my new rule is that i will catch up when i feel like catching up, but the backlog will not stop me from writing about current events.

the weekend was eventful. friday night, si organized an outing at vibe to see ladi6. i am not hip enough to have heard of any of these things...vibe? ladi6? where the f is brick lane? but he promised me the best bagel in london, and it was within walking distance of work, so after a couple of tequila shots celebrating a colleague's bday on the green, jackie, jonnie, anne, and i traipsed off toward east london. we got distracted by some thai food, but we made it eventually, and the venue was great, the cider delicious, the music meh (apparently it got a lot better after jon and i left...pffft).

saturday featured a 3hour 8am partybus trip to bristol for some scrimmaging. we lost in game point to leeds leeds leeds. d line had some (read: a lot) of trouble converting, but we did manage to get some d's. the o line looked like a machine (well-oiled and all that). i took that night pretty easy, but some of the girls had a big night out at people's republik (the plan was to eventually get to inferno's, but ppl's r is like the blackhole of nights out). sunday started with dimsum, followed by a 2 hours skills session in hyde park at which whit kakos made a surprise appearance (yay!), and then...it took me 1.5 hours to get home thanks to the northern line closure (which seems a bit daft on marathon weekend), and as soon as i got home, we remember that the parkway drive concert we thought was on monday was actually on sunday...so that's another hour journey back into town for some hardcore metal.

i highly recommend going to a metal concert in a smallish venue. the energy is fantastic, and watching teenage boys flail like berserker never gets old. the first time i saw a circle pit, i thought it had formed spontaneously, but i eventually cottoned on to the fact that the band was calling it. it's a bit like square dancing actually...the band will say, "circle pit!" and the room will turn into a cyclone of bodies, or they'll say "split the room!" and the boys will flood to opposite sides, and on the count of four, they all throw themselves at each other, crashing like waves in the middle. winamp should create a new graphical sound visualization...instead of those bars going up and down, it'd use skinny teenagers bouncing off each other.

we saw 4 or 5 different bands, culminating in parkway drive, which was the most normal and likeable one. they seemed to genuinely enjoy being there in front of an audience and rocking out. the lead singer was so pleased that the audience knew enough words to sing along that he grinned like a kid. it's nice to see a band that isn't jaded with the rockstar lifestyle yet, and they weren't afraid to incorporate some melodic guitar bits in amongst the killer fast bits. the other groups were a bit older, a bit muscley (in a "i've just gotten out of prison way"), and way more tat'd up.

going home after the show was a bit of an adventure. although british people are normally all for queueing, british people straight out of a metal concert try to squeeze as many people as possible simultaneously through the train doors. i was carried through by the 3 hyper-aggressive boys behind me, all the while apologizing to the guy in front of me whom i was pressed up against. once we were all on the train, we discovered that it wasn't even crowded--we all got seats. what melodrama! arrived home to a very affectionate cat. and that, in a nutshell, was the weekend.

next weekend, jon's going to brussels on a roadtrip with doug and family...i'm staying home to cat-sit.