The beach is my favorite ever place and here’s why: When you are standing on the beach, right next to the ocean, everything seems simultaneously huge and tiny. Anything you think of, or talk about or do at the beach suddenly gets infused with this grandeur and drama because here you are, doing whatever you're doing, on the edge of the world, with the waves crashing gloriously behind you, the horizon stretching endlessly into the distance! How can this moment not be one of the most important moments ever to have happened?! And yet, standing next to something so majestic and powerful and enormous as the sea makes you and the things you do feel so small and unimportant, you are humbled by it's brilliance and ashamed at your arrogance to think you mattered even the slightest. You are a speck, forgettable, useless. And yet! Standing next to the ocean, this realization of your insignificance feels inexplicably powerful and momentous! Ah, I love it so much. How do people live away from oceans? What must their lives be like?

"Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, 'Some gardener must tend this plot.' The other disagrees, 'There is no gardener.' So they set up a barbed-wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds. But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. 'But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden for which he loves.' At last the Skeptic despairs, 'But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?'"

we checked. just to be sure.

also, dc is very cool. don't think i could live here.

i have a million bug bites. tragic.

the family and medical leave act of 1993 is fascinating.

i miss philosophy.

"Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it's important."

So here is a story of my dad’s. Just the story, not pretty. I just wanted to get it down so I don't forget.

So a long time ago, Daddy was at a party at one of Uncle Charlie’s friends house. He said it was like a frat party, with people everywhere and loud and fun…but that it wasn’t a frat party, it was a Marin drug party. Heh. Affluent area, richie drug dealers and such. Daddy’s playing craps with a bunch of people in a back room and he sees this guy who he knows but can’t remember where from. He says so to the guy and the guy is like, who the fuck are you? I don’t know you. But my dad is so sure that he does and keeps saying so. So Charlie comes up to Daddy and is like, Dude, that’s Chile Willie (so named because he went to school in Chile), he’s a high profile drug dealer and you are freaking him the fuck out. He thinks you’re the cops or some shit. So my dad is like, Fine, I’ll leave him alone but I totally do know him from somewhere. So he leaves him alone until they run into each other alone in a hallway. And the guy is like, dude, what’s your deal? And Daddy’s like, I know where I know you from now. You’re the guy in the white suit on the bench in Cartagena. And Chile Willie is like, You’re the guy in the army fatigue coat!

So a million years before that night, in Cartagena, Colombia, here’s how Daddy and Chile Willie met:

Daddy dated a girl in Colombia. Her brother, Alberto got into a spot of trouble, smoking pot on the beach. The girlfriend has Daddy go bail him out of jail. So he’s at the police station and Alberto is already out but the police are asking Daddy to stick around for a moment. They are muttering to each other and pointing at my dad and he’s got the picture pretty well since he just got out a jail in Ecuador. He’s not keen to get back into a thing with any corrupt cops so he tells them he left something in the cab and will be right back. He hops into the car and tells the cabbie to just go go. Just as soon as the cab pulls out the cops are behind them with their lights on. The cabbie is like, what the fuck? But keeps driving when my dad starts throwing hundred peso bills on the front seat of the car. So the cab is ahead of the cop car by a bit and they round a corner. My dad tosses some more money at the cabbie and hops out and tells him to keep going keep going. He sits down on a bench on the side of the street and the cop car drives straight past him after the cab. The dude already sitting on the bench has on a nice clean white linen suit. He looks over at my dad, wearing his army fatigue jacket, his hair crazy wild down to his shoulder, having just jumped out a cab being chased by the police. My dad, just before getting up and sprinting away, says to him, “Next time I come here, I’m dressing like you.”

After the class disappoints him by not being able to properly define the term grammar in the classical sense, my religion professor:
"And I suppose none of you know how to diagram a sentence?"
*silence*
"The world is rapidly coming to an end."