Olga Vasquez, who teaches my COHI 100 class, is awful. She should not be teaching. People snicker and hiss during class (and it takes quite a bit before your average Communications student realizes something is wrong with a lecturer), and in defense of her, my TA cited her PhD from Stanford in our discussion section last week. If this bitch can get a PhD from such a prestigious institution, education has seriously lost its value in this country. We’re talking serious inflation here. I’ve decided to pursue a septuple-PhD from Yale. It should be a cinch.

At the end of April I went to San Jose/Santa Cruz/Capitola with Utako. I saw Mike, Jesus and my little brother. We had much fun.

Before class today I went to La Jolla Shores with Utako for some quick kite-flying. My pants are still damp up to my knees, but the beach was pretty and it was a nice way to start the day.

I want a nap.

The weekend of the 31st was MQ production, which was predictably stressful and tiring. I was lucky enough to catch a horrible cold at the same time, so I was thoroughly miserable the entire time. I must have burned through nearly 3 boxes of kleenex in 3 days, and my nose is still healing from the abuse I gave it. The paper came out well though—possibly the best this year. Gotta owe it to the awesome top tens. Go check out the new web site, too. Kevin did an awesome job meshing the database backend with the purty front end that Truex sculpted from scratch.

I had a midterm for Art History this past week; I did poorly. Soon after starting on the essay questions, I became overwhelmingly apathetic and didn’t put any effort into my responses. Whoops.

This past weekend was nice. Friday night Kimiko cooked a tasty dinner while I napped. She’s awesome, eh? We were planning on just staying home and being lame, but at the last minute we decided to head back to campus with Reid to see Reel Big Fish play in ERC. How could we possibly ignore a free concert in the newest venue on campus? While I didn’t necessarily enjoy the music, the crowd was cool and Marianne was nice enough to let us hang out in her apartment and utilize her 3rd floor view of the stage. It was pretty awesome to be perched up there and look down on people crowd surfing — sort of like box seats, I suppose.

Saturday night, Kimiko and I had dinner with her SDAFF buddies and then migrated to Dan’s 21st birthday party over in Mira Mesa. The party was great—just the right amount of people, and I knew the majority of the kids there. That sort of thing is more and more important to me these days. Dan’s party (wonderfully hosted by Christina) was the first party in ages that I’d been able to feel relaxed at and have fun because I didn’t have to worry about shady assholes trying fuck stuff up.

Then on Sunday I did jack shit. I probably spent 3 hours trying to scream my PDA into functioning correctly. That stupid little motherfucker PDA. I can’t upgrade the ROM yet, but I need to get the newer ROM so I can use the 802.11b connection to try and upload pda-captured images to Jusspress by Wednesday, when Prof. Jenik has her seminar class.

Fuck technology.

And now… the exciting conclusion of Mazer’s christmas vacation.

Upon arriving in San Diego a much later time than originally planned, the drinking began!

Two afternoons and a little bit of partying later we were on our way to Mexico. Our good friend Brian and a couple hotties from Enigma’s arsenal joined us in a house we managed to rent in Rosarito about 30 minutes south of the US/Mexico border. I was immediately deemed “the person who knew the most spanish” when we got there after a slight misunderstanding in the grocery store. The first night was kind of disorienting. The sun went down around five or so, the way it usually does in the dead of winter, so we went and got some tacos at the closest restaurant. When we got back to the house we naturally started drinking. After a while someone asked what time it was. It turned out it was only 10:00 and we were all smashed, kind of a funny situation. Nevertheless everyone agreed that we couldn’t consume any more alcohol.

The days in Mexico were automatically half as long as a normal day because we all slept half way through them. There were countless little shops selling tourist-ie shit on the main street of Rosarito, none of them had anything worth buying. Except for blankets. Mmmm… blankets. Whatever we had a night of gluttony in Puerto Nuevo where we feasted on shrimp and lobster. We toured the bars and clubs. I managed to nearly blow myself up with mexican fireworks (photos will be posted later). Overall our adventures in Mexico have taught me to appreciate our clean cities and our safety regulatoins concerning fireworks.

After flying back to Sacramento on the 1st i slept for a couple days in Davis waiting for a ride home to Nevada City. When I finally made it home the next couple of days I spent madly painting and sanding my car getting it ready for a final color that was applied this past saturday.

So, now that you all know what I did over my christmas vacation, you should all take pity on me because I never got a chance to go snowboarding. Please, someone take me snowboarding.

Well.

Friday night (or Saturday morning, whatever), laying on my bed, typing away on my new laptop. Woo! Kimiko is busy setting up a new modblog on my desktop system, so I’m sitting happily on my wireless connection with my notebook. Mmm, notebook. It’s nice to surf during boring lectures - I stay awake that way, and I seem to glean just as much from the prattle rising from the front.

Hmm. I try to commit certain daily activities and occurrences to memory, but I can never recall them once I sit down and try to write on this damn blog. Maybe I’ll just try for today.

I got my hair cut today after roughly four months. Saw the doctor about some long-term health problems and I’m very excited that he’s decided to refer me to a specialist in La Jolla that is covered by my insurance. Maybe I can eventually work out these digestive tract problems. After that I met up with my VIS70 group and we interviewed a graduate student in the Social Sciences department for our documentary on Asian stereotypes in the US and at UCSD. She had a lot of awesome insight and basically set all our minds at ease about the disaster that our film had been up to that point. I worked for 2 hours, then Kip picked me up and we went by the University Annex Gallery to see the art collection our VIS 1 class had amassed in the cramped space. Our cool costumes were partially obscured by other shit, so we basically stomped around and traded bitter cracks on the rest of the crap that was there. We left after only 15 minutes and came home to Mario Kart and snacks. Far better than wading around waist-deep in the worst shit that art classes have to offer. Ever seen a crappy collage made from printed-out AIM away messages? Yeah, be thankful you haven’t. After the art show I was supposed to join my documentary group to do some editing, but they finished ahead of schedule and I went out with Kimiko and Kip instead. We got food at this awesome little Italian deli thing where the waitress/frumpy woman behind the counter jokingly hassled us and threatened to not give me my food for messing up the salt shaker. It was a pretty good chicken parmesan sandwich; I was pleasantly surprised that the cheese didn’t set my stomach off. I plan on visiting the deli again sometime soon.

Next week is finals week, and although I only have one exam, on Thursday, I do have crappy busy work to attend to this weekend. Bummer. That and laundry. Curse you, gods of all that requires laundering!

Out.

Okay, so more details on the fires:

Beginning Sunday, the sky was incredibly hazy and what light shone through was red and orange. It was all very apocalyptic, and Wednesday afternoon ushered in the first clear skies in more than three days. On Tuesday, the smoke was so thick that it was dark by 3:30pm. Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, ash fell from the sky almost constantly. I had to keep blowing the grey snow off my car when I wanted to drive anywhere, and there is still a layer of chunky ash all over our patio and the two chairs we keep outside. It was weird to walk around outside on Monday because swirls of ash would kick up in everyone’s wake.

Kimiko’s family had to evacuate. We kept some of their stuff at my place because it wouldn’t fit in Kimiko’s dorm room. Sheer luck saw to it that all their finches in the back yard survived what must have been a suffocating environment while Mr. and Mrs. Saito stayed in a hotel after their evacuation. Upon returning, they had to shovel ash off their front patio before they could open their front door. The back yard required the same sort of attention.

Kip’s family was evacuated. Their house survived, although we were nervous for a time because there was a rumor that the house at the end of the street (7 doors down from him) had burned down. As it turns out, one house was leveled a short distance away, but every house on Kip’s street came through unscathed.

Troy’s house burned to the ground. His street was one of the worst casualties, with only a single house standing. Most of his posessions were already at our place, but Troy lamented after the fact over the loss of his high school yearbooks and his collected love letters from past girlfriends. His parents were given 10 minutes to evacuate, which means they left with only the clothes on their backs. It boggles the mind. Kip and Troy took around 150 photos of the street when they were allowed to return Tuesday afternoon and the images are incredible. All the houses are reduced to chimneys, and it looks like a nuclear bomb was set off. Cars sit on melted rims, their paint cracked and peeling like black scabs, and none of them have windows because all the glass exploded in the heat.

Now the fire is in the past, and hopefully things will return to normal. It still makes for vivid memories though, and I can imagine myself telling my grandchildren (metaphorically, since we all know I’m not the type to have children) about being caught in the Great Firestorm of ‘03. Maybe I’ll post a couple photos later.