would you expect anything else?

It's Valentine's Day! Mother is playing online Tetris*, father sits beside me watching online tv, I write this post while setting reminders on all the chick flicks coming up tonight. YEAH! Would you believe me if I said that I have three blind dates lined up for after dinner? No? Okay, I wouldn't either. I'm just happy to be home--it's refreshing to get away from school for a few days.

*A note on mom's mad Tetris skills: her highest level is twenty freakin two! She gets to 15 easy now. When we used to play on our old Nintendo, yup this classic,she almost beat it...got up to level 19 (out of 20), got distracted, and in a millisecond, death. In her disbelief and anger, she threw away the remote. Unfortunately, old Nintendo iz broke now, duck hunt gun and all =(

Tomorrow I'll be working on something rather new to me. We are to somehow bring to life three scenes from a movie based on the script. Wha? Of course, this is what I signed up for when I enrolled in Film and TV directing, but it's definitely foreign ground. Just selecting the script has been a painstaking task so I've narrowed it down to either THE APARTMENT or AUTUMN IN NEW YORK. I have not seen either. Regardless of the poor reviews for AUTUMN, it might be slightly easier to take this on rather than an extremely well-known, high-intensity action or drama since I have no idea what I'm doing. Eek!

I'll also be starting some T.S. Eliot, Morrison's BELOVED, and Woolf's MRS. DALLOWAY (one of my favs). Luckily, I've been wanting to read the first two as well, so that should make it less homework-y and more enjoyable.
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Last night's dineLA outing was an eventual success. Aside from L.A. traffic being miserable, downtown L.A. is miserably confusing. Missed the 4th/3rd exit--which is combined under the 6th/5th sign only to separate to 4th/5th? or something like that. Finally had to whip out Mr. Garmin GPS who gave a series of "Keep left, then keep left, then keep right, then left..." To my utter disappointment, changing the voice to British-English actually ended up being more obnoxious. Darn.

Finally! We got to Wolfgang Puck's Bistro on 6th, drove around about ten minutes to find the cheapest lot possible ($3). Honestly, the bistro was tastier to me than Grace--again, I'm only making judgments based on the dineLA tasting, but sometimes a good ol' steak or burger and fries does the job. Plus, it's decently cheap so I just ordered from the regular menu: Tuna tartare appetizer (yum!), tortilla soup (so-so), and the bistro burger + fries (NOM!!!), which altogether ended up $2 less than the dineLA price. Of course, the set dinner and desserts were also delish, especially the steak au poivre. My only criticism is that everything was a tad too salty--that tends to be the flaw in a majority of American cuisine, too rich or over-seasoned.

The drive home at midnight was GLORIOUS! No traffic, but also not deserted--perfect driving conditions. Mom is paranoid about those cases where people pretending to be cops pull women over at late hours and dot, dot, dot. "You don't ever have to get out of your car. You have the right to ask for I.D. Don't get out of your car." "Okay, okay mom!" My foolproof plan if anything should happen: act crazy. Chances are, my attacker-kidnapper-___er won't want to deal with a troubled person.

Once home, I went straight for HBO On Demand to see what I'd missed the past how many weeks. Watched DEFINITELY, MAYBE, cried (duh, when Isla Fisher cries at the book and Abigail Breslin cries to Reynolds at the end), then fell asleep. Sigh.

Annnnd, dad just revealed a newly bought RATATOUILLE DVD! I'm all smiles!
Good night to you!