because he had gone around selling parts on craigslist all weekend. we chatted about track wheels vs traditional road wheels and how to use wd-40 to clean handle bar tape gunk.

so then i went home and put together the wheels for my old scwhinn revival. i used to have a set of thicker (>23 mm) wheels whose bearings were also worn and i had removed them to try to clean...but now i have a set of thinner wheels i had bought, a set of tires i just bought, and when i put them together they were a nice, sleek setup. so i had the bullhorns on the frame already, i put the two wheels on, and installed an old noseless bike saddle that i had spray painted because it was shockingly pink before. i had one bike chain left, and it happened to be a single speed which fit pretty well - i had to take off 6 links for it to fit on the largest gear in front and the 2nd smallest on the rear wheel.

i took the bike for a spin despite not having brakes. it starts a bit slow but it seems to have a good top speed because of the gear ratio - my other single speed has a bit too low of a gear ratio so i have to pedal a bit too fast. and thus my old heavy schwinn is on its way to becoming a cool cambridge city bike with bullhorn handles, a noseless saddle, and sleek wheels. can't wait to ride this one around.