Please Happy

Typical morning at apartment #9.
This is how we produce the brilliant stuff.

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Since moving to Southern California, I have come to detest grass. Its high water and high fuel (lawn mowers mowing followed by leaf blowers blowing) requirements make it particularly unappealing. Add pesticides to that and you’ve got a cocktail of ickiness that no one can (should) afford.

But.

One morning, I biked to school early. For sunrise. And sat. Alone.

On the grass.

This is a nice patch outside the historical Kerckhoff House. A patch of peace near the highway. But, the big trees block the street, and, while I hate to admit it, the grass felt damn good on my feet and back and head. And I just lay there. Before the day started.

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After a few weeks of poor-me city life, we escaped last weekend to Santa Barbara. We first visited the monarch butterfly preserve. We went on a lovely nine-mile jaunt to a beautiful crowded waterfall and beyond on dusty switchbacks. At the top, we saw a paved road and celebrated the summit by lying on gravel and looking out over the ocean. On the way home, we stopped at our new favorite beach in lovely Carpinteria (in the news recently for a controversial oil drilling proposal) and took some pictures of each other jumping, dancing and spinning. Sooo fun and sooo cold! We couldn’t feel our toes afterward. Like, at all.

Not being able to bear the idea of heading back to L.A. after such a perfect day, we stopped at a Yelp-recommended vegan restaurant in Ventura. Mary’s Secret Garden. Not only were the squash soup, fake hamburger and spring rolls scrumdiddlyumptious, but our waiter was bouncy and friendly and genuinely kind. He ran after us as we were leaving and handed us his CD, on which he plays every single intrument.

Driving back into traffic, into city lights, into the density, we listened to his music. And it was beautiful. For real. A perfect perfect ending to a wonderful day away.

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Just liked this image. Nothing more than that. View from the bleachers outside the Lyon Center Gym at USC. Sunset.

Saw a girl today with a big black mark of soot on her forehead. Thought she had a tattoo, a birthmark or one of those pet bugs that people keep on broach chains pinned to their lapels. Nope. She was just displaying her Catholicism. And that hit me smack in the forehead. I completely forgot (sorry, Grandpa). But, after seeing her, I started thinking about lent. The 40 days from now until the anniversary of Jesus’ death and Resurrection, where people give something up in honor of the sacrifice Jesus made for “us.”

Then, I saw a Facebook status update asking “____ is wondering what to give up for Lent this year.”

People give up all sorts of things, from TV to chocolate. There tends to be a tendency to give up a vice, a luxury, a treat. But, I wonder how that’s actually helping the world? How is your moodiness from lack of caffeine making the world a better place?

Why not flip the Lenten sacrifice around and take something up.

Give up TV and then spend your free time mentoring local middle-schoolers. Instead of giving up chocolate, teach a community class on how to make chocolate cake or better, how to enjoy broccolini (a new favorite ’round here). Do something productive.

So, for Lent, I’m not going to Give Up Hope (as one Huffington Post author vowed) or give up sweets (though, as a separate promise to myself, I’m no longer eating refined sugar). I’m going to stop driving my car so much. I’m going to ride my bike and walk in this city of highways. (Just heard of a couple that had a wall map of L.A.. On that map, they circled a one-mile radius around their house. No driving within that circle. Good idea!) That’s good for me and for others. I’m going to talk to people on bikes. I’m going to talk to the folks on the bus. I’m going to talk to my friends about their cars.

And, I’m going to write more letters. This is something I love doing anyway, but people always love snail mail. That’s not a giving up. Just an adding on. Snail mail and mixed tapes! On a bike! Eating well!

Yay for Lent!

So, I’m taking this class called Web-Based Scholarly Multimedia at USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy. Fancy! We’re learning how to code Web pages by hand (as oppose to a program such as Dreamweaver). By the end of the semester, we’ll be making Flash and Flex pages. But, now, we’re just learning basic basic basic html, which means even the worst looking page with one line of text set against a dark background is a small victory. It takes so long! One misplaced slash and the whole page is null.

Thus, I present my five/seven/five project. Rough draft. Due today. Spent hours and hours coding these piddly little pages.

I’ve been blogging for years on more sophisticated platforms than this. But, it’s like baking cookies myself — they turn out lumpy and greasy and all different sizes, but they’re mine. I knew what went into them. And eating them is way more rewarding than scarfing down the perfectly round store-bought kind.