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!