Thursday 11/7/02             Thursday Nights are Blah

            Work this week was the most productive ever—got all the data sets downloaded to my PC for 1996-1999 for both US and Taiwan for all hospital inpatient cases, and after much reading of the SAS books and eventually getting most of the actual written code from JiauJe, I’ve got all the ICD9s with total expenditures sorted in descending order for each year.  A big step. 

            Found out that tonight’s German John’s last night and they’re all going to a bar called Grace.  I SMS’ed Stella and Ginger about it and we met there around 9:30, realizing Oh it’s GRAY’S, the same bar we went to for Joe’s bday.  A whole bunch of ShiDa people , Christina and people from her class and many others I didn’t know, were there and except for their big table the place was pretty dead. Thursday’s dead everywhere since it’s between Wednesday, big ladies night, and the weekend.  John was of course taking pics left and right, Stella had one of those I-Zone cameras that make small sticker pictures. 

            It was pretty boring and Stella and I kept wondering when we could make an exit—it was one of those things where people keep saying they’re going to go soon but still keep talking.  I told her about my apartment problems and we got to talking about apartments and roommates we’ve had, and she told me she loved her last “flat” in South Africa and how she’d decorated it with antique chairs and her mom was so impressed, and how she used to go to auctions for furnishings.  I like these kinds of conversations with Stella most—like her story about visiting a sugar factory--ever since she saw how white sugar is bleached and chemically-treated, she’s only eaten natural tan sugar.  It’s such an interesting side of her that’s totally different from Asian-party girl mode.  She says she actually was a homebody before, always staying home, watching movies and playing PC games when her friends would ask her out.  It’s so weird to imagine.

            Elsa, JiaLan, Gin and I shared a cab back home.  It was only 12, I said “the earliest we’ve ever come home from a night out,” and Gin agreed.   When the others asked us if we’d been going out a lot, we said we’ve been good and haven’t gone out since Halloween.  They said, “But that was just a week ago!”