2004-07-06 - 11:03 PM
Wednesday, Thursday, maybe, I got an IM from Stacy. "I wish I could take a road trip this weekend."
To which I responded how nice it would be to be in Santa Barbara for the 4th. About 12 hours later, a call from Coral. "Tell me right now if you're serious. I'll take time off work."
I clear it with my coding partner, and a couple days later, freak-occurance weekend road trip.
I want to get at least 3 per summer. This way, I meet quota.
Coral and Stacy are fantastic road trip partners. It's not the "doing something epic" feeling one gets when travelling with another Jungle Gym Boy, or Clara, Libby or Pup, but it's a more lighthearted sort of "Man, this is a lot of fun."
Coral made about 6 CD's, none of which had any particular theme except "random". Fraggle Rock was on the same CD as the ass anthem, "I like big butts...", and Superman was on the same CD as some fanatical country tune entitled "She thinks my tractor's sexy." I maybe only liked half the music, but when girls are making the mixes, that's a pretty impressive ratio.
I like to think Jerome, Billy and I mentally scarred them when we sang along (rather flamboyantly and off-key) to "man, i feel like a woman." Take that, girl-power. Take that.
There's a lyric in the song that mentions short skirts, and the first time I heard it I was re-reading The Beach and was at the part with the convincing south-east-asian transvestite in the gold Lame dress. That song will never have anything but transsexual connotations for the rest of my natural life.
We got there, and ate, and ate, and slept, and tried to figure out what to do, and ate. I met a guy at my Uncle's BBQ who co-authored Adobe Photoshop, whose academic advisor attempted to discourage him from the CS major in college.
Take that, you heinous bitch.
Almost hung out with Amanda, she was too tired. Almost hung out with Heather, but neither of us had a clue the other was in town.
Going back to Tucson, it was brought up that Stacy hadn't once gotten wet from good ol' fashioned Pacific Ocean. We were on the chunk of the 101 that skirted the coast of Ventura at the time, so we did what Coral and I had done 8 months ago, coming back from a funural, making brilliant and desperate swipes at some sort of reminder that life could be happy. We pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway, hopped over the cement barrier and down some rocks, took off our shoes, and puddlestomped the pacific ocean.
That, my friends, is a really big puddle. I bruised the ball of my left foot, stomping for the biggest splash I could and misjudging the depth under the murky, 6-inch-deep water.
The car smelled like ocean the whole ride home, and my foot hurt, and i was happy, because despite summer school and desert heat, against odds and classes and grades, I'd stolen a weekend from my academic captors, and given it, with love, to Santa Barbara.
-Alex
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