Halloween

So apparently Halloween is a big deal for people in their 20's. This is news to me. It wasn't a big deal at Harvard, and it's an American holiday that hasn't made it over to Japan yet. Matt is visiting for the week after a conference in Salt Lake City, and it's great to see him again for the first time since graduation. On Saturday we went to see the San Francisco Symphony play Tchaikovsky's 5th and something Soviet but post-Shostakovich that didn't leave much of an impression. We ended up dropping by a biophysics Halloween party in Berkeley when we got back, and both Matt and I felt like we were back in college again. It was pretty funny to see people my age dressed as zombies and sharks (there were three people wearing cardboard boxes with cardboard fins), and I told everybody that I was dressed as a "member of the liberal elite", which only drunk people seemed to find funny. One of the people I talked to started running through a laundry list of animals and asked me what positions they mated in. He started getting annoyed when I wasn't really sure.

Craig and I took Matt to Oakland for a Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebration on Sunday, with all kinds of live music and tons of people. To round it all off, the three of us plus Zack and two of Craig's friends went to the Castro on Monday night for the "parade" and street party, thousands of curious bystanders along with witches, ancient Egyptians, the living dead, the Incredibles, Michael Jackson, Snow White, the opposite sex, semi-nude people, and real and imposter police officers. My favorite was a group of guys carrying paddles and a Viking ship made out of cardboard, which seemed confused about how best to fit through the gate. It's been a long time since I've seen such craziness. On the way back, BART was clogged with high school and college students in less ambitious costumes. I think the social scene at my high school would have been a lot different if we had access to BART in Los Gatos.

I took the day off to show Matt around San Francisco. We had lunch in Chinatown, climbed Telegraph Hill (and saw the famous flock of parrots!), watched a male sea lion unsuccessfully attempt mating with another male at Pier 39 (trust me, I saw the internal genitalia extrude), and walked halfway across the Golden Gate Bridge as the fog sort of cleared up. But enough having fun; I've got to get some work done now.