knowitallgirl

Back 2 Skool

It's official. I've just finished my first homework for school, and classes haven't even started. It's a good thing I decided to check the homepages for my courses to see if we had pre-class reading. Yup, school has changed dramatically in the past ten years -- in 1994, UC Irvine had just begun handing out email accounts, and we connected to the school's servers on a 2400 bps modem. Yow.

But school can wait. First, the final vacation summary. Within hours of returning from LA, I met up with Eric and Rhea, and we bummed around SF for a day, including a visit to the Exploratorium's Tactile Dome (Now that I know the Dome was created in 1971, it's smell makes far more sense. But despite smelling like old feet it's super cool! Try it!). Then we made tracks for Portland to attend our college friend Chelsea's wedding party, stopping off for a night in Arcata after exploring the super-huge redwoods in Humboldt State Park.

We were planning on driving up the Oregon coast via 101, and were happily on our way until we hit a fatal car accident just short of Crescent City around 11am on Saturday, August 14th. It took three hours for the road to clear, which despite the sad circumstances was quite enjoyable, as we were surrounded by fog and majestic redwoods. Most of the folks on the road were summer travelers, and since we were so isolated that turning around wasn't an option, a mini-community sprung up; people left their cars and walked themselves, their dogs, created impromptu bands, and socialized. But the delay put us behind schedule, and in able to make the party that evening we had to cut over to big bad I-5 (which still made us a few hours late for the festivities).




Paul and Babe say "Hi!" from the Trees of Mystery on the 101.



Rhea in profile.



Eric and Rhea among the Big Trees.

In Portland on Chelsea's advice we stayed at the "Legendary White Eagle Rock N' Roll Hotel," located in Portland's equivalent of SOMA, which means the neighborhood was industrial but lacking the filth and homeless population of SF. It was a great little place, I definitely recommend it if you need a cheap, clean room and aren't bugged by shared showers and toilets. They also had some of the best bar food I'd ever had, and were happy to serve it to me at 1:30am.

And, of course, we wish Chelsea and Marc well on their domestic adventures. Chelsea was four months pregnant when this was taken, so additional congrats were in order for the imminent arrival of the kidlet.




Aww. the happy couple.

I flew home the next day, and I've spent the past two weeks allowing myself to be wholly consumed by my vacation. Per usual, I never get completely into my time off until it's almost over, and in true form over the last two weeks I've made some spectacular displays of laziness. I've flaked on my morning yoga classes since I can't seem to wake up until 10:30am, I can't ever get out of the house before one or two . . . it's as if my competent side just disintegrates. Luckily, it's summer and the days are still long. Last week Juan and I went mountain biking in Big Basin, and daylight savings enabled us to get on the road around noon, finally hitting the trails for a 13 mile ride around 2pm.

Badass in the forest.



The view from way up high in Big Basin.

It's times like these that reveal certain truths about yourself, and in my case, when I don't have deadlines to motivate me, well, I'm not motivated. I do wish I took a few more rides or hikes this summer, but at the same time, the ones I did do were awesome, and I definitely got some good slacking time in before the craziness starts.

I did manage to make both of my 9am orientations last week. On Wednesday, I attended the general graduate student orientation at Cal, where our motivational speaker was none other than Supervisor Matt Gonzalez. I enjoyed his speech, where he encouraged us to not become corporate scum when we graduate but to do something for our communities, defended Ralph Nader's candidacy (which I agree with in spirit, but dammit, please don't run!), and used the word "fuck," which gave him some Berkeley cred, despite the fact he got his law degree from Stanford (insert hissing here). I'm not sure how many of my fellow classmates appreciated Matt's presence, however -- when the Dean took the stage afterwards, she read through our class's demographics, noting that we originated from every state in the union except South Dakota, and over 60 countries. When she asked the Californians in the room to raise their hands, there couldn't have been more than ten of us in the room.

Even after just a few weeks of trying to get my school affairs in order I've quickly remembered the second education you get at a UC school -- a course in how to successfully navigate bureaucracy, which has only been made worse in the past ten years by the Internet. Cal has so many poorly designed, non-sensical webpages now that just attempting to figure out how to find the proper forms on the Web is almost no different than before, except you don't have to do any walking, which means now we still deal with bureaucracy and we're fatter. But now that I think about it, the experience is truly a service in disguise, having navigated the bureaucracy and general insanity of large corporations for several years now.

Anyway, I have more homework to do. Sigh. So much for summer.

Why You'd Want To Live Here

I pulled into LA on Thursday evening, and made a beeline to my friend Darah's parents' house in Beverly Hills. As I crested Coldwater Canyon Drive and officially entered Sharon and Ozzy's hood, one of my favorite Death Cab for Cutie songs began (incidentally called "Why You'd Want To Live Here"):

"I'm in Los Angeles today
it smells like an airport runway
jet fuel stenches in the cabin
and lights flickering at random

I'm in Los Angeles today
garbage cans comprise the medians
of freeways always creeping
even when the population's sleeping

And I can't see
why you'd want to
live here . . ."

Which has been my predominant thought as I travel back to my homeland -- it's not that it's just hot, smoggy, and crowded, like it always was, it's that it's now hot, smoggy and CROWDED. The 24 hour traffic jams, which used to only be the provence of L.A. proper, have become reality everywhere else. Thus far, anytime I've gotten on a freeway in the past few days I've come grinding to a halt. It takes twice as long to go anywhere now than it used to, and it's easy to imagine a future soon where everything here becomes completely paralyzed (and not even toll roads will save the rich in that scenario).

I joke with my family that we need a good earthquake to scare people away.

Admittedly, though, I have moments of missing some things about L.A. Strapping on my skates and rolling right out my front door to the Back Bay trail is one of them (albeit along the concrete-lined San Diego Creek, SoCal's take on "nature"). Swimming with Darah and her boy in her parents' pool at 12:30am under the stars (yup, you could see a few!) in glorious 70 degree weather. Canter's Deli in West Hollywood (why does SF have NO legendary Jewish delis?), where the sandwiches were only $8.50 (vs. Carnegie Deli in NYC, where they were $18.50 and higher).

I find myself wondering again how it can be that L.A. and San Francisco could be in the same state. Now that I've given up my SoCal citizenship, they feel like such completely different worlds. I don't think I've seen a Kerry sticker in over two days (I decided to help by adding a "Defeat Bush" sticker to my car yesterday).

There's no place like S.F.