hola chicas, how's things? i will try to talk down my news a bit so you don't get too jealous while you're sitting in your little cubicles/rooms/toilets with your big pile of books and no drunken obnoxious james' spicing up your lives. ok?

last night i went out with a few guys staying at the hostel. just for a few beers, some pool and stuffing around. was nice to have a beer. havn't had one since sydney. was surprisingly hungover this morning considering how little i drank. that was irritating. today did very little. walked around, got a phone, and then i sat and read in union square. when i looked at the time it had been 3 hours. didn't feel like that long, i think i may have even got a little sunburnt. me. an australian. getting burnt in california. the shame.

i've been trying to find bill bryson's other book on the US but to no avail. sucks. i have been enjoying this book immensely and i have almost finished, when i got about half way through i decided to buy a little packet of post-it notes and i have been marking the spots where i have laughed out loud. there are quite a lot of post-it's in there. i suppose i want to go back later and use them for little points of inspiration when i write. the idea of being a writer has for the first time seemed plausible to me since reading this book, a lot of the things he does are reasonably quotidienne but his style of writing makes up for that, and i can see myself starting to think in a similar way. i wont give away any of my secrets just yet, but i have come up with some pretty funny stuff from the most mundane of daily events. then again maybe my view of reality has become skewed thanks to how little i enjoyed LA. still, my positive outlook makes me think i might go back when i have a driver's licence again. everyone deserves a second chance: even a tacky, boarded up, sprawl of a city like LA.

i've been a bit down today really. the amount of crazy/homeless people around has really been getting to me. you just have to completely ignore them, which really pangs; but what else can you do? there are hundreds of them here. and most of them are clearly drunk, drugged or have been so drunk/drugged up in the past that it has had a lasting effect on their motor skills. san francisco is an affluent place really. i shudder to think what poorer places like new orleans, detroit, new york are like. im actually a little scared about going to nyc. its going to be hard from what i have heard. everyone except you says its fucked up.

in a way i feel obliged to do more touristy things while im here, and in a way i feel like i can't be fucked. i did the bridge and that just about killed me. i keep being told i MUST do alcatraz, but i dont think i will, i think i might top things off tomorrow by going to berkeley and doing one of the tours there. with 18 nobel prize winners from one campus there must be something of note there.

i havn't been staying in touch with as many people as i should have. at this hostel you can only use the internet for ten minutes or so and i seem to use about 9:55 on writing here, so you should feel very special indeed. i have a long list of emails, some dating back to february, that i need to reply to, but i need to be in a certain frame of mind to give them the attention they deserve. which doesn't happen too often.

for those of you who have an interest in well... stuff: i was thinking of looking into re-enrolling at UWA and doing a bachelor of education, which is a year's supplementary study on top of the degree i have done, and then rather than going back home, just applying for an exchange in sweden/canada/usa. but probably not canada, why would i want to go there?