Day 101: The Cambridge House Party.

Our third attempt at throwing a party was ... a blast.  Slightly less messy than party #2, much wilder than party #1, and brimming over with people more than either of 'em.
In some sense, this whole shindig [read: blog] could be considered the beginning of the end.




But really today marked it.

It was our choose-your-own-theme theme party, a theme fitting for the party sending us all off on our respective life paths.  I suppose the majority of those paths were pre-determined; mine the least so.

So, I'll chronicle the day.

I worked a lot.  But left early for the sake of the party and gathered the necessary elements from the liquor store and the Trader Joe's near my place of work, so that I could get home and start to clean before my roommates got back.  Having a car does have its perks.

I transformed my bedroom so that it actually looked like a) a place where people could live and b) a place where people could chill during our party.  [The first theme, by the way, was mostly Titanic, complete with tunes from the second soundtrack and liner notes + a poster from the first two albums.]

It ended rightly, with the important folks doing a sing-a-long at my 14-year-old keyboard (shitty Casio from the 90s), my roommates playing my XBox game of RockBand 2, and everyone else dissipating at the appropriate pace.  Plus, some long-lost friends showed up, to my delight.

Cambridge is my favorite.

Day 29: Academia

As you can infer from the above picture, being in academia means you need some ducks.  And in theory they should be in a row.  Of course, some of them get sidetracked sometimes, or even appear to change shape or color, in which case they can appear more like this:

Today I gave my talk at Harvard, something that has been hanging above me as somewhat exciting and also anxiety-inducing for the last several months.  It was in an informal setting -- and in fact, 4/6 of the people in the room listening to the talk (other than me) were close friends -- but still something for which I prepared.  A whole lot.  And in the end, I was glad I did it.

So, today essentially involved talk prep, work, and even more talk prep, giving the talk, de-briefing with friends after the talk, and deciding that after all that thinking and talking about talking I was ready to shut up for awhile, not study, and hang with friends at the Asgard.  And they were up for it too -- because one serious perk of academia is that often you can set your own schedule, and so if you wanna go out on a Tuesday night to play some pub trivia, well, hell, you can.