the weekend of eating out.

last weekend, ryan drove down to visit.

thursday night, after decadence, we ate a gypsy’s. then we went to mike and matt’s apt to coo and squeal over their brand-new kittens. hi andeja.

i had an ok day on friday. actually it was a terrible morning but it turned out all right. i didn’t sleep because i was doing homework, which i didn’t quite finish in the end, but at least it got turned in, so whatever. i spent the day in a blinking haze. ryan and i got half a cheeseboard pizza and drove to indian rock to eat it. it’s nice up there, and cheeseboard pizza is just indescribable. roundabouts are scary, but the fountain in the middle of that particular one on the way up to indian rock is cool.

on saturday, we went to san francisco and met alan and angela to go to a performance put on by the modern dance company that my ballet teacher (angela’s dance teacher) is artistic director of. we ate at blondie’s after emerging from powell street station. the performance was at sfsu and i suppose i was expecting a lot more; pcn was a bigger production than this. i also decided that i don’t really like modern dance very much. i am also not a huge fan of saxophones. they sound annoying. angela says that this particular production didn’t get at the entire scope of modern dance, which is why it seemed inaccessible to the general public–of course, it was about “remembering the poets of angel island” so basically the only emotions conveyed were anxiety and helplessness and restlessness. highlights included this girl who did these bendy things on releve and who lifted herself onto a bunkbed sideways using only her arms, and the piece with sue and her daughter which was playful, and the ending. i liked the ending. i didn’t really like how sue was both the mother in angel island, and the wife left behind in china in two different pieces. that felt inconsistent. but i guess it’s not a play (even though it sort of was, with the whole fence-family-thing), and the dancers don’t really play a specific character that remains consistent throughout the production, even though they kind of sort of maybe did, but not really.

then we got lost in san francisco and i ate alan and angela’s chex. the moon was huge and low and definitely not full, but beautiful nonetheless. after walking through residential neighborhoods we happened upon a bart station and hopped into it. then ryan and i ate at sun hong kong. at 11pm, like old times (or just time). that was fun.

on sunday we joined jenny and melinda for thai brunch. at the thai temple. the thai temple is not a restaurant. it is a thai temple. i say it like this, with short sentences betraying my unsuperior intelligence as shown by my unsuperior grade level, because i had difficulty grasping that fact myself. every sunday they serve brunch. you get in a line, exchange money for tokens, and then get in other lines to exchange tokens for thai iced tea, fried chicken, mango and sticky rice, rice dishes, curry things, tofu things… etc. they had a large selection. i had fried chicken. it was yummy. and that evening there was cha-ya, aptly described by ryan as “heaven!!!”, (notice the comma outside of the quotation marks; i am greatly disturbed by that yet i deem it necessary due to the !!!s that are more important to the sentence than punctuational correctness, and i don’t think punctuational is a word, but who gives a bean) with krishna and shanshan! who i haven’t seen for a while. there was much oohing and ahhing. wish i’d gotten them to talk more about Being Far Away Across The Ocean For A Year, for i have never done such a thing myself, but i can always make them tell about it later i suppose.

and then ryan had to disappear again.

today my dad came to visit and to drop off mail. we ate at a japanese place across the street from ichiban. i forgot exactly what it’s called–sushi ko, maybe? just to try something new. he got combo a and i got combo b. i did not warm to the asparagus wrapped in thin slices of beef dunked in teriyaki sauce, but i liked my ca rolls and my sashimi and my vegetable tempura. my dad told me not to miss opportunities like i have in the past and that graduate school will be the happiest years of my life because they were the happiest years of his; for it is during those years that one is at the pinnacle of health and one’s mental abilities/alertness and life is carefree and happy. he told me stories about how he couldn’t go into the computer room when he taught fortran for the ie department because his students would overwhelm him to ask for help. and they only had $10 per project (everything was punched onto cards, and then you put the cards in the computer and ran your program then… and every time your ran it, it cost money) so if you ran out of money, you were screwed, so sometimes he’s give them his own card, and then they’d be really careful to be really nice to him all the time. he spoke fondly of working in a world-class lab, one of only three in the world at the time explicitly working on metal forming. every time i get dinner with him we talk, on the surface, of roughly the same things, i guess–the future, the present, my dad’s life experiences, my brother, my sister, my mom–what else is there, really–but every time i leave with something different. today i told him that i wanted to make it clear that i wasn’t going to go to a top-tier graduate school, and that i wanted him to really understand that because my senior year of high school was particularly bad for me.

telling him is a good first step in my own acceptance of that fact. i have a tendency to only want to do things if i can be the best at it–on the other side of the coin, of course, i delude myself into thinking that i can be the best at it, try halfheartedly, and give up, and not even give up completely to boot. so fine, berkeley is the last top-tier school i will ever go to. that’s nice. and of course delusions of grandeur can go on the same page and same sentence as mocking self-deprecation, because obviously i’m hoping that i’ll get only As for the rest of my stay here and someone, somewhere, will make an exception for me. note in the wording of this that i do not perceive myself as the one capable of creating my own future, i see myself as being accepted or not accepted into somebody else’s world. look at her, so afraid and so unwilling to find her own way of doing things. also, i’ve got a killer headache.