People watching

I know lots of people who like to sit in the CougarEat or Brigham Square and just watch people go by. Me too. In fact, I occasionally take it even further and I follow people around to see what they are doing and talking about. This is more tricky because they can't know you are following them. If they are hard to understand, I will sometimes walk in front of them and try to guess where they are going. This tactic usually doesn't work as well.

This being said, I do have a little respect for privacy, and if they are talking about something really personal, I don't listen in. However, I have taken detours for discussions of health-care, anti-matter, and literature. People are really interesting.

Speaking of interesting people, a friend showed me this link today. The first one is about a Mormon missionary. I've listened to 2 of them now and they were both amazing.

Word Play

I'm a fan. I suppose I can't claim to have never groaned at a forced pun, but I really do appreciate that sort of thing most of the time.

Tonight, I was talking to my roommates about massages and one of them told us about a lady that once gave him a great one.

"She's a really good. . . massager. . . massoose. . ." he said.

"Misogynist," I said. No one laughed. They either didn't get it or didn't think it was funny. Either way, it made me sad.

Two things I've learned this summer

To keep my mouth shut more:
At the beginning of the summer, I was working away at my desk listening to my iPod when my cubicle neighbor came over, tapped me on the shoulder, and said, "Your humming is very nice, but I'm having a hard time focusing over here." What made it even worse is that I knew she was there and was making a conscience effort not to hum or sing or tap my desk in time to the music. And I did it anyways. I've been trying really hard since then, and I think that I'm better at not bothering people anymore. Or perhaps they've all decided to work in other places since it seems that my area of the cubicle farm is relatively vacant recently.

To open my mouth more:
One thing that I love about Boston is that more than 10% of the people I know aren't Mormon, so I get to be a sort of liason for the Church. I've had all sorts of great experiences talking to people about it, and I love it. My favorite story from this summer so far is helping a Norweigan stranger break into someone's house and then inviting him to church.

Alarm Days

I've realized that I really enjoy waking up to an alarm. Here is what happens in an alarm and a non-alarm scenario:

Non-alarm: I wake up briefly as the light starts pouring in the windows. I don't need to get up, so I pull my blanket over my head and try to fall back asleep. I wake up again when I start to hear other people bustling around the house. I don't need to get up, so I put my pillow over my head and try to fall back asleep. I wake up again because I've been lying in bed a long time. I don't need to get up, so I just lie there awake. I get bored so I eventually get out of bed and climb into the shower. Eventually, I make it work an hour and a half or two hours later and sluggishly work on the projects that I've been assigned. After 8 hours at work, I've done about 6 hours of work. I leave that evening, telling myself that I will work an extra hour the next day to fill the 7 hours of work that I'm supposed to be doing each day. (Lest anyone worry, I do work the extra hour the next day.)

Alarm: I wake up to the gentle buzzing of my cell phone on vibrate mode. If I'm concerned that I'm tired and won't wake up to the buzzing of my phone, I put my phone on my desk, and I wake up to the buzzing of my phone on my desk (which is louder). Since it is time to get up, I hop out of bed, hop in the shower, eat a quick breakfast and I'm at my office in under an hour. Maintaining the pace of the day, I make all sorts of beautiful figures and amazing discoveries at work and can leave at 3 pm since I got to work so early and have been so effective all day long. If the previous day was a non-alarm day, I happily work till 4 pm because time flies when you are effective. Life is great.

Sometimes non-alarm days are a little more effective than this, and alarm days are a little less effective than this, but this is the general idea.

The Charles River

This picture shows how good of a photographer I am. Look at my beautiful fingers on the left. The big problem was that this photo was taken from the inside of the Boston Metro (the T), and I was trying to cover the flash so the camera could actually see through the window.

Another sign of how good of a photographer I am is that I really wanted this picture to focus on the sailboats in the river, and I'm not sure you can even tell that is what they are. Oh well.

One really fun thing about Boston is that they love their river, the Charles. Even in this dreary weather that we've been having lately, there are always people out rowing or sailing or doing whatever else you might do in a river. They have a really nice trail that runs along both sides of the river too, so bikers and joggers can enjoy it. I don't blame them for how much they like it. It really is very calm and majestic.

I think that most people think of rivers as inconveniences these days since they get in the way of where we want to go, and we don't get the commercial use out of them that we used to. I have to admit, a couple weeks ago I was trying to take advantage of the beautiful trails along the river and took the one bridge that doesn't connect the trails on both sides. Instead it brought me into the middle of Boston University (which is a nice place, but not where I wanted to be right then). What I wanted to be a brief 3 mile jog turned into a 6.5 mile one as I ran around the Boston area lost, trying to find my way back across the river. This, though, was not the fault of the river, but of the person who thought that since I wanted to cross the river, I also wanted to cross the freeway and the railroad.

In any case, perhaps I'll get a better river picture one of these days, and post that one, so you can see it a bit better.

Today, I'm leaving to California, so I probably will have to post my daily pictures all at once on Sunday.

A picture a day. . .

I was talking to a friend of mine from back home a couple days ago, and she asked me if I had taken lots of pictures, to which I replied, "No, I haven't taken any pictures" because that was the truth. She then got mad at me and gave me a great idea:

I am going to take one picture a day for the rest of my time in Boston.

At least I'm going to try. I already missed Monday, but I have today's picture already. I've decided to put these pictures on my blog unless they are really boring, and then I can tell you why I like (or dislike) the thing in the picture. Most of them will be "like" things since I haven't really found anything that I dislike so far.

So without further ado, here is picture 1:


This is were I took my GRE today. I thought that it was a really cool building and it reminded me of the houses that I saw in Normandy on my mission. Although this building is really cool on the outside, don't be fooled; the inside hallways look a little like a hospital and smell a little bit like vomit. (I guess that makes this my first "dislike" thing.)

On the other hand, I was pleasantly surprised by the actual testing center. I was expecting a run-down office with grumpy employees and it turns out that it is a beautiful office with pleasant employees. I'd give them an A+.

Words and Friends

As I've been preparing the GRE (which I take tomorrow, by the way), I've realized that I don't really have that large of a vocabulary. I always knew that my vocabulary was lacking to some extent, but I'm beginning to realize how limited it actually is.

This was particularly surprising to me because I really like words and grammar and other things like that. One of my favorite books in the whole world is "Eats, Shoots and Leaves." I have a special place in my heart for etymology. When I learn a new word, I feel like I've met a new friend. It just turns out that I promptly forget that friend once they are out of sight. I think that my subconscious mind does this on purpose because that way I can squeeze every last bit of joy over meeting a certain word several times.

Honestly, I think that I do this with people too. It seems I re-meet the same people several times in life. The difference is that people sometimes get offended if you forget who they are. Yesterday, I saw a girl at church that I knew from Provo while I was passing the sacrament and she smiled and waved and I smiled back. After the meeting I considered looking for her, but I decided against it in the end since I couldn't remember how I knew her or what her name was. Had she found me, I would've tried to figure it out without having to ask her, but I didn't really want to purposefully bring that on myself. (As a side-note: As I'm typing this, I suddenly remember who she is.)

In any case, I'd like to announce to my mind that given that there are over one million words in the English language and 6,788,282,557 people in the world, if I can even remember the words and people that I already know, there will still be lots more to meet in the future.