Hollers from New York! The weather has been fantastic so far, with highs in the low 80s (it barely nudged 78°F, 26°C today) and no rain apart from a torrential thunderstorm that closed Newark Airport for a few hours, right when my flight was supposed to take off for it.

That minor hiccup aside, I managed to do almost everything I wanted to do so far, except for Shakespeare in the Park. Don’t say that Singaporeans are the only kiasu people in the world; New Yorkers show just as much exuberance for freebies, even if it is something as arty-farty as Shakespeare. (The Public Theater is showing As You Like It until mid-July.) Thousands of people jammed Central Park in a quest to get free tickets.

I would write a whole lot more except that I am super tired. I’ve experienced a whole lot of strange stuff, such as being served soggy carrot cake at New York’s supposedly premier restaurant for dim sum, watching a fierce mean-looking cop buy hot dogs for an old woman who was scrounging through the trash cans of Chinatown for scraps of stale food, wrinkling my nose at the ubiquitous rank of stale piss and fermenting shit that seems to permeate the entire ultra-rich TriBeCa area, and discovering the virtues of the $24 7-day unlimited ride MetraCard. Since the trip began I’ve only managed to gross 7½ hours’ worth of sleep and I really want to get to watch Kobayashi-san trash everyone at the Coney Island hot dog eating competition tomorrow.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, THE Coney Island, where the A&W Coney dog got named. I’ll find out tomorrow if real Coney dogs are just as disgusting as the ones A&W served back in Singapore (when they still existed). Also hope to catch some spectacular fireworks, Macy’s plans to launch a whopping 80,000 of them tomorrow between the hours of 9:20 and 9:55 EDT. And judging from the scene outside my window right now, many people in Harlem are impatient and are getting their own fireworks up in the sky in celebration. (I got a little bit too close to a smoke bomb for my comfort up on 6th and 116th; I was deaf in one ear for a few minutes when a flash lit up the bottom of a bus and caused the bus driver to slam the brakes and yell at the miscreants who threw the smokescreen at him.)

Was reading about KnightOfPentacles‘ latest update and thinking to myself how we all go through a little bit of what he’s going through right now in terms of packing our belongings for a trip. For short-term trips, utility and weight are of utmost importance; long-term trips such as going for a semester-long exchange program engender more harrowing cost-utility judgement calls. Is it worth bringing that large fluffy 40″ teddy bear to South Africa to decorate your dorm room, or the hundreds of photos with your best friends and family? And how much higher up in scale does the difficulty get when you prepare to move for life, rather than for just a few months?

Maybe the vast majority of us are living with far too much excess baggage, literally. Maybe we all need to be quite a bit more thorough in our next spring cleaning routine.

Good luck to you, KnightOfPentacles. May your independence be well worth the effort expended. A nation will be celebrating with you tomorrow night.