Good News For People Who Like All News

Yes you heard me! N-E-W-S.

Good:

• Weather is excellent, but the light in California is really bright. It gives everything a lovely golden glow, but I have to squint often, which isn't pretty.
• I've been attending International Orientation and found out today that I get 36 unit credits from my A Levels. 12 for Lit, 12 for TSD, 12 for Econs. 36 credits! That's like a year's worth of work! The best part is the Lit A Level is equivalent to all FIVE classes required for the English Major here. So all the Milton, Chaucer and Shakespeare classes I thought I had to take for the next 2 years - poof!! gone.
• They're showing tons of movies in the theatres here (shocker); my parents are taking me to see 500 days of Summer tonight and Inglourious Basterds tomorrow. And possibly Bright Star over the weekend!
• I have bought and uploaded the new Muse album.
  

Middling:

• I've met a whole bunch of people from all over the world here at International Orientation, but most people have kind of shuffled into country-based cliques (which leaves me stuck deep in Asia). Also I suspect there's a definite bias that prevents European people from wanting to befriend Chinese people. Fuck that.
  
• The other Singaporeans are mostly what I expected them to be - some are better, some are worse (make of that what you will. I'm trying to be diplomatic).
• I've been hanging around sporadically with a nice Canadian girl, German girl, Swiss girl, Italian guy... and I have some Turkish friends, and Mexican, and Danish. There was a hipster Irish guy who told me how he met U2 in a French restaurant and got invited to sit down with them for a few drinks. Fuck that. We also talked about Once and Damien Rice.
  

Bad:

• I thought I had a nice time yesterday, skipping OG dinner to visit my uncle and aunt in their (gorgeous and filthily expensive) beachside house in Malibu - lavender/crimson sunset and flocks of seagulls and twinkling evening stars and all that. I even beat my cousin at chess (he's 9, but damn it, he takes a chess class at school!) which was the highlight of my evening. This morning I showed up for orientation and asked my friends how they spent their evening at OG dinner. Oh, they say, we stumbled upon a movie premiere in the village, of this movie called Love Happens? We saw Jennifer Aniston and... this other dude. The other dude was signing autographs and taking pictures with everyone, but we didn't recognise him so we didn't bother. What, I said, Aaron Eckhart?! Have you never seen Thank You For Smoking? No Reservations? Erin Brokovich? The Dark Knight??? Oh we have seen The Dark Knight, they said, but we thought that guy was dead.