Well, yesterday I rollerbladed into the lab to do some work and I came home about 1 pm. Ben had called asking if I wanted to go with a few guys to "Dave and Busters" a restaurant/bar/gaming place in the Dolphin Mall. I had no plans so I said yes and I then spent the rest of the afternoon doing laundry, sleeping and staying out of the heat. Avi called about 6:30 pm as I was taking to Allison and that changed what I was going to wear, since I originally was going to wear a dress, but with no time I just went with jeans and a singlet top.
We drove to Avi's place where Ben picked us up and drove us down to his new place down south. I hadn't seen his new house before, but the place was enormous! It had 10 foot ceilings upstairs and downstairs as well as an attic, although they didn't have quite enough furniture to fill it yet, it was definitely starting to come together very nicely indeed. Not long after that Ben and Avi's friend Raul arrived, he is a Miami transplant to Boston, but was down here to see his family, so we all piled into his car and drove to the mall as a big lightning show crackled off in the distance. On the way I polished off my third Smirnoff Ice of the evening, and as there was long wait for a table Raul and I went to the bar and got drinks, or to be more specific he got me drinks, first a "Harvey Wallbanger" followed by a fruity "Sex on the beach" at which point I was really quite mildly trashed. Raul was flirting heavily with me, but I was under the belief that he had a girlfriend, so I just played it casually. Ray and Marilyn were there, Anthony and Jill, Tony, Vince and Richard, some of whom I hadn't met before. I had to go outside to an ATM and Raul came too, he was doing a lot of hand touching and so on, at which point I was not so drunk as to not notice and take an evasive plan for dinner.
During the wait for dinner itself, I had a Long Island Iced Tea, followed by a blue Iced Tea at which point I was getting close to "seriously off my face mode". Fortunately I didn't do anything bad enough for anyone to remember so it was not so bad. Our waiter was a 22 year old cutie named Leo, who was studying Bio and had a tongue piercing, and during the evening he had to put up with a lot. ;) We had a magician come over and do some simple card/coin tricks which was fun and then finally our food arrived, I had a club sandwich which was ok, but mostly I had passed into the "whoa, I'm really drunk" phase and so I settled down to recover for a little bit. The food was timed pretty well as I needed to eat and not drink anymore by that point. After we haggled over the bill we all went over to the gaming room to watch the guys play Pod-Racer and a whole bunch of other games, Jill and I got a photo with a Han Solo cardboard cutout and we chatted for a fair bit. It got to about after 1 am and we had to go, so we left the others and drove back to Avi's house from where he drove me home and the other guys headed south.
When I got home exhausted and still quite drunk, I called Allison and talked to her for a while, and then about 2:30 am (I think) I finally crashed out. It was a really fun night, I'm glad that Jill and Marilyn were there, because it meant it wasn't completely an all guy environment (like gaming). Still, Raul was getting a little too touchy feely, but I was able to avoid him to a degree in the latter half of the evening, but just hanging out has become so second nature to me that when I look back on the evening, I really smile because all my desires of just being (mostly) normal have been realized. :)
10:20 pm - Memory : How we differentiate the past from the present.
It's been a fairly quiet day, I spent much of the morning recovering, and by about 2 pm I was bored enough to go into the lab. I didn't accomplish too much there however so I came home and lay about until later in the evening when I went down to the bookshop to read their magazines.
These days I do much more "self-editing" of my diary entries for whatever reason. I know from the geocities statistics that I score about 15-40 hits on each entry, even if I don't know who all those people are. But it's a simple fact that if I want to bare my soul on some issue, then it's more likely that I will write it in my paper diary which only I can access, for the simple reason that words in the public domain are hard to take back, and some people shrink from honest assessment.
I received an email from Illara today, she is doing Ok up in Vancouver and will be back online in the near future too. We won't be able to recapture the long ICQ chats of the past unless I acquire my own computer, but it is good that things are coming together for her.
In the newspaper today I received the evacuation guide of what to do during hurricane season which runs between June to November. It turns out that I am right on the edge of the evacuation zone, but only for Category 4 and 5 hurricanes. Fortunately the chance of Miami being struck by such a storm during my short stay is pretty small.