A Little Time

After the mania of the weeks at Berkeley, the rushes across campus, and crushes on Sproul, it’s so easy to cut the weekends loose and let them drift. Last term I spent great swathes of time in my bedroom; feebly telling myself that I had far too much homework to go out, while still achieving very little. Some days I’d never see the outside of my halls, just sit and struggle through a dense essay or a dusty book, listening to the industrial carpet dryers wafting stale air down the hallways. Enough to do a person’s nut in. 

Having made it home and back again in one piece, and passing all of my classes with good grades, one of my top resolutions on my return was to take one day a week when academic work could stuff it. I would have Me Time: the only condition being that I used it to do new things, going across the bay and actually seeing something of San Francisco, or exploring parts of Berkeley outside of the four roads penning the campus. 

My first twenty-four hours of Me Time began at about 9pm Friday night, after singing with Perfect Fifth in the Welcome Back Acapella concert. There was an aftershow party, and the twenty-first birthday of a fellow choirgirl to attend. With the Irish Aristocrat, the World’s Greatest Lover and the Laconic Australian in tow I went steaming away, determined to show these Yanks how the British drink. Reckless bravado. 

Acapella parties are like stepping onto the set of Glee. Every time I went to the fridge to pull out a beer, I had to manoeuvre round spontaneous scatting sessions, and people were able to segue into a five-part harmony rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’ with no apparent effort. I had a conversation with a theatre major in possession of a highly convincing British accent, ‘helped’ the birthday girl with tequila shots, and learnt that one of my friends had been raised in a religious cult. An enormous bowl of vodka gummy bears had been provided for general consumption, which were easy enough to pick at once every half hour or so- but after midnight the hostess decided they weren’t disappearing fast enough, split us into teams and threw us into an eating contest. I swallowed a large tablespoon of them, and remember nothing more of the night. 

 

The second phase of Me Time began with slumping on the bathroom tiles the following morning, shaking like a leaf and heaving radioactive-looking bile into the toilet. Not the most fortuitous of starts. But, by the early afternoon, when I could stand upright without feeling an invisible pickaxe in my skull, I took the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) across the bay to visit the San Francisco Museum of ModernArt. 

'Guardians of the Secret' by Jackson Pollock

Architecture in central San Fran is fascinating- the buildings cobbled together like a five-year old’s collage, with old free-standing apartment blocks set against a chrome backdrop of skyscrapers. The MoMA is a two-block walk from Montgomery Street station, and costs eleven dollars for entry if you have a valid student ID. Eleven dollars well worth spending: the Irish Aristocrat and I spent a good two hours wandering through the exhibitions before the museum closed, and we barely scratched the surface. They seemed to have a little bit of everything- Picasso, Frida Khalo, Andy Warhol, even Damien Hirst’s petrified cow head, which in retrospect was not the best thing to examine with a hangover. And while I have no idea of the meaning behind a sculpture of brains, it was a great way to spend a Saturday afternoon, and a success in my first attempt at taking a little time.

peculiar brain sculpture

Next weekend I’m flying down to LA, where I plan to stick my hands into whatever stretch of drying cement I can find. Good times ahead!