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Kate has a friend who was offered a job to be a chef at Olive’s in Charlestown. She had never met me before. When we met she let me know that she knew one thing about me from Kate. That fact is that I am very persistent. She mentioned that she would have had a great time at the Swedish Nurse pub crawl had she known that we were doing the event she would have come. I also recently used the word persistent when talking with the Viapoint people. I had added to it ‘I hate to fail’.

I think it is interesting that persistent is something that would describe me. I am not sure if persistent is a compliment or a warning to others because persistent people are dangerous. In computers things that are persistent are usually bits of information that are given the right by the programmer to stay alive because they save time for the user and the computer going and retrieving them over and over again. A session with a computer is set-up to be persistent. Persistence also brings the idea of movies where a narrative is created through a series of still images because of the persistence of vision.

Someone who pesters Yahoo! Tech support for a week is persistent as is someone who sticks with a start-up for ten years. It describes a part of me very well. I want to be by continuing what I have begun and to bring each thread that has come from me to a conclusion that meets my desires and expectations.

I wonder if most atheists are persistent. If you don’t have a god or afterlife to justify existence maybe persistence of yourself and what you do is what is left to drive you naturally. The original god in the Middle East that the Jews and the Christians adopted wasn’t far from this concept. The word used for the god was “I am”, a self-referential persistence that falls only to the non-persistent opposite “I am not”. If anything God has been persistent and religion promises persistence – something I don’t actually believe in.

Enough Monday morning philosophy!

Kate’s friend found plenty of evidence for my persistence. I was obsessed with what I believe is a true social problem regarding bathroom candles. As a celebratory act that we had put candleholders and shelves into the walls Sarah placed candles throughout the apartment and lit them. I am not totally opposed to candles but I do see them as a fire hazard and while I am not opposed to them I do fear them. The scariest spot for a candle I found was when I sat down on the toilet and found that there was a candle burning behind me on the ledge of the toilet. Now I can understand that the bathroom is theoretically a great place for candles. It is naturally smelly and the candles provide some olfactory relief. I blew out the candle and went on a rant about how I would prefer not to be a burn victim who also had cracked their skull trying to stop-drop-and-roll on the hard tile floor of the bathroom.

When we arrived at Hattie’s party I also had to go to the bathroom I found myself once again confronted with a lit candle on the ledge of the toilet behind me. It shouldn’t surprise people to find that I spent a large part of the evening speaking to various guests about the dangers of toilet candles and lobbied to get enough votes to convince my significant other and host to put an end to toilet candles. (Insert no toilet candles logo here). Now I will likely drop this cause shortly but I do think it is worth fighting back. My sister has already burned her hair twice, once on a Bunsen burner in lab at college and once by a candle from a restaurant in New York. I would hate to see her burning from a toilet candle.

So if that persistent ranting about the toilet candles weren’t enough I also had an urge to play Internet Karaoke because we did have a significantly large gathering of people to make Internet Karaoke work. Unfortunately the computer was buried in the room where Hattie was keeping the coats. But with some coercion I managed to get Hattie to tell me where the computer was. I then removed piles of coffee table books to reach the computer’s monitor only to find a bizarre 3-D social game being played in real time on the screen. I didn’t know what to do with it and it was taking the whole screen. Many of the people were chatting away in completely unreadable Japanese characters. So I tried to hide the game on the screen but failed. I then cast a deodorize spell on someone else in the environment because it looked like an interesting thing to do. I probably shouldn’t have done that since it was Jose’s long standing character in some other world of virtual reality that had done it and I likely disrupt some carefully plotted alliances. Feeling guilt about having disturbed this game I went to Jose who then hid the game and showed me how to turn the volume on in the game. I then turned on the Karaoke and had a group of people singing early nineties music, Frank Sinatra, and some other choice pieces. Kate’s friend joined in and seemed happy to be singing along. Matt was also a very active participant as was Hattie’s friend Chris who loves Karaoke. Persistence rewarded… until the next morning.

Another big highlight at the party was that I finally chatted with Hattie’s friend Alex, who runs a company that oddly enough creates Karaoke games for gaming systems like the Playstation. The conversation we had was all about my idea and his independently created idea to build video games for pets. We will be meeting shortly to plot the rise of this new generation of pet home entertainment systems. I am quite excited to finally be getting to moving the Pet entertainment system project forwards.

We awoke at nine AM because we were going to have an early tailgate. This wasn’t a great idea since we weren’t asleep until 3 AM as we had chosen to watch the first half of Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story when we got home so we hadn’t gotten enough sleep for the long cold football day ahead of us on Sunday. Earlier on Saturday before Hattie’s party we had gone to Peter’s holiday party at his home. Sarah was absolutely in love with Peter’s house. I think she was ready to move in immediately after securely locking Peter and his family in the basement. I thought the basement was among the highlights of Peter’s home. It had a ping-pong table that didn’t have enough room behind it to have a fierce professional volley but worked well for a friendly game with a wager on it between Sarah and me. Even more importantly they had an area with a hockey goal and concrete oriented pucks where I got to play some hockey against Peter’s oldest daughter Lydia until she was called upstairs to do a mandatory piano recital. Another highlight of Peter’s home was a decorative piece created by Peter’s wife made of brussel sprouts and cranberries. I tried to convince Lydia that brussel sprouts are very tasty when salted properly but she would prefer to eat broccoli. We did get the card for the architect of the house who was a woman walking around with a baby in a baby Bjorn attaching her one month old baby in her chest. For convenience she had placed her cards in the front of the baby Bjorn leading to the obvious thought that the baby Bjorn is the perfect cocktail party accessory. Soon everyone will be wandering about cocktail parties with new born babies in front of them used as business card holders.

Peter had mainly invited me in order to meet with a VIP at the party who might be a good fit for being involved with ventures created in the future with Chris, Peter, and me. He was a VIP because he holds an executive position at a major bank and is on the board of MIT. As we all got together and were chatting important things like the future of innovation at MIT, what we might do as a next venture, and types of ventures that are successful on the Internet when a recruiter friend of Peter’s broke into the conversation with the comment “The only business that is profitable on the net is porn”. The recruiter then followed-up to discuss the guy who calls into talk radio and knows more facts about pornography than any other person in the world. The VIP turned and walked away and Peter, Chris, and I munched on some carrots and appetizers as Sarah spent forty-five minutes talking with his wife about working with children with learning disabilities.

On the way to Peter’s house we got thoroughly lost in Watertown. It took an hour to drive what should have taken fifteen minutes. So on the way back from his house we took a scenic route through where I grew-up. I took Sarah through a driving tour of Grenville Road where I pointed out highlights like the hill that the Griffin’s, a police officer’s catholic family of seven, used to have rock fights with my sister and me, the Tolan’s yard where a dog had bit me square in the ass, Aaron Dushku’s front step where the fire department had nearly arrested us for lighting snakes and firecrackers on the sidewalk, and Susannah Malone’s house where I had stopped on the way home in the middle of a snow storm to get hot chocolate at age 7 had fallen completely in love.

So we arrived at Hattie’s an hour or two late and when I had to go to the bathroom I got a call from Matt, Kate’s boyfriend, who wanted to co-ordinate tailgating at the football game on Sunday while sitting in front of a burning candle on Hattie’s toilet and reminded him that we could co-ordinate from Hattie’s party.

The tailgating was successful although it is hard to claim it as a success for our tailgating team. The reason is that we mooched off of Alan Buckler’s tailgating set-up where he had pulled together a grill with charcoal and had already been grilling for half an hour when we arrived at the Auto-East parking lot. The game itself was fun with plenty of scoring and a thorough drubbing of the Bengals including an interception by Troy Brown. Belicheck was rightfully unhappy with the performance of the Pats because they did some stupid things like allowed the Bengals to score a touchdown on a fake field goal play.