day out in emory

i finally met up with leisha, who's studying in emory, after like 2 months of living in the same city.

i woke up early for team buzz, an annual campuswide community service which i talked about in an earlier post.

what i didnt mention, i got freaked out when i came back to my room. why? coz when i woke up this morning, i saw a red stain in the community toilet door. it didnt exactly seem like blood, more like pasta paste or a really bad case of vomiting, except that there werent any stench throughout the hallway. i was talking to tyler, joe and kyle this morning what the hell that was.

and then i come back to the room after team buzz and find the same kind of stain, but like a finger print, on the message board on my room door. at this moment, im thinking, what the heck. and then i open the door. and the first thing that i see is james' blankets and pillow on the floor. then i see the pillow.

the pillow had several stains of blood splattered over it.

i didnt know that it was james who was bleeding. i was awake when he came back from chi psi party drunk, but still sane and conscious of what he was doing. so i thought it couldnt be. just to make sure that he wasnt unconscious, i woke him up, he didnt respond for first couple times, but eventually he woke up so i was relieved. he doesnt seem to remember what happened at all. he tells me that daniel was there this morning when he went to the toilet. i go over to dan's room and find out he collapsed in the toilet cubicle. it scares the shit out of me coz i dont know the severity of his damage and the cause. james wakes up later and i see the scar on his head. he tells me it hurts a lot, and the gash looks real bad. i tell him to go check it up wit a doc, but he is fine for now, or thats what he says. he walks fine, knows what he's doing, but only problem is that he doesnt know how he got it. could have happened during the party, on the way back to our room, or maybe during that fall in the toilet.

what a scare in the morning.

anyway, i found out that number of my friends knew a person who was studying in emory, who is leisha, and we've been talking about meeting and all, but it never materialized til today. and another surprise? marc, as in marc irawan, has a cousin, pamela, in emory too, and she also knows leisha. so i got to meet two people yesterday.

we walked around for a while, talking partly about tech and emory, and then it was cool that another guy who was there, yong, intended to go to the jamie cullum concert too. so now i have at least a couple of people going for the concert, apart from gautam and gopi who expressed an interest, but yet to confirm, along wit some other people from the hall council.

we deliberated whether to watch 'the forgotten' or 'the grudge' which is the american version of 'ju-on', much like 'the ring.' ive seen the trailer of 'the forgotten' and thought it had a good storyline, but both movies had received a lukewarm review on CNN so i wasnt too keen on either. i would have watched garden state for the second time just for natalie portman. and i later found out this girl staying next to pamela in emory, has a sister who's the best friend of natalie portman as they practically grew up together. how coincidental is that. i am that close to potentially meeting natalie portman! (if, at all)

anyway, so we decided to watch 'the grudge' starring sarah michelle geller, and jason behr from roswell. i was ambivalent to either movies, so it didnt matter much. but i thought the movie was horrible. whenever someone remakes a movie, they always lose the touch of the original one. but i didnt complete watching the japanese ju-on, so i cant really comment on that. but i bet the japanese one was more freaky.

but yea, overall, horrible, dont waste your money on this. everything is so predictable, you know when theres a scary part, coz you can see the ghost or whatever that thing was for like a second or two before they kick in with that horrible sound, or you know whats going to happen for most of the time. and the ending was just awful.

so as i lamented having wasted money and time on this movie, the people at the theatre started giving away readmission tickets to all of us in that theatre. i thought they were compensating for us watching an horrible movie, but as i realized, they did not align the movie properly when screening, the top section of the movie was somewhat above the projected screen, causing us to not be able to see the entire screen.

but i guess that was good enough compensation for me. im gonna use that to watch some other good movie maybe a month down the road, or use it to watch 'the forgotten.'

well, i decided to go by to emory, coz i never did that before. i heard it was an awesome campus, and even though i only got to see a section of emory, it was pretty impressive enough. their dorm was very new, compared to mine being old, and almost everything about emory was modern, new and nice. but again, thats coming from a first time visit. i felt like that about tech when i came here, about their old looking buildings and whatnot. but i liked the quietness of their campus and how they were spread out. emory might be located in atlanta, but unlike tech, which is in the smack of the city, emory's located a little off city limits. so it was a nice change of scenary for the day.

we talked about nonsensical stuff, but it was very much welcomed, since i havent had that kind of talk with people who understood what they meant. i could relate to things in singapore with leisha and pamela would understand too, and i found out other things about marc from his very own cousin, which was interesting too.

if i had told my friends in tech that i was actually in emory, they'd kill me. which kind of was true when my friends called to ask where i was and when i was coming back, i'd tell them im at emory and the first thing they would say is, why didnt you tell me you'd be at emory? the sex ratio at tech's pretty bad, as i mentioned very long ago, and the guys at tech will jump at the opportunity to go to UGA or emory, coz there are more girls.

and i kinda understand why now. the girls that i met in emory and saw around campus, well, were commendable. and the ones i got to know through leisha and pamela, though i cant exactly remember their names, were very nice bunch of people too.

oh and i got to measure my weight for the first time since coming here. i was so afraid i had gained like 10 lbs, but as i found out, i actually lost weight. i lost weight in my freshman semester. how weird is that? all these talk go on about the effects of the 'freshman-15' but i actually lost like 5 lbs. with all my coins, ipod, shoes and wallet, i weighed 139.5 lbs. so i assume that my weight is 139 lbs. i was elated, coz i had feared for the worst, but i guess my lost apetite in brittain caused me some good.

well whatever is it, i had a really good time in emory and if time permits, i'd love to be there more often. its a change of surrouding for once and its like an extended network of friends over that provides a different sort of unwinding and relaxing from the rigours of the weekday.

also, red sox wins the first game of the world series. i still believe! take that josh!