I must've been bored yesterday.

Yesterday, 2:41 pm:

I am at work, listening to Interpol and writing on the backs of the store's discount coupons, cheap rectangles of blue paper that expired last February. A boy with long brown hair has just walked out, taking with him two cans of cherry Coke and the stink of pot. My cellphone blinks, flashing its blue lights to indicate silently an incoming call from the Seattle aunt.

Interpol is good and I am hungry; the meals this weekend aren't following the schedule. Last Friday I ate a lot, although arguably I consumed more drink than food: there was coffee in the morning and a lunch of cup noodles; later a duck dinner at Hua Hin with Cecilia and SeiJung and Thai iced tea; then hot chocolate, with Eunice, at the Drunken Boat; then, at her house, a red Solo cup that warmed my stomach and loosened my tongue. Forgetting that I was to open the store the next day, I stayed out until 2am; luckily SeiJung had slept over (Vivian was at her parents' home for the weekend) and Cecilia's loud voice woke me up; but even then I didn't have time for breakfast and just showered and dressed and went to work, where I nibbled on beef jerky sticks washed down with orange tea. Then I got off work at around 3pm and walked to Memorial Glade with a bag of Fritos, which I offered to Matt when he unicycled into the scene (more on this later), and with which we tried to lure the dogs playing all around us on the grass. Then: "You have a visitor," Matt announced, and I glanced up to find SeiJung, clutching her overnight bag and looking forlorn in the bright afternoon sun. And twenty minutes later we -- SeiJung and I -- were on our way to a Korean grocery store in the next city, riding the bus almost until downtown Oakland. So much Asian food! I felt mildly homesick, especially upon spotting the egg soup mixes; interestingly I spent $27 and SeiJung spent $72.

We finally exited the store at around 9pm, eating frozen red bean mochi while waiting for our ride back to Berkeley. Our dinner was inverted, and the mochi was our dessert; we started on the main course only later, at around 10pm, when we finally arrived at her apartment; we both had microwavable rice, accompanied by seaweed and ham (for her) and by seaweed and saury and miso soup (for me). "A dinner of luxury," she commented. I felt content.

I ended up staying over, in the process getting more class reading done that would have been possible had I gone home, because SeiJung is quiet and with her I am at peace, and also because I didn't have my laptop with me. I went to bed -- Anna's bed -- at 1am, waking up at 9 and walking one block to the church that I like but still attend only sporadically; and, though nicely attired in the white sweater of the previous day, I was really unwashed and again with no breakfast except leftover Fritos and a cup of orange juice. After church I returned to SeiJung's, picked up my Asian groceries, and went back to Northside, where I managed to down only five piddling rice cakes (more like "rice sticks," for they are sticks barely thicker than the thickest Pocky and much shorter than the regular ones) before needing to shower and dress and go to work again.

And now I am here, hungry, although admittedly comforted a bit by beef jerky and iced tea and Bloc Party (I switched CDs).

And I think that this entry illustrates more the routine, alternately tedious and relaxing, that my life on the weekends has assumed, rather than any concrete statement about my recently erratic eating habits, which are the habits of every other college student anyway.

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Yesterday, 5:38 pm: I am still at work.

Not much happened in the store yesterday during the four hours that I worked, except that a tall boy walked in, carrying two badminton rackets, and asked if I played tennis (I don't), and if I were a student (yes), and what I was studying (biology and literature), and which literature (Japanese and Russian). Sounding very Russian himself and ready to quiz me on Leskov, he inquired if I knew either language; I responded, feeling slightly facetious, that I'd been reading the foreign lit in translation, and that should he come back next year he would find me quadrilingual. "Ah," he acknowledged and introduced himself as a political econ major, also a second year, who plays on the Cal tennis team.

... Then Matt, my housemate with the brown-hair-streaked-with-blond that hasn't been cut since August 2003, rode onto Memorial Glade on a unicycle, as previously stated! These past two months of living with him have well acquainted us with his strangeness: he adores math and majors in physics; he dislikes anime for its "empty characters" yet loves artsy movies and (useless) philosophical discussion; he owns a robotic hand, a prototype somehow obtained from a now-defunct cybernetics company; he possesses no concrete beliefs, switching from one extreme to the other for the sake of debate, earning a liberal -- even socialist -- reputation while attending high school in stodgy Orange County yet assuming a relatively conservative stance here at Berkeley. Therefore the unicycle wasn't much of a surprise and I stared at him for only two seconds (really).

Anyway Matt pedaled over and we sat there for half an hour, watching the dogs play and laughing in particular about this one man who was yelling into his cellphone (business call) and at his dog (just pooped in grass) in the same voice. Then he got back on the unicycle and wheeled away, leaving me with my book. Rolling over on my stomach, I managed to get through a couple of chapters before setting the book aside and falling asleep. This, I think, was at 5pm. At 5:21 I woke up the blue-lit ring of my cellphone; I picked up and heard SeiJung's voice; but something happened and she said Good night, Mairin and I was asleep again so that, when I awakened once more at 5:51 pm, my cellphone, still open (flip model), was gripped in my right hand. Resuming my novel, I looked up some ten minutes later and saw Matt and the unicycle standing beside me. He sat down again and inquired, "Have you met the hat lady yet?" Not if she's the one on Telegraph and Durant, I replied. "She talks a lot," Matt continued and proceeded to report that he'd unicycled down to the intersection of Telegraph and Durant to see about a beanie, but the hat lady had been so nice and engaging that he couldn't easily tear himself away, and besides she'd asked him where he was from and he'd said Southern California, which had led her to note that the people who were nice to her were always SoCal kids and never NorCal natives. Now you wouldn't want to change the lady's opinion of SoCal kids, would you? Would you? But Matt did eventually get to leave politely, but only after saying that he had somewhere to be, abandoning any hope of a Hat Lady beanie.

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Today, 11:14 pm:

I stopped writing when several people came into the store and put a gun to my head and took all the cash register's money bought a lot of stuff. When they left with their purchases I saw that it was time to close; I'd been there almost seven hours.

And that was pretty much how the weekend went, kidses.