Photodocumentary

Guess who's back?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yep, c'est moi, I'm back in California, back on the blog, back in your lives. I present to you, in no particular order, the Best Five Things about being back in California (and as a special bonus: the Most Surprising Thing, the Weirdest Thing, and the Worst Thing).

I finally finished reading Anna Karenina and I'm feeling verbose tonight, so bear with me.

I spent all afternoon skinning, slicing, and canning tomatoes with The Two Bobs, my dad and my next door neighbor. The Bobs collectively have about 60 tomato plants in their backyards (my dad, 10; my neighbor, 50). Readily accessible sun-ripened tomatoes are one of the top 5 things about being back in California.

Canning was fun and messy and exhausting. Tomato guts all over the kitchen. Tomato carcasses in the compost. Nine quarts of tomatoes cooling in jars on the counter. Bob, my neighbor, who grew up canning tomatoes in a coal mining town in Pennsylvania, was discarding whole tomatoes that seemed perfectly good to me, admonishing me for not chopping off the green parts, the brown parts, the soft parts, the hard parts. He whispered the words "food poisoning" and I started chopping the shit out of those tomatoes.

I'm baby-sitting my dad's Mac while he performs surgery on my PC, trying to coax it back from the brink. My laptop is the slowest, crankiest machine in the entire world. At night I used to hear it wheezing away like an asthmatic old man; I couldn't turn it off because it would take 20 minutes to start back up again later.

But you know what? I.... I....... love this Mac. There, I said it! It is so fast and quiet and sleek and white, like a mink coat. I can't bear the idea of going back to my polyester fur PC.

That is neither a best nor a worst thing; it is just a thing.

Best thing 2a: Bonding with my dad, who, like me, is out of work and has a lot of free time on his hands. Unlike me, he has a few interviews lined up. I interviewed at AIM last week but haven't heard back yet, so cross fingers. (The AIM interview was the Most Surprising Thing that happened to me. If it works out, I will be indebted to yet another mother of a Scripps brother.)

2b: Bonding with my mom over this thousand-piece monster:

It looks innocent enough, but don't be fooled. It's called "Bavarian Vista" and my mom bought it for $1 at the Book-Go-Round because it's one of our family traditions to do puzzles on vacations. Not only was it a shameless piece of Nazi propaganda, but it was also incredibly boring to put together. See my hand beating that cloudless Teutonic sky into submission.

2c: Bonding with my sister:

After we got back from camping, I spent a few days with her at UC Davis, where she's living and working this summer. She took me to her pottery class and I managed to destroy three bowls, including one she'd made the previous week. I toyed with the idea of taking an art class at a community college back home, but earlier this week my mom and I had a serious talk about my future and it boiled down to this: "No frivolous classes. Get a job."

3: The t-shirt my sister's wearing in that photo? It's mine now!

Here's the Weirdest Thing, by way of my h.s. friend Julie. Julie has a part-time job at a local outdoors magazine, and last week she interviewed a man who hikes up a lot of mountains. What she didn't realize until she asked him to email her a photo for the article was this:

 

Whenever he reaches the top of a mountain, he poses for a photo wearing nothing but a strategically placed sock and an animal mask corresponding to the zodiacal year.

As you can see, my life has been pretty quiet since I got home. Lack of a car, limited social opportunities, and general feelings of aimlessness are the main contributing factors. But the single worst thing about being home is that I miss New York a ton.

I don't want to end on a sad note, so...

4th best thing: my bird, Peep, who couldn't be more perfect if he tried.

5th best thing: dry heat.