4/2/01

I've been feeling kind of burned-out lately. I think it's the stress of orals hanging above my head. The bad thing about that is that my orals aren't until May 24th, so I'm probably going to keep feeling like this for the next two months.

Yesterday was my birthday. I'm 29 now. I had a little party with my school friends on Saturday night. Originally, I'd thought we'd gather at my place and then we'd go to a bar or something, but I wound up doing a 21-mile training run on Saturday morning and my feet were killing me, so I decided we'd have a party here so I wouldn't have to wear shoes.

The party was fairly low-key, but fun. I wish I would have had a bit more energy for it, but I managed to stay awake until the last of the guests left at 4:30 a.m. (though I feel obliged to point out that it would have been 3:30 a.m. had we not switched over to standard time at 2 a.m.). I was exhausted at the end, but I still felt compelled to stay up and clean everything up before I could go to bed. I was actually happy that people stayed so late, though, because they wouldn't have stayed if they weren't having fun, right? I'm always kind of paranoid when I throw a party that people won't have fun.

Then yesterday, I went out to dinner with my closest non-school friends: Phil, Jay, Andy and my friend Katie, who recently moved out from Boston. We went to a slightly fancy bistro on Haight Street, and ate out in their garden. The garden had heat lamps, but it was incredibly windy, so it actually got pretty cold. I didn't really realize how cold I was until I stood up and felt how stiff my knees had gotten. Of course, the whole running-21-miles thing the day before might have also contributed to that.

This last week was a pretty busy one for me. Jen Bombpop was in the area, and I had lunch and dinner with her on Tuesday, the one day she actually spent in San Francisco. It was a beautiful, warm day, as it always seems to be when people from more frigid climates come to visit. None of them actually believe me that San Francisco is chilly and overcast 90% of the time.

We ate dinner at an Asian noodle place on Haight Street, and then afterwards we walked to a nearby bookstore to hang out. As we did so, we passed by a homeless man and woman sitting on the sidewalk. When they asked us to spare some change, we both replied "sorry," and as we walked away, the woman shouted out to me "you shouldn't be sorry with legs like that, because you've got great legs!" Well, at least I assumed she was talking to me, because I was wearing a skirt and had bare legs and Jen was wearing pants. I started giggling out of embarrassment. At least there weren't many people around, unlike what happened a couple of years ago when I was walking downtown and a homeless man yelled out at me "nice tits!" and everyone turned around to look.

Another random experience a couple of days ago: I was walking one way down the street and passed two men walking the other way. One of the men was blind and the other man was guiding him down the street. As they passed by, I heard just a brief snippet of their conversation: the sighted man saying to the blind man "well, that's because you've got a photographic memory!" He didn't seem to be joking, but maybe he just had a very dry sense of humor.

Then the other day I got an e-mail from one of those "crush" websites saying that someone had put my name in there. This had happened to me before, but the weird thing this time was that someone had entered my school e-mail in there, so I guess it must have been a UCSF person. Anyway, those sites drive me nuts, because of course it makes you wonder who put your name in, and you're tempted to just go and enter the names of people who you think it might be so you can find out, but then you know that if it wasn't them then it would drive them crazy wondering who'd put their names in, and if it was then they'd think you had a crush on them too, and you'd have to explain that you don't really, you were just trying to figure out who had a crush on you. And of course, then you have to wonder if the person who put your name in really likes you or maybe someone put their name in and they thought it might be you.

Anyway, it's all moot, because I would never be interested in anyone who would go about pursuing someone in such a cowardly way. I'm only interested in one person right now, and he knows it. But I have to admit to still being curious as to who put my stupid name in.

In the forum: Those crush sites.