Love In The Asylum

What is this, a three day weekend where I am actually putting on pants and leaving the house, and not just lazing around like a bum? Crazy, I know. I'm half worried to look into the mirror, in case I turned into my mirrorverse self without realizing it, and suddenly sprouted a dashing goatee. This is what I've got going on this unusually-long weekend:

Tomorrow: dress shopping. My aunt offered to buy me a dress to wear to graduation (omg), but neither of us actually know what size I wear anymore. So I'm doing some advance scouting at Macy's to get an idea of how their lines fit on me and what styles I like, and then she'll pay for the dress when she gets down here in a couple weeks. I'm not hugely excited about the idea of shopping, but I do need a dress, so...

Saturday: CHAMPIONS LEAGUE FINALS! It's my perfect flawless Barca boys against the no good evil Mancs, I cannot even wait for this. I'm even going so far as to secure a spot in one of the tv lounges upstairs to watch it on, because I don't want to risk my stream failing at a crucial moment, as they have a tendency to do. Also probably I will study and clean and shit, but that's not nearly as important as FOOTBALL.

Sunday: SAN FRANCISCO!! I mentioned a while back that I bought tickets to see Siegfried, and I have been patiently waiting all quarter for Opera Day to finally come around. And now at last it has. I'm sure it will be absolutely fabulous, and it will nice to treat myself to a whole day in the city. After the opera is over, Freshman Guy is meeting me at the opera house and we have tentative plans to go to a gay bar together, or to wander around and hang out if that doesn't work out, I guess. Should be lots of fun either way.

So, yeah. A social life, I has one.

OH GOD I JUST BOUGHT TICKETS TO THE RING CYCLE.

Okay, not the whole Ring Cycle, as such; I'm not that masochistic, and even if I was, I couldn't afford it and I wouldn't have a way to get home afterwards. But I did just buy tickets to see the premiere matinee of Siegfried at the end of May. Do you know how much opera that is? FIVE HOURS OF OPERA. EPIC GERMAN OPERA.

Chalk it up to a moment of temporary irrationality brought on the realization that I have been in the Bay Area for four years without ever going to the San Francisco Opera, and Siegfried being the only performance scheduled before mid-June, when I will be in the middle of finals and graduating and moving out. So Wagner it is. I'm not sure whether I should be excited or terrified.

(I'm also making plans with my grandmother to see a live broadcast from the Met of Lucia di Lammermoor at the local movie theater while I'm home for spring break. I have a lot of making up to do for the recent dearth of opera in my life!)

Just home from having wacky hijinks in SF with the lovely and brilliant colourofsaying. Man, that was AWESOME.

Even though we talk, oh, pretty much constantly on Skype, I haven't seen colourofsaying in about two years, what with the going to schools on opposite ends of the country and living in different states on holidays and then this year the thing where she was kind of in Japan. Clearly this was unacceptable! So when we realized that she was going to be in San Francisco for a day on her way home from Nagoya this month, of course we decided that Epic Adventures were in order.

After we met up together at the Caltrain station (and she gave me the stripey socks and all the fan porn she brought me from Japan), we took the BART into the city, where we immediately proved our utter incompetence at public transit by getting on the bus in the wrong direction and not realizing it for about 8 stops. Oops. Luckily, the SF bus system is forgiving, and after an extensive interlude of cracking dirty jokes about Doctor Who and cooing over the massive tribe of elementary students that got on at the zoo, we made it to where we were going, which was...some neighborhood by Golden Gate Park, I don't even know. At this point we were both about to keel over from hunger - but since the street we were on was four solid blocks of Dim Sum take-out bars punctuated by fruit markets, this was not an issue, we just picked the closest one to where we standing and treated ourselves to somewhat ridiculous amounts of dumplings.

The used bookstore colourofsaying wanted to check out was pretty thoroughly amazing, as evidenced by the fact that between us we bought, like, half a dozen books in the space of less than an hour. It had TWO FLOORS AND TWO SEPARATE BUILDINGS GUYS IT WAS WONDERFUL. I got The Demon's Lexicon, So You Want To Be a Wizard, The Tempest, and Marvel Adventures: Iron Man 2, and I think colourofsaying bought The Demon's Covenant. I'm pretty sure we could have stayed the entire day if we hadn't needed to find a bathroom.

Somehow, on our quest to find one store in San Francisco that actually had a bathroom, we ended up walking about a mile and a half through Golden Gate Park in the rain (and of course we had one umbrella and one overcoat between us, of course), so by the time we got to Haight Street (which was an ultimate destination for reasons I no longer remember) we were pretty much frozen through, and had to spend a good bit of time in some random coffee shop with great hot cocoa but no napkins or spoons, thawing out and reading bits of books out loud at each other and giggling.

Once we could feel our fingers again and most of our clothes had dried out, we wandered around Haight Street for a few hours, since we didn't have anything better to do. We saw approx. 11 million guys in skinny jeans and Converse, and a lot of girls with hair more exciting colors than mine. Since we are both English major uber-dorks, we found a second used bookstore and hung out there for a while, which was fun. And at one of the several dozen thrift stores on the street we bought me a very cute hat!

After a lot more walking, a game of phone tag, and finally us hitting up passing strangers for directions, we got on the right bus to go down to Ferry Plaza and meet colourofsaying's mom for dinner. Except we couldn't find any restaurants that were a) open and b) not insanely expensive, so in the end we just got a box of cheese and bread from a wine place and some fruit from the farmers' market and did that.

I don't actually remember much about the trip home, except that I kept using colourofsaying as a pillow on the BART and some guy with scary eyebrows kept glaring at us while we were arguing about what kind of songs each character would have in Torchwood's musical episode. But I made it home fine, obviously, and hopefully colourofsaying will have a good trip back to NC. And hopefully it will not be two years before we see each other again, right?

So, I'm sunburned, exhausted, and gritty in horrid places, but SAN FRANCISCO IS COOL AND I LOVE IT. Today was so much fun. We walked all over Fisherman's Wharf and Pier 39, we went to The Cannery, and I managed to avoid buying a ton of touristy junk I didn't need. We spent all of 23 minutes in Chinatown, which was still interesting, and I felt horrible for not being able to read any of the signs or understand what anyone was saying. My dad tried to take pictures out the window while driving down Lombard Street, aka the Crookedest Street in SF, and I thought we would die.

We went to Sunset District and I got to see the tiny tiny studio apartment my parents lived in when my mom was pregnant. That was...cool. And then we went to the beach right by there and I love the ocean. It is so...I don't know. Just vast and cold and moving and powerful and amazing and god, I got sand everywhere. I'm still brushing it off my pants.

The restaurant where we ate dinner had the greatest hot and sour soup I've ever tasted, and my dad embarrassed me horribly by trying to get me to teach him how to thank the waiter in Chinese. But it was worth it for the awesome food.

Is it just me, or do all the guys in SF seem really gay? Not in a bad way (Inner Yaoi Fangirl: there is no bad way...), just...very pretty and clean and they all seem to be wearing tight clothing and...I don't know. I just saw a lot of guys I would peg as gay. This, needless to say, made me happy.

Now if you'll excuse me, I shall go die of fear. I have to move in to my dorm tomorrow. Which by the way involves getting up at 6 in the morning. Gah.