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Erin’s 22nd Birthday party, and so forth. Just another night, really.

After this party, there were a series of loud bangs and distant cheering that continued well past midnight. Odd.

I keep having the same dream: I’m Harry Potter and I’m in the woods, and there are just all sorts of these odd wrinkly-faced, plastic costume-wearing, brightly-coloured, bad guys who need to get the shit kicked out of them one way or another. And this time around, Malfoy was there too. Man, I need to get out more.

Flipendo!

Just kinda bored, really.

So today the Starbucks in Farnham pre-opened. Not that I am a fan of Starbucks, in fact, quite the opposite, but I went by to see what was what. To my dismay, they do not have an active wi-fi network, but I should go back tomorrow and check, once they officially open for real, and actually allow you to buy stuff. The good news is that they were giving out free coffee, so I took the recommended dosage of a gingerbread latte, which turned out to be complete rubbish. My stomach is now doing all sorts of tricks related to dairy bombardment. Lovely.

It’s a lovely sunny day and we set the clocks back this morning so we all got an extra hour of sleep, or in my case, doing nothing. Of course, now the sun will start setting at absurdly early times, so I say it wasn’t worth it – at all.

The tradition continues…

Halloween this year was pretty manic. Since this is, of course, art school, people went all out – homemade and rag-tag, but intensely detailed consumes on a much more frequent occurrence than back in the states. The costumes themselves were of a different vein than I remember back at Drexel, Rutgers, etc. – there were a lot of people dressed up as characters from A Clockwork Orange, including the three black guys who decided to show the ‘black’ version. Numerous girls were dressed as French Maids, the ever-popular and slutty alternative to actually doing something creative. And, as the film “Mean Girls” will testify, a lot also dressed as vague animals such as bunnies, mice, cats and such, when in fact they are just in their underwear. Devils too.

I committed Halloween faux-paz by repeating my costume from last year, but oh well, no one over here had seen it.

The Union was incredibly hot, to the point where you couldn’t do anything because it was so hot and stuffy. Queues for drinks were massive, and more like mobs that somehow pushed forward to the bar. Both dance floors were packed to the point where I couldn’t move, let alone do the Thriller dance. And the music wasn’t really my thing, nor was the freakshow.

So yes, it was fun, as Halloween always is, but certainly not worth the £7.50 cover charge. I will justify it by saying that it cost that much just to know what everyone is referring to for the rest of the year.

You climb a mountain
In search of an adventure
Just come home alive

I won’t bother to try and interpret my seriously fragmented and impossible-to-recall dream, but that’s what I recall from the night’s subconscious randomness. I don’t often write Haikus, even while awake, so I find this as odd as you lot who are reading. So the lesson here, be mindful of your dreams, for whatever reason. Dreams are fun too, they are usually more interesting than anything Hollywood can cook up, and certainly more random and a lot cheaper. The trouble is, they don’t get releases on DVD, as in Final Fantasy, The Spirits Within.

I suppose the climbing of a mountain is not literal, but rather figurative, meaning some large-scale life challenge (like moving to England) and coming home alive, is rather, coming home unchanged, or perhaps coming home at all, in the case of England. So it sounds like something my mother might say to me, but in the dream, I was saying it to someone else. And I can remember myself thinking of it and, in my dream, counting the syllables and such to make sure it was a haiku. Then at times, in my dream again, I was simply speaking in Haiku, which plain doesn’t happen to normal people who are not doing it on purpose.

Karoake was shit last night – no one came. Guess they are all resting up for tomorrow – Halloween dance. Plus, no one turned up for rugby so we didn’t train. Not a typical Wednesday.

The mad thing is, Guildford bares a strange resemblance to New Brunswick. I wonder if the University of Surrey would likewise share a resemblance to Rutgers. *shudder* In that regard, I hope not.

High Street Highjinks: Two parts research, two parts boredom, one part curiosity, one half part looking for Halloween stuff.

At least now I can say I’ve been to Guildford and I can locate two Starbucks, just outside shouting distance of one another.

*sigh*

Thursday, we had presentations. Good times. Lots of accents, varied projects, low-scale arguments.

Friday, I had £800 in cash lying around, so I decided to take a few pictures. I don’t think I’ll ever have that much cash at one time. Jeez.

Wednesday: Rugby and Karaoke

As the team becomes more experienced and more comfortable with one another, our level of play increases, ever so slightly. Yes, we were blanked, but we held a better team to fewer points with a depleted squad on the pitch. It rained. Oh well.

And then to karaoke night at the Union. Apparently, there is a large following of people who love to hear me sing. WTF? I got a lot of compliments last night, which I thought to be strangely out of the norm. I suppose I was channeling Paul McCartney, again. In fact, as the night wore on, I was sharing the stage with half a dozen dancing girls, perhaps playing the roles of the song subjects – or maybe they were just drunk.

“I saw her standing there” by the Beatles and “Mambo No. 5″ by Lou Bega.

And so the popularity of this, my website, grows. Strange.

Tate Modern still doesn’t make sense to me even though I’m now in art school. It’s still a collection of seemingly thrown-together stuff, mixed with the occasional really-cool-but-I-wouldn’t-call-it art.

I’m glad to see that they are finally cleaning the facade of St. Paul’s, although it’s being done in strange fragments and patterns, leaving columns half-clean and so forth. What a building that has been so massively defaced by years of traffic running right up next to it.

On a quick search for Transatlantic Branding. Not too successful. Starbucks is the same everywhere you go. A corporate monolith. American Express seems a bit warmer and more friendly on this side. Will this evolve into my thesis? Dunno.

After playing our first match, the SIAD Rugby team, in typical Wednesday fashion, went down to karaoke at the Union and proceeded to do our thing. Highlight of the night, Psycho Tony downing that 6 pint flash of beer and not passing out or throwing up or really being all that affected. Considering how drunk he already was before we got there, and considering the massive kabob sandwich thing he ate beforehand (it was so spicy, sweat was literally rolling off his face), that was quite a feat.

Jess and Jenny, yea, they were pretty wasted. Not cool. I am in front of the camera more than usual, which should indicate the fact that people were fascinated by my camera proceeded to take random photos.

Tonight, we sang “Moving on Up” by M People, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, I dunno who by, and “Harder to Breathe” by Maroon 5

As far as the match itself, we lost 57-7, but played respectably considering the lopsided score. I got my first-ever yellow card, which was pretty embarrassing considering I was the captain. All in good fun.

Once again to Oxford St, London for some swing dancing and photo-taking while in transit. Tonight, a study of relative velocity, you might say. Hard to focus while on escalators.