Sitting around and taking up space

Uh, hello, I’m still alive. And I still have internet, as my friends who keep seeing me online and asking “why the hell are you online so much while on holiday?!” can attest to.

I’ve been in San Francisco for close to two weeks now, and apart from spending a lot of money, I really haven’t accomplished very much in terms of real travelling, but that’s alright — I think I deserve a sit-around-and-do-nothing kind of holiday. Even if I did pay over a thousand dollars of airfare to sit around and do nothing (except take up space) in Toru and Sasank’s apartment.

More interesting activities:

• Snow Patrol and Embrace in concert at the Warfield. Very enjoyable, even if I got my ticket kindof late and ended up nearly as far back from the stage as humanly possible. Snow Patrol’s excellent live rendition of Run definitely made up for that, though.
• Bright Eyes and The Faint in concert at the Concourse Exhibition Centre. Bright Eyes was pretty decent (they mostly played from Digital Ash, the less popular of their two new albums), but The Faint was just ridiculous. Infectious energy, catchy tunes, clever animations, great performance. Definitely overshadowed the main act, in my opinion.
• San Francisco International Film Festival: Caught three movies at the AMC Kabuki in Japantown: Phil the Alien, Boxers and Ballerinas and Mad Hot Ballroom.
  • Phil the Alien was stupid but amusing — think Napoleon Dynamite but lower budget. I did laugh out loud a couple of times, but I can’t remember about what.
  • Boxers and Ballerinas was a documentary on Cuban youth boxers and, well, ballerinas; more specifically, it was an examination into the contrast between those who stayed in Cuba and those who’d defected. Interesting for its subject matter, but not so much the actual delivery, I thought.
  • Mad Hot Ballroom, however, I thoroughly enjoyed from start to finish. Partly because it’s about ballroom dance, partly because it’s about schoolkids and teachers, but mostly because it’s so well-made. It’s one of those movies where I suffered from the Grinning-Like-An-Idiot syndrome throughout the entire movie. I hope it makes its way to Singapore, I definitely want to see it again.
• Went to a SF Giants game courtesy of Jess’ company tickets (I’m not sure how you get free tickets after you quit, but let’s not question that), which unfortunately got rained on. Giants won, at least.
• Visited campus for a day, crashing at Joakim’s little Rains apartment (a situation I’m not altogether unfamiliar with, crashing at Rains). Just in time to see the prospective freshmen show up on campus for ProFro weekend. They’re so… small. I felt like I’d step on a couple if I wasn’t careful. And they’re class of 2009?! When the fuck did the numbers go up so quickly?!
• The best part about being here, of course, is just meeting up with friends from college times. It’s good to see everyone again after a prolonged absence, especially also since I doubt I’ll ever be able to do this again (or at least, bum around on holiday for so long).

Otherwise, the food’s good (though expensive, now that I’m earning in Sing$), the drinks are cheap (hence making my friends into semi-alcoholics on weekends, it seems), the weather’s alternately craptacular and fantastic, the futon I’m crashing on is very comfortable, we’re going to Vegas next weekend, and I’m with some of the best friends that a lost anti-social international student could’ve asked for in college.

Good times.