This was right at the beginning. Very cool, with the numbers flashing on the screen and Chris Martin appearing at the back of the stage. Yeah - that tiny little head and arm holding the mike that you see under the first number 3? That's my, our, Gwyneth's Chris.

I LOVE this picture.

He can sing lying down! And here you can see that the rip in his shirt near the shoulder was there right from the beginning of the show.

I really like this shot of the whole band! Chris looks adorable holding the banjo like that.

Taken right before they left the stage for good. Chris's hand is very dubiously placed.

Yeah, they were all yellow.

Mean postcard idea: "This is all YOU get to see!" written on the balloon and sent to people who didn't manage to go for the concert. And whom you'd like to piss off majorly.

Less-mean postcard idea: "Wish you were there!" Down the side of this photo.

You can safely assume that all the unidentifiable blurred guitar/mike-holding objects are Chris Martin. He moves a lot and very fast and his energy and unselfconsciousness are amazing. This shot is cool enough (post-lots-of-editing) to be a postcard for the tour, don't you think? Would be better if Chris were a little less unidentifiable though.

Colours!

More funky colours

LOVE.

I love photo editing software.

Chris Martin exploding! Actually I'm not sure what's happening here but after all the editing it just looks very cool so here it is.

The stuff on the background when they were playing In My Place

This is the same as a previous picture, but with a little special effect courtesy of Nasty

Random picture of one of the boxes at the side of the stage. There were a couple of guitar cases on top but in trying to remove all the noise in the picture the guitar cases were lost :(

See! He's looking at me!

The concert was abso-fucking-lutely amazing.

I nearly cried when he started singing "Fix You" right at the end; I'd been waiting for that song all night and at first they said goodbye and walked off without Fixing Me and I was momentarily disappointed but then I knew that they'd come back and sing it just for me. After a few minutes of yelling for them to come back they came back and sang In My Place and something else I cannot remember - and I was still hoping and hoping they'd sing "Fix You". And then when he sat at the piano and played the first chords I nearly fell off my feet. (I shan't mar this post with details of the horrible British woman and her kids who hogged the railing in front and tried their best to push me and make me fall off the little platform attached to the railing because they wanted it all for themselves and didn't want their personal space invaded.) And I had tears in my eyes through the whole song. It is so cheesy and kind of embarrassing, but Chris Martin ignited my bones, if that makes any sense at all.

Worth every last cent :)

Also, I love my Seven jeans. I have been extremely happy both times I've worn them out so far. And they're soooo flattering! Good days, good days.

I have just DIYed a pair of jeans! I had these 4-year-old Abercrombies that fit real nice but like all American jeans had a far-too-long inseam which wasn't as intolerably long as the inseams of, say, Sevens or Earnest Sewns and therefore I was too lazy to get them altered. For that matter I also have A|X and Levi's which I've been too lazy to get altered, which I will give for alteration tomorrow when I pick up my brand new Sevens, because when I bought them the salespeople at Inhabit recommended me their tailor (they'd normally have sent it themselves but during sales they don't do alterations and the sale is the only reason I found it in me and my wallet to cave and get those Sevens) and I thought if it's good enough for Inhabit it should be good enough for me. So my darling Sevens are in their care and I've been too lazy to pick them up although they were ready on Monday.

No, laziness is not the theme of this post. The point is that I was trying to decide if I should also give the Abercrombies for alteration, whether it was worth the 6 bucks (don't ask me why 6 bucks is suddenly a big issue when I can impulsively plonk down 230 for another pair; maybe it's because my wallet is still hurting from that.) They had frayed ends because I've been wearing them long for ages, and the friction makes them fray. I think the way jeans fray at the end is very cool by the way, so I'd just let them fray and then when they frayed so much that there were bits sort of hanging I'd just cut them off. So I decided that I might as well just do the job myself, cut a whole inch off with the little orange scissors on my desk and leave it unhemmed like Gwyneth's True Religions. So I cut them off! And I am very pleased. They're a nice length now, still a teeny bit long because I'm so used to wearing extra-long jeans that I cannot stand the thought of them being at a just-right length such that my ankles will get exposed when I cross my legs =]

Also, the jeans have paint stains on them from that glorious fall I had on wet paint while painting the Daisy sets last year. So, these jeans have a Character and a History and that's the way jeans should be.

Tomorrow I will take my A|X and Levi's jeans with me, and if I discover that the Sevens have been suitably altered, I will also submit those for alteration. I will also investigate Chuck Taylors at Converse because I feel like owning a pair of sneakers. And I will help my brother exchange his soccer shirt thing at Adidas. And I will maybe make it to Orchard Towers to get one of those nifty International Student Cards.

I will also visit a store called Actually, located at Seah Street. Okay maybe that won't be tomorrow because Seah Street is a little bit far. I just discovered today that such a place exists, and it stocks Earnest Sewn! Am kind of pissed that I only discovered this after buying my No Exchange No Refund Sevens. Although I can't actually afford Earnest Sewn at the import-mark-up prices, or even the US prices for that matter. Maybe in New York I can convince my mother and her credit card to accompany me to the Earnest Sewn flagship store. And to buy me a bottle of Lovely by Sarah Jessica Parker from the KrisShop catalogue. Because I just dabbed a little on my wrist from a sample bottle in a magazine, and now I can't stop sniffing my wrist. And my mom gets a lot of KrisShop vouchers for some reason, so on an SQ plane is the best place to get her to buy me perfume.

KrisShop is where all three of the fragrances on my dressing table came from, and when I bought a bottle of Burberry London at Tangs some time ago which my mother then convinced me to return, she told me that she'd buy it on the plane instead because it's cheaper (I'll have to look into that, because I never thought import duties added much to perfumes) and she has vouchers. A bit nonsensical but I think half the reason I bought Burberry London is because I liked the ad campaign. The fragrance itself didn't move me to tears or anything. I am so susceptible.

My mother just came in and I made her sniff my wrist and she said "God! American perfume! So shallow!" She has this snob I-Will-Only-Wear-Dior-And-Chanel thing. I wish that would extend to handbags too because I would totally raid her stash. Am trying to convince her to buy a YSL Muse in white. I wonder how much it costs and whether it comes in multiple sizes because we were looking at one of the pictures and she proclaimed it far too large. She of the proclivity to extra-large Tod's bags. OK the Muse is probably bigger, but it's the sort of bigger that I prefer because it's a softer leather than the Tod's so it's slouchier and therefore the largeness is not annoying. I hope there are multiple sizes.

On Wednesday I went to the US Embassy to get my student visa. My inbred Indian neurosis served me well because I brought along all the right documents and then some, so the process inside the embassy itself went very smoothly. Before, though, there was a veritable Mountain of paperwork to be completed, and there was a two-hours-in-the-sun queue (I swear I do not exaggerate) to get into the embassy before the security check and then the room where you take a queue number and wait some more fortunately in airconditioning and with chairs to sit on. I just thanked god I wore flats and kicked myself for bringing two bars of Kit Kat instead of a bottle of water. But my 'interview' itself lasted just a couple of minutes unlike some other people who stood there being interrogated for a very long time. Probably because they mispronounched Michigan and brought photos of their future offices to prove that they were going to work in the United States. And they couldn't provide accurate addresses. They were of my species - that is, Indians - so I am allowed to wonder where they left their brains that morning.

I probably shouldn't say anything else until tomorrow when I go back to the embassy (with a little yellow card this time which will help me cut through the painful queue, yay!) to get my passport and stare at my shiny new visa. Like I was telling Kelly, I hope the guy wasn't just being nice to me while secretly plotting to deny me a visa. After the visa experience and after hearing about the various initiation rituals that government scholars have to get through, I have decided to be very fascinated by the various paranoias that governments have.

And Lovely gets a bit grating after a while. Am still sniffing my wrist, though, if only to figure out why the fragrance is starting to get on my nerves. I have no nose for perfume. I should just stick to buying them for the pretty bottles. JLo's perfumes have surprisingly pretty bottles! And Creed have a very expensive very nice fragrance called Spring Flower or Pink Flower or something but the bottles are a bit large and bling. Creed is highly respected fragrance, though, unlike the dime-a-dozen JLo/Paris Hilton fragrances. And they're European so my mother will not dimiss them immediately. They are not, however, represented in the KrisShop catalogue. And if I were to buy them myself at Tangs I might as well splurge on a pair of Earnest Sewns. So I'll cross Lovely off the shopping list and make a plan to fit Earnest Sewn flagship into the New York schedule. Such is the balance of life.