A different world

No, I´m not speaking of Aotearoa (known as New Zealand to you colonials). Side note: I can call you colonials and not be a hypocrit because I wrote a grant to study the NZ indigenous culture. You power hungry (choice word). Anyways, I´m talking about San Diego. I woke up blurry eyed yesterday morning in abnormally cold, wet, far from attractive, god I would feel dumb if I foolishly tattooed this state on my left shoulder blade, Minnesota only to find that a quick car ride, rub down from a security guard and shaky plane trip can land you in a place that makes you feel foolish for spending 18,000 dollars to go to some island in the middle of nowhere.

Enough with my regrets for not doing the more than well funded oceanography program at UCSD and back to my title. Here they have something called the ocean, it looks something like lake menona and mendota combined, without the pollution, and a little bit more water. oh, and GRASS!! Sure its fed with destructive fertilizers that we will soon find out our perpetuating the absurd increase in Autism, but who the hell cares, its beautiful. Here people wear winter coats just like at home, with a little twist though. They wear the coats to stay "comfortably warm"...I think its a foreign phrase. I thought the purpose of wearing a coat was to avoid hypothermia, frost bite, and a painful death. Clearly I was wrong...I recieved many curious looks for assuming shorts and a t-shirt were appropriate attire for a 60 degree day on the beach. Ive learned my lesson, no more "cultural fuck ups" as kevin likes to call them, today Im wearing pants and a fleese.


In all seriousness though, SD is great. I think weather and landscape like this breeds a healthy lifestyle, assuming you can avoid the lazy, spoiled, rich kid mentality (there are more fat children here than anywhere Ive ever seen). In short, because I am getting sick of typing on my sister in laws german keyboard, I purpose that our entire friend group transfer to UCSD and get tattoos of california on our left shoulder blades (sorry Brooks). I need to go do some more exploring.

Waiting

Why is it that life seems to be unbearably dull when you're waiting to go abroad? I've only been home for 20 or so days, but it feels like I've been in the depths of hell for an eternity. I'm trying to have fun, but everything seems mediocre when I have mountains, glaciers, and sandy beaches in my future. I can't help but think that everything I do here would be 10 times better in New Zealand. For example, let's say we all have an internal rating scale of 'excitement' (clearly this scale is valid and reliable and in no way subjective). The scale goes from 0 (Shit, that sounds terrible, I'd rather shit myself) to 10 (echo tap). Now for the experiment. So your friend from home calls you up and says, "Hey man, you want to go on a buzz cruise?" So you think to yourself, 'eh, that sounds alright, I know I'll laugh a bunch even though he only has the snikle frits, but I'll probably be paranoid and it sounds a lot like a high school...I'll give it a 5' Now, you're in the #1 country that you want to visit (let's say it's NZ). So you're Kiwi host calls you up and says, "Hey man, you want to go on a buzz cruise?" You laugh because he has a funny accent and then reflect on what this entails...'aside from laughing my ass off because my friend just got the bees knees, the purple nurple, and the west coast giggle shits ground together and roled into a 10 gram blunt, I'm going to be rolling along the coast of NZ seeing wildlife that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world, pretending to shoot down any pakeha (foreigners) trying to take invade the 'land of the long white cloud', and will probably finish it off with a visit to the shire where Samwise and I will start our great adventure...that gets a ten'. So in conclusion, waiting to leave falls somewhere between getting Mono in Green Bay and getting malaria in a corrupt west African nation. From now until February 17th everything I do will be lower than normal on my excitement scale because all I can think about is what awaits me this spring semester.