2004-08-03 - 10:26 PM

Thursday morning, woke up. Looked around. "This..." I realized, "is the last time I'm ever going to wake up in this room." My life was in boxes, giant rubbermaid flip-top crates, purchased from the local wal-mart. DVD's, textbooks, wires, instruments. 7 crates contained my life to date.

Kinda slick.

It took about an hour and a half for Eddie, Nikki and I to load up the church-van (monstrous beast of a thing). Crates in chairs, computer desk peices in the back. A mattress and a papasan roped to the top, a dome on top of a rectangle. Looked like a little temple. Irony. Cameraphone. I'll post it later.

It took the 3 of us, plus Andrew, Andrew, and Brittany about 20 minutes to move it all into my new room. I don't know if I've described these people yet. Andrew "Opie" Oplinger is tall, wirey. Fiercely intelligent face, computer science major. We discuss things like Trillian and PS2 games, the need to write. The big and small. I feel like somewhere behind someone utterly and entirely different from myself, lies someone staggeringly similar. A lot like Dave, in that respect. Just a bit in the opposite direction. And not to that degree. Nobody to that degree.

Andrew "Harvey" Harvey, the gentle giant. I spoke of him once when describing a lan party. A gentle giant, "Fucking spawn camping, fuck FUCK!" When not gaming, he's impressively articulate, and among the gentlest souls you will ever encounter in life. He's also built like a house, no, a fucking castle, when he helped us move stuff into the new room, he took on twice the weight even Eddie did. I swear to god, I know how that man's going to die. He's going to pick a fight with some shrimp named David, who'll be packing a sling.

Call it a hunch.

Brittany's awesome like there might not even be words for. She's hard to sum up as a personality, mainly because I don't know her well enough yet. But I can ballpark it with experiences. She smiles a lot, and playfully bites your shoulder. When I came in last night she was lounging on the couch, one leg looped over Opie's, demanding a footrub. She showed me what she was drawing.

"Hey, looks like a D&D character," I'd grinned. She looked at me in surprise and flipped around her makeshift clipboard.

The Player's Handbook.

Yeah.

So anyway, backtrack, thursday. After everything had been moved in, the van was dropped off and we took off for California in Eddie's car. Eddie and Nikki rank as exceptional roadtrip buddies. Over the years I've known Eddie, he's become infinitely easier to have an easy, fun sort of time with. He doesn't give off the feel of... motives... anymore. We took off around 3, planned on arriving about 1 in the morning. Traffic jam in Pheonix (Jerome's favorite town in the world.) Eddie looked over at me.
"Hungry?"
"Yeah. Screw this."
"Yeah."
We turned around simultaneously, Nikki grinned and nodded approval. She has this hairspray that smells like ocean, and with huge sunglasses and the windows rolled down so her hair blows in the wind, she looks like a 60's move star. Pang. Maintain. Move on.

A couple hours later, we were back on the road. 2 hours after that, we were in a McDonald's in Blythe with Eddie's friend Art, who was making the same Trek we were, in the opposite direction, at the exact same time. Yeah, we'd met in the middle.

We didn't make it into town until about 3:30 in the morning. The last hour and a half Eddie slept and Nikki drove, offering a rare opportunity to really bond with her in that 1 on 1 sort of way. We talked about how weird it was to learn second languages, and I told her about how I had a good accent when I took classes in high school, because I was good at impressions and I could emulate the Telemundo guy very well. I deepened my voice and did it, she laughed hysterically. In the back Eddie flipped over and mumbled. Hushed giggling. She asked if i had a spanish soap voice, so I combined telemundo with "Big Gay Al" and gave it a half whisper, loosely constructed a sentence with the word "bonita" in it. She smiled at me, "Do you know what you just said?" Pang, maintain, it's dark so she probably can't see me blush. I became fascinated with the radio dial. "Yeah, I just said you are very pretty." She looked me straight in the eye and nodded and smiled.

Eddie Snored.

I looked past her at the ocean, we'd hit Ventura. Oil rigs, a ragged path of flickery moonlight in the water. 30 miles from my house. Miles be damned, I was home. Half an hour later I was home in the "house" kind of way, and we fell asleep.

Friday, blurrish. Woke up around noon, feta omelettes. Internetting, a small bit of wandering so Nikki could see downtown and the ocean. Jerome called.

"Hey, wanna meet up at Carl's Jr?"
"Mom's making italian beef."
"Oh shit I'm coming over."

Went over to his place later that night. We'd been looking for Billy all day, J had had no idea where he was, nor did Patrick who was in the front room. But there he was, on the couch, next to a box of pizza and hotwings. I'd found my Billy!

We talked of movie things, he showed me the signature to rule them all, and a few others which at the very least, ruled a whole lot.

A day later. Greek Festival. That which we'd travelled for. Nikki and Eddie needed to experience greek food on a level few ever really do. I just needed another excuse to be home again. Wandering. Eating. Gyros and Souvlaki, Calamari, Loukomathes. No baklava, because that was storebought, and the stuff mom made was a thousand times better. Eating. Tons of eating.

Afterwards we went downtown. Nikki got a Henna tattoo, I convinced her to get the chinese symbol for "tiger". She made the little claw motion with her hand and mouthed "rawr!"

I fell in love for 7 and a half seconds. Yes. I counted.

Bent on unleashing furious vacation upon those who so desperately needed it, we went to see The Village at the Arlington. The Arlington is critical to the Santa Barbara experience. A movie theater seating 2200 people, with balconies and fake stars and everything. I mean, it's necessary.

Saw Heather. Called when we pulled up to her house, she flailed and ran across the lawn towards me. I was tempted to say something glib, "I just felt like a pidgeon, I have no idea why.", but it all disappeared when she leaped at me, arms and legs outstretched, almost throwing me back a foot from the sheer momentum. I could feel her smile into my neck, "Hey... I missed you." I suppressed smirky, dismissive comment and just hugged back, enjoying her.

"Hey... missed you too..." I mumbled into her hair. It smelled fruity. I smiled, remembering the time her lips tasted fruity. She keeps threatening to tell people I once drooled in her mouth. I keep telling her it was her fault. She tasted good and kissed me right around time for breakfast.

We did Denny's. She offered to treat Nikki to fries because Nikki had coral-colored toenails. The Nikki-coral thing almost launched me into a fit of coughing. I just looked the other way and bit my finger harder than I really should have. There's a scab now.

Sunday, stopped by Billy's to say bye to him. Heather too, she was passed out on the couch. Kinda beautiful, well, incredibly, but I kept suppressing. She belongs to someone now, I keep reminding myself. And I'm stoked for her, it's so unusual to see something make her so universally happy. But every once in a while, for a second or two, I get a pang of something for her.

Festival, last minute munchies, bye to parents and J. And the road. Left town around 3:00 PM. Outside temp, 70. Got into Tucson about 1:45 AM monday morning. Outside temp, 105. It rose 35 degrees simply by driving east, into the night.

What the frell.

Halfway through the journey back, we pulled over in Ventura, next to a ritzy hotel, because Nikki still hadn't been in the ocean. We walked through the hotel like we knew what the hell we were doing, and down to the pool that overlooked the coast. Nodding amicably to the guests sprawled out on lawnchairs or sacrilidgeously swimming in the pool 20 feet away from pacific waters, we climbed down some rocks. Nikki stared with fascination at the tide pools, I pointed out crabs floating around in the surf, sea anemones that squirt when you poke them on the side. Abalones with the shiny insides of their shells. We took off our shoes and walked knee-deep in the surf. It was frigid, completely frigid, sending chills up my spine. I bent down and scooped up some water to my face, revelling in the shocking, searing salty cold. One of them asked how long since I'd felt the pacific against my skin. Long, I'd grinned. Too long.

We walked for a while, hopping tide pools and picking up interesting looking shells and rocks for souvineers. I tried to skip an ambitiously round rock, it plunked. She looked oddly at me.

"You can't skip in the pacific," she scolded.
"Yeah?" I grabbed her arm and hummed "We're Off to see the wizard", and our knees slushed impressively through the water, and she laughed. Then I skipped a rock, too, just to cover my bases.

Eventually the tide was coming in, taking our shore away, so we turned back and got in the car and drove. Nikki said it was the best vacation of her life. Possibly, I mused, it was the best self-contained weekend of mine.

But eventually I was back in Tucson, in the new house. I stumbled into my room, looked around. mattress and boxspring against the wall, boxes in the middle, desk peices strewn about. I grabbed a blanket and a pillow and headed for the living room couch.

In class, Monday, could NOT pay attention. It wasn't sleep dep, it was just... sadness... "20 hours ago", I'd thought, glancing at my watch, "I was knee deep in the pacific ocean. There was a beautiful girl with a hollywood smile skipping in the surf. 4 hours earlier I'd been around most of my dearest friends in the world. Now I'm in OS. With a sigh, I'd concluded that Operating Systems was, in fact, not the pacific ocean.

This morning, woke up around 8. Hushed whispers around my door. Mumble, mumble, Alex, mumble, mumble. Two years ago I'd lived with Victor, this had sprung me out of bed. I'd spent 15 minutes huddled in my closet with a tie wrapped around both fists, ready to leap and attack the moment my sacred space was entered. Frantic, fresh from sleep, and by survival instinct, today I woke up and looked around with terror, realizing I had no closet. Then I realized who I lived with now, rolled out of bed, and put some pants on. I opened the door.
"Hey!" Brit was in front, the Andrews right behind her.
"Put some clothes on..." At this point she looked down. "... some shoes on. And let's go to breakfast."

They'd been debating whether or not to wake me up to go out to breakfast with them.

I'm two blocks of walking farther from campus than my old apartment. I can't stab the wall with nails, and the house gets absurdly hot in the middle of the day. Not to mention I lost a few square feet by moving into this room. But I love it. I love this house, and I love these people.

-Alex

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