Adventures in Egotism

I’m taking this blog more autobiographical. Here goes.

Ally and I spent 10 days surrounding Mother’s Day in California. We flew into LAX and stayed with my sister. I got reacquainted with LA’s car culture. We ate sushi. Ally was surprised that the temperature was cool, contrary to the LA portrayed in the liberal media. We hit the LACMA and thoroughly enjoyed the Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement exhibit. Time on Ventura Beach. Mother’s Day festivities. It was so good to see my family. Renewal. Oh, and we ate at California Pizza Kitchen. How can it get more California than that?

We rode with Micah up the coast to San Francisco. I got reacquainted with BART. I love the intersection and flow of people. (I had a video link for BART too, but it turns out that it’s on Atlanta’s MARTA, which has the same car design.) The weather in Berkeley was gorgeous, even by Berkeley standards.

We seriously lucked out, as the gorgeousness maintained through our spontaneous camping trip on Angel Island. “spontaneous” as in the product of a serendipitious exchange in which Robert and his rad friends invited us to join them. “rad” both as in “radical politics” and “super fun to camp with”.

Well, I’m not going to try to recount the whole time there. I don’t have links for everything. And I’m not sure how comfortable my friends are with me shouting out to them in a blog. (Oh, though I know Ann Larie is down. We caught up over sushi and the conversation was just getting rolling when we had to part.) Suffice it to say that I was deeply glad to see the people I managed to and wish I had time to visit more. I’ll be back in California in not too long for my next dose. Natural beauty, mass transit, multiculturalism, the intense odor of garlic driving through Gilroy, etc.

If you use Google Transit, you may like this Google Gadget for Google Transit.

From my friend Andrew, writing (at length) about his trip to Israel.

Propaganda – birthright is total propaganda. The way they described the UN partition plan as a joke and Palestinians as “foreigners” is nausea-inducing. The trip is about mating and donations. I am not sure it’s a wise use of resources to send overprivileged people abroad to drink and screw.

I sit here on the blue (blue!) couch in Katie’s living room, PJ Harvey on the Akai integrated 3-disc stereo. I realize that this is it, the last night of my vacation. What a relief.

That’s not to say I haven’t enjoyed it. That wasn’t really the point, anyway I don’t think. Hmm, I’ll have to get back to that one.

But I am eager to return to Berkeley. I left many open questions on departure and I’m anxious to resolve them. eg. where am I going to live? will it be solo or in a big organic-veggy commune?

I visited the Catacombs today. Disturbingly undisturbing. Miles of piles of bones and no affect. There are some nice poems, but beyond that there is no humanity, just complicated arrangements of calcium.
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I started writing an e-mail several days ago, like I said I would. A little update on my trip. But I wrote it from my laptop and it’s not until today that I could get the thing online. By this point, I’ve got that whole blog idea and mailing list going. But since the thing’s already written, might as well paste it in here.

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… seein’ places I already been. Well, half-n-half.

For those who don’t know… oh, first, let me explain who “you” are.
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