On good weekends and tough decisions

It's been a pretty neat weekend, all things considered. Friday night I met my adopted little brother after work for beer. He came by the restaurant, and as there was only another half-hour until closing time, Mafune let me leave early so that we could sit and talk shit before meeting a biologist friend of mine, having a greasy burger and then going home. Is this how working adults spend their Fridays? Two beers tops and then they're all done? I remember being 19-20-ish, where everyone would start drinking at like 8 p.m., go on until 3 a.m. and then hit an after-party. I have no idea where all that energy came from. I'd probably die if I tried pulling that shit now. Give me a nice night in with comedy shows and tea. I can handle that.

My biologist friend and I spent Saturday museum hopping, along with what seemed to be every family with young children in Stockholm. We started off at the Natural Science museum near my place, where I hadn't been since junior high. As you guys may have noticed from the photos from my Berlin trip with Hemingway and Yanyan, I have a kinda creepy love for stuffed animals. I'm weird, I can't help it. If I could keep plants alive for long enough, I'd keep lots of stuffed birds around as if recreating some sort of frozen moment in time, just because they're pretty.

...or I don't know, maybe just an entire freaking box of humming birds. Sounds reasonable.

Generally, there were a whole bunch of stuffed animals around that I wish I could keep as pets. So many things I didn't know even existed. No wonder they were able to think of so many different Pokemon - there are millions of species out there just as amazing as fiction. Now I just need to find them and make them mine.

Like this furry thing. Adorable.

Or why not on of these adorable silky anteaters?

Sloths are the best though, obviously.

After all of my animal squee-ing, we hit the Technological Museum to try the hands-on Game On exhibition. I found it a bit disappointing, partly because of the millions of people who went there so it was near-impossible to play most of the games, but also because most of the games I was interested in, I already had. How sad is that, when you go to a museum and find stuff you own among the relics they're presenting? That being said, it was still fun, and well worth the visit since it was free for students from my university, and I got the added bonus of getting to explain the idea behind Portal to an old man, feeling like a nerd queen.

Speaking of nerd royalty - original Mario sketches by Shigeru Miyamoto. I almost nerd-gasmed on the spot.

Bringing old-school Pokemon to the new generation.

All in all it was a good day. It felt unusual to do so much on a Saturday off, but it just goes to show that doing things with people you actually want to hang out with, rather than feel obligated to hang out with, really does make a difference. I was invited to two separate parties in the evening, and ended up dissing both for dinner and talking with my philosopher friend, which was far more restful and made me happier than any amount of drinking and loud merrymaking with a large group of people could.

Drinking chai at cafes alone is hard to beat.

Sunday rolled around, and with it a sense of purpose and a feeling that things need to be done. It's both a good feeling and a bad one at the same time. Physical chores, like cleaning the apartment because it's my cleaning week, are one thing but the mental aspect is a little different. It's more painful. I read the other day on the internet that the harder something was to tell someone, the quicker you should tell them, and maybe that's true. It doesn't change the fact that it's hard to do though.