so i finally stopped putting up facebook albums, aside from the occasional picture of food. the predictable comments began to get on my nerves after a while. and i was getting sick of the less social of my friends branding me as a “party guy,” when nothing can be further from the truth.
[do the math, read my twitter feed, parties are rare compared to the nights i spend reading at starbucks. duh!]
…and there’s the whole issue of uploading twice- i already put up pictures for this website, which by all accounts gives people a much better understanding of the world i inhabit. i don’t need to facebook it when i do it here, already.
so… busy month. here we go.
a good friend of mine in the Mainit family, of University of San Francisco fame, came back from Korea for a few days, so I took him to a Warriors game with my stanford crew, did some sightseeing, smoked some hookah, and did the whole tourist bit.
the warriors lost, by a lot, and i got lost on the way there, but the beer made it bearable. i don’t see any of these people all that often, so i figured why not go.
i continued my appearances at the bitter end bar on tuesdays for trivia night, with our team walking away in victory most of the time, though not after arguing the position of certain ‘things’ on certain posters in the bar. being considered a ‘regular’ is nice.
i also went to see the old prom date at the NoisePop “Pop & Shop” Craft fair, but it didn’t go as well or as reassuringly as I’d expected, for some reason. but at least the stuff being sold remained interesting.
[maybe not great, but definitely interesting. they even had a bar, and i found the combination of crafts and alcohol to be at least somewhat okay.]
following a day at the lake, i got sucked into walking with the Loong Mah lion dance troupe for the Chinese new year parade- which I hadn’t marched in in exactly 10 years, since the old JROTC days in high school.
it wasn’t as easy on my knees as i would’ve liked, but i figured why not. and there were a lot of interesting things to see, culminating with, of course, the miss chinatown float. ray made it a point to be aware of its proximity to us.
a dinner back on clement street followed, as did crepes at Genki and a box of Pocky. a big one.
that sunday we had brunch at cliffhouse for the first time in a while, and it ended up being being worth the drive to the far, far end of Geary. a lot of discoveries were made that day, from the epic combo of crab and avocado to the goings-on in suburban los angeles. and proper phone etiquette.
rebecca’s birthday came the next week, and we had a great time at zingari with her and the dragon warriors crew. though the conversations occasionally repeated themselves [i mean, i spend half the week with dragonboaters regardless] and the food was so-so, it never hurts to make new homies in different industries.
at the end, however, the birthday girl kind of walked away with the signed check. i walked them all to the club and returned the damned thing to the restaurant myself, which got me a lot of dirty looks from the staff, but they got what they wanted.
and after another night of epic pictures and great conversations with some interesting, albeit older people, so did i.
in between the ides of march and st patrick’s day, i saw Full On Flyhead and Late Nite Drive at Bottom of the Hill. i have a lot of friends in local rock bands, and seeing two of those bands performing together was incredible.
[my apologies to Angelo for not being able to make his performance with Delicate Pie across town]
and the last of it, following the usual practice, was the night at Swig with misters yee and the dragonboaters. it wasn’t bad, though the flogging of brendan was pretty much expected.
perry and i had a good post-mortem at my favorite 24hr diner afterward and we finally called it a night.
and other than all the ‘social’ stuff, it’s been work and dragonboat, and my trek to make in onto the A-boat for the first tie in three seasons. keeping the intensity up without destroying my vocal chords or collapsing was never much of an issue.
but it’s hard, and it’s a separate path, which i already document on the Ripple Effect website, though i’m legally bound to make it sound optimistic, even perky, the rest of the way.
you know how it goes.
more later. i’ll try to get to this thing weekly, eventually.
