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22:58 - Wednesday, Feb. 09, 2005
boring/stupid
I wish people would make up their damn minds.
It is not that all college students are boring and stupid, like I had previously thought (like I asked my mother about: 'Mom, was everyone boring and stupid when you went to college, too?' And Nick yelled from the other room: 'She doesn't count! She went to Berkeley in 1969!' Touch�.)
Her actual answer was: 'Sometimes.' Which, you know, isn't helpful. But it turned out not to be that. It turned out to be that everyone is intelligent and unique and awesome and creative, but the venues and situations they group together in causes the illusion of boring stupidity. It is impossible to have any sort of stimulating conversation when drunk guys are hooting and spilling tequila shots everywhere, or music is playing way beyond the capacity of your voicebox, or your lips slip and fumble when you try to form syllables.
(Sidenote: some people really are boring and stupid; we are not considering them.)
I would like to get to know people in a capacity where it is possible to get to know them; them, not their social know-how; them, not their ability to hold their liquor; them, not their sense of rhythm; them, not their masked-exhausted overdone everybody-is-my-friend-when-I'm-drunk act..... I think in abstracts like this sometimes that I would like to know these parts of people as well, but in reality it bores me.

21:48 - Tuesday, Feb. 08, 2005
looking fish in the eye
On the beach, naked, except for surf shorts, my cell phone rang from its waterproof surf short pocket compartment, and the caller ID said 'Andrew: SE Asia.'

Andrew spoke in a tumble of words, a mouthful of urgency. 'Do you understand how important it must be for me to be calling you? I have seven minutes before they charge me hundreds of dollars. I am on the Southeast Asia calling plan. It is an overseas sort of calling plan. Everywhere is far away. California is extremely far away. What are you doing? I'm going to come do it with you.'

What I was doing was surfing, with Nick, in a California pool-ocean with a steel divider in between beaches that proved troublesome when coming back to shore. We surfed on inner tubes. Mine had a wolf on it. Since it floated, ducking beneath the divider was almost impossible. There was also the choice to surf on a bobsled, a pair of pajama pants with bumblebees on them, a laser printer, a log, or an oversized clay hand, but the inner tubes caught the waves best, so we used those.

When Andrew showed up, he brought some people I didn't know, and we all had surf races. We ran to Southest Asia later so he could call more people to join us without losing hundreds of dollars. The tides changed so fast you had to guess whether you sould be sunbathing at a particular point on the beach or underwater, looking fish in the eye.

 

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