Got up at 12 yesterday, and went to the mall down in braintree for a couple of hours. It's been quite some time since I went to mall last, so it was a refreshing change to see what the latest mall-things are. I'm not sure if the Braintree mall counts as an urban or a suburban mall, but I didn't see as many people as I'd have hoped to on a Saturday afternoon. It could have been me projecting my 'malls are dying' knowledge on reality, or maybe the Braintree mall is not particularly popular, but it's not somewhere I'd go out of my way for. There's way too many teenagers and children to begin with, the stores are pretty expensive no matter how much they 'mark down', it's quite difficult to comparison-shop even when all the stores are in the same building, and walking between different outlets is not as fun or satisfying as doing the same in newbury. A day at the mall might be fun on an awful winter day --or maybe not, because they certainly to not radiate 'warmth' in their design, choosing to go instead for the cold 'mall' aesthetic -- but Boston summers and fall are better spent outside in Newbury street, or basically city shopping street. The mall doesn't add anything to the experience, IMHO. Add to the fact that we were drenched in popcorn smell from that one small popcorn outlet, and couldn't escape it no matter where we went because it was so strong, a mall seems to me to be a strictly crappier option to an outside shopping strict, assuming the outside weather is amenable. I can see why people would be crazy over malls in say, Singapore or Florida though -- because heat and humidity is what everyone is trying to escape and the mall aesthetic fits right in to that desire.
We got back to my friend's place (whose place I'd crashed at the night before), and we had a short moment of crisis when we thought something Very Bad might have happened to one of his roommates. After several minutes of panicking, a phone call, and a solid knock on the door, we discovered things were Not Bad, and all took a big long sigh of relief. Good times. I cut a pineapple (i've been invited to cut pineapples for people now), and my friends made fried chickpeas for the potluck at our place.
On our drive to my place, I suddenly got very sick, and was the most thankful I've ever been that a reasonable Dunkin' was so close. I got a plain donut and used the facilities, and the relief of having things aok was as great as discovering Something Very Bad hadn't happened a couple of hours ago.
Back at our place, I helped clean up the place and set up the place, and waited for everyone to come over. We had a great group, a couple more than a dozen people in our cozy living room. There was some chatting and catching up (and thus the observations written last night in the previous post haha), and talking to people from Back When who I hadn't seen in a long while made me really happy. There were three -- or was it four? -- very intense games of mafia that we played after, and I died very quickly in the first two rounds on accusations of having somehow caused the murder of a good(?) friend. They got it wrong once, and right once, and got the justification wrong the time they did get it right. Someone observed the hearsay and bs that the game moved on very closely resembled the American justice system and the juries they use and we all agreed...it's very difficult to argue something when there's three lawyers in the room, two of whom went to The Law School (I don't name drop here but when I do, I only drop the biggest names, etcetera). We closed out the night early at 11.30 ish, I'd figured people might have wanted to stay for longer, but roommates were eager to go to bed, it was raining, and the guests didn't seem particularly into hanging around for longer either. Since it was a potluck, we were all done with cleaning up etcetera by 12. I tried to go to sleep soon after, but couldn't sleep well until 3am, Youtube kept distracting me too.
All in all, it was a pretty happy day. It's unfortunate the hiking planned for yesterday didn't happen, but because of the rain and other logistical reasons it was unlikely to have happened anyway in hindsight, so on the balance things turned out for the best/
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