Honolulu

We were out in the country for a week with no internet. It was awesome, and the surf was good.

Now we're back in town, there's a little swell, and it looks like there are 500 people out in the 5 spots I can see from our apartment (Suicides, Graveyards, Tongs, Ricebowls, and Old Man's).
We're 11 floors up, so it's hard to see, but Ricebowls is a couple feet overhead on the sets. Hopefully we'll find some corners!

Lost Angeles

I get a lot of incredulous looks from people when I tell them that I love LA, but I'll stand up to the haters--LA is great. It's wierd, and awful, and apocalyptic, and a disaster, but it's also vibrant and close to everything I love (surf, deserts, mountains, books, really awesome food, I could go on...). It's full of strange people who think they're normal. It's ecology is fascinating--there are vernal pools filled with threatened freshwater shrimp-things next to the runways at LAX! There are pockets of coastal sage scrub that persist in the face of all sorts of invasive species, as houses are built and torn down nearly on top of them! And god, the wetlands, the coastal ecosystems, the islands...

Anyway, I didn't mean to wax rhapsodic about LA just yet. I'll save that for the next few days here (though it's supposed to be 108 tomorrow everywhere but the coast, so I might be changing my tune quite shortly, once I've actually remembered what summer in SC is like).

But I don't know. At this point, LA feels more like home than anywhere else. I know it better than Boston, I like it better than most places I've been, and I can surf all the time--and unlike my dad, I don't get sick everytime I go in the water, which is nice.

I meant to post this like 2 weeks ago, so it's going up now, without revisions--more later!

I guess this is the beginning

So, I forgot that I had a blog for a while! Now, though, I've left Portland, and I'm suddenly feeling very...uncentered, I suppose. A little lost. In times of confusion, I think writing everything out helps me clarify it all.

This will be the blog of my experience throughout my 2-year-long masters program at Columbia. I don't start for a few months, though, so in the meantime--this is a blog of the interim.
I've spent a really horrifying amount of time in that "interim"-type life stage in the last year, finding myself in transit, or waiting to move somewhere, or filling time as I look for a job. Interim periods are strange, stagnant times, when I've got nothing to do but think about myself and fill time. Last August, when I got back to California from Hawaii, I spent nearly two months waking up late, surfing County Line all morning, half-heartedly studying for the GRE's, and calling people in Nevada for the Obama campaign. Then, in Portland, I was unemployed, then underemployed, then...I don't know. Just a little lost for a while.

Now I've left Portland. I'm back in California, with Gabo, playing college-tour chauffer for two weeks, before I head to Honolulu for a few weeks with the family; after that, I fly back east to move in with Alex in Manhattan!

See? When I write it out, my next month or so seems less terrifying. Which is a good thing, because I tend to let things snowball and become much scarier than they actually are.

Anyway! On to happier thoughts! What have Gabo and I been doing, anyway? This is yesterday, in SF, below the Golden Gate Bridge. We were going to walk out onto it, but the whole thing was thickly coated in fog. We went to the Mission to eat tacos instead, which was a great decision.

Gabo finished his lacrosse camp today, so tomorrow we're starting our travels (loosely based on visiting colleges) in earnest. More updates soon!

What a wonderful week.

Man, I haven't had a week this awesome since...I can't even remember. It's been a long, long time.

A sweet hike in the gorge on Sunday, the beach yesterday (the foggy beach, which J. commented looked like that scene from Spirited Away with the train and the lake, etc), and another--ANOTHER--gorgeous, hot, sunny day today.

We woke up, lay around in the sun in our apartment for a while, ate some oatmeal, biked over to the park to play tennis, biked around collecting ingredients for lunch and margaritas, and now we're well on our way to total sated-ness. One margarita in, happy hours to hit all over NE (we're thinking 5th Quadrant, that unnamed bar on Williams, maybe Amnesia or Por Que No so we can compare margaritas...), a picnic in Laurelhurst later...the Blazers game at 7...

This is what we have taken to calling "fun-employment," or in our case, "funder-employment." Yeah, it sucks not to have any money or a job that I can be excited about/proud of/not want to burst out laughing when I tell people where I work, but whatever. I'm going to grad school in the fall and it's going to be a crazy, hectic two years; it's finally sunny here, and I've had a pretty awful couple of months; dammit, I'm going to enjoy anything I can get. 

Mmmm. Margaritas. My mom makes the best--not kidding here--margaritas ever, and thank goodness she has shared the beautiful knowledge with me, because I really think I like good margaritas better than any other drink I've ever had. Plus, once at school I was sick and down at Seal Beach, at Abuelito's, and he told me to a) have a shot of tequila, b) eat a jalepeno, and c) suck on some lime, and between those three things, I would kill any sickness that was in my body. A margarita encompasses two of those things--tequila and lime--and we'll just forget about the sugary triple sec that could provide so many little bacterial colonies or whatever I've got in my throat with food for weeks.

Why can we forget about them, you ask? Oh yeah, because J. made pad kee mao, otherwise known as spicy death noodles, for lunch, and there's enough capsaicin in a bowlful of that to take down the Death Star, let alone some wimpy lingering virus/infection/whatever I have. Our eyes were watering and noses running, I'm not even exaggerating. And J. loves spicy things. And he'd used half the thai chillies called for in the recipe!

The best part? He made about 20 pounds of it, so we're going to be eating leftover spicy death noodles for the rest of the week. Or month. Or year.  See the picture at the top of this post--we're literally going to be eating this foreeeever.

Anyway, here's the link to the recipe--I suggest you use a quarter of the quarter cup of thai chillies called for, so 1/16 of a cup or about 1 tablespoon. You can always add more spice later. You can't get your mouth back from the burning fires of spicytown without gallons of milk and some screaming.