it was so close, a trip to the world series, i was all ready to go out celebrating with julie after the game, until the last few innings, when our long and glorious season finally came to an unbelievable close as the yankees came back from to tie it and finally win the game with a homerun. life will go on, i will still go to work tomorrow, but in the baseball universe, planet red sox exploded tonight, smashed into a million pieces, its debris cast into orbit forming a heartbreaking asteroid belt. i will not point any fingers, it's too easy to look back and say, "oh, so and so did this, that's why we lost." baseball is a team sport, if it hadn't been for the efforts of everyone, we'd never be here in the first place. there's always next year, i guess.
today was my official first day of work. it wasn't any different from any of my other days of work. i didn't even leave the office the whole day, for lunch i just had my leftover chow mein from yesterday. the one exciting thing that happened was adam finally set up the G5 machine. unfortunately i won't be the recipient of any of that high speed mac action, as i will just inherit his old G4 mac (better than not having any mac i suppose).
when i got home, there was a package on my doorstep, the nikon lithium-ion batteries i ordered finally arrived. i put one into the recharger, and that's when alex called me from the airport saying he just arrived from tokyo. 
i got into his car and raced down to logan, narrowly avoiding several near-miss accidents because i was in a rush to pick him up and still have time to get back to my house to watch the game. "you just passed me," alex told me when i called him on his cellphone after i drove by terminal E. i went through the concourse one more time and came back around, finally spotting him standing out on the sidewalk with his suitcase. driving back to boston, i missed my exit and didn't go through the callahan tunnel, instead i went north through revere and lynn and malden. this was alex's neighborhood so fortunately he knew how to get us back on track. the good thing was i didn't have to pay the $3 toll, the bad thing was it took a lot longer to get back into cambridge.
as soon as we got back to my place, i called julie to let her know i was home and that she could come over. alex gave me a present, this usb-powered desktop fan shaped like a cat sitting underneath a tree. i went down to the street corner and ordered some pizzas, then julie arrived with her radio so we could listen to it while we watched the game. we saw the start of the first inning at the pizza shop when we went to get our food. alex left after a few innings when he finish his pizza.
julie and i watched the game, each in our own way. i was the picture of guarded optimism, 
lying on the couch, very calm and collected. julie was the exact opposite, sometimes she couldn't sit still and had to get up and dance around, while other times she'd be crouching on the floor, moaning at the television, saying how she couldn't take anymore of this. we were both dressed in our red sox wear, julie had her lucky red sox cap along with actual red socks, i had on a pair of red pants. during commercial breaks, julie would run to go use the bathroom, or maybe call somebody on her cellphone. at one point she got some pizza stains on her pants, and would spent the rest of the evening trying to get the grease out, even though i told her it'd be perfectly okay for her to take them off and put it through the wash, clean tumbled dry pants in just 30 minutes. for 7 innings it was all "hooray we're going to the world series," and then in the 8th all our dreams disappeared. when the game was finally over (i stopped my vcr, i'd been foolishly recording the game, thinking it might've be a classic), julie went back home, both of us glad that our lives were no longer controlled by major league baseball. this evening could've ended in one of two ways. unfortunately, it ended in a bad way, but over time i will get over tonight's gut wrenching loss, and perhaps in my lifetime, i will finally see the red sox win the world series.