I woke up at like 1 again even though it was christmas. I looked outside the window and everything was wet. I think this is the first christmas I've seen where all the snow disappeared. I went downstairs and found my present under our christmas tree. I didn't know I was gonna get a present this year. We did presents last year but I didn't know we were gonna do them this year. But it was a nice surprise when my mom asked me yesterday what I wanted for christmas. After having lunch at Udipi, we went to Best Buy to get my "Best of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe" DVD but surprisingly they were sold out. I didn't know there were other people besides me who watched He-Man too. Then we went to Circuit City to look for it there and had no luck. So then I just got the Live 8 concert DVD that I had wanted for so long. I watched the first disc (out of four) today. The first disc itself is about 3 hrs long! The whole set contains about 10 hours of music, and all that in DTS surround sound!! It sounded fantastic on our set up. I can't wait to watch to disc 3 which has the Pink Floyd reunion!!

Anyways, after watchin disc 1 I watched "March of the Penguins" in my room. I thought it was gonna be a boring documentary about penguins but I was simply blown away!! The cinematography was unbelievably gorgeous. It was incredible to see how carefully the penguins' journey was captured on camera in a harsh place like Antarctica. And the whole time while I was watching it, I felt like I could relate to these penguins just as if they were humans. The way they behaved, the mating, the protecting of the egg, the nurturing of the chicks, it was remarkable. I really hope this one wins an Oscar.

Then I had to get ready to go to a family friend's place for a little dinner party. Normally I don't go to those cause I have nothing to do there, but I had nothing to do at home either so I thought ah what the hell. The kid there named Rohan (no...not that Rohan) got a Nintendo DS for christmas. So I got to play mario kart on that. Then he showed me his toy guitar, which was an actual guitar but a lil kid's size. So I tuned it for him and then played that for a while. After that we were having dinner at like 11pm and just talking. Usually, I don't participate in any conversations at such parties, and the adults don't care to include me in their conversations either. For some reason I become very anti-social when I go to these things. I think it's cause none of their conversations are interesting to me. The uncles will talk about their jobs and the aunties will talk about tv serials. And when they all talk together it will mainly be bitching about the socioeconomic conditions in India and how to improve them. But today something strange happened. The uncles decided to actually include me in their conversation!! Not only that, the conversation was about their love affairs (more like how close they came to having one) before they got married. For the first time they were having an interesting conversation and I was a part of it! At first I didn't believe it. I was like "huh? u talkin to me?" But then they complimented my hairstyle (ah-ha!) and asked me who I was growing my hair for. Why do I have to be growing my hair for someone. Is it too weird that I wanna change my hair now? Anyways, then they asked me about Indian girls at OSU. "Haha...well...now that you mentioned it," I thought to myself. They wanted to know how the college culture had changed since they graduated. Specifically, whether Indian guys still revolve all their convos around girls or not. I told them that sadly it was still true. What more can I say? Girls are such tricky and mysterious beings. Generations have passed and still no one has figured them out.

All in all, it was nice to see that my presence was given some importance there. It was quite interesting to hear the uncles talk about their college days. They always mentioned parents and families when talking about compatibility with women. It was always about what they talked about with the girl's parents, not what they talked about with the girl. Something very strange and I don't understand yet. Maybe when it's my turn one day. But not yet, not for a while.