mood: introspective music: 'from a motel 6' by yo la tengo

(caution: if you don’t have a lot a time on your hands, you probably won’t finish reading this post!)

i’ve been having the weirdest weekend so far.

first off, on friday, i went over to my friend sergio’s house with a couple other guys, as i always do on friday afternoons. we proceeded to practice, also as usual, but maybe a little bit earlier than normal. one of these guys, andres, got his license that day, so everyone was wanting a ride in his car. (which, might i add, is illegal for 6 months, but i don’t really care, and neither should you.) anyways, he ended up going with his friend and another couple out to eat leaving me, sergio, and one other g.irl, anna, alone with nothing to do. (i know what you’re thinking, and that’s not where i’m going with this.)

so with the night young at 8:30 or so, we decided to get something to eat, then go to a spot where you could see the entire east side of los angeles. i’d never been there, and the view was breathtaking. lights everywhere. the spot, however, was kinda creepy and dark, which was good for me, because it made it a lot easier for me to scare poor jittery anna.

afterwards, we didn’t know where to go, so we went around on streets we’d never been on. then serendipity struck. hard.

i saw a street that looked like a de.ad end at first, but on second glance i saw there was a turn in the road. curiosity got the best of me, and i followed the road. about 20 yards after the turn, i saw a small animal crossing the road. i thought it was a cat or a small dog at first, but i looked again and i saw that it was hopping.a white rabbit. can you believe that? talk about omens. i figured, how often do you see a rabbit hopping around less than 10 blocks away from the airport? at that point i recalled a walk i had taken a few weeks back. i actually found a rabbit and chased it around for about 10 minutes. did you know those little buggers are fast as hell?

anyways i stopped the car, and proceeded to follow the white rabbit. it was drawn more towards anna, though. as she was petting it, she realized that it might be the rabbit of a friend of hers that had lost her bunny 3 weeks ago. so what else can you do? we picked it up and put it in the car with us.

and i drove. i drove carefully. this rabbit was scared stiff, literally. we brought it to the newly licensed driver andres’s house. everyone came out, because i didn’t want to scare the bunny anymore by transporting it. anna made some calls and found someone who wanted to see it, so we drove over there. this rabbit was the life of the party. we were awaited by at least half a dozen people standing in their driveway, waiting to pet the cute little bunny, which was actually very large, at the size of a wiener dog.

eventually, we brought it back to andres’s house for the night. on the way home, i finally realized: holy crap, we found a rabbit. i mean, how often do you find a rabbit hopping along it’s merry little way around the noise polluted suburbs of los angeles? i also realized that it had left hundreds of strands of short white fur on the passenger seat of my car. no big deal. battle scars.

well, the next day i had to wake up at 6am to get to school. yesterday was the day of the big freshman retreat, which is when the ‘big brothers’ take their freshman on citywide expeditions to give a gist of what loyola does. my group consisted of sergio, andres, chris, and me. the freshmen were andrew, nick #1, nick #2, augustus, matt, antoine, and mike. their nicknames are lurch, nick, yoshi, goose, matt, a.c., and mike medals, respectively. (take notes, there will be a quiz afterwards.)

things started off with an assembly on the loyola’s football field. we proceeded to hear lots of arbitrary words/noises/songs.

finally, once that was over, we went to lunch at del taco, and to our community service site: st. gerard majella elementary school in culver city. our task was quite arduous: we were to complete a mural on a 10 x 30 foot wall in three hours. of course, we were ‘adequately’ planned, and we had sketches of what we were going to do. luckily, we had chris, who drew 2 exquisite giraffes and an elephant, and lurch, who is about a head above all of the seniors. andres and nick drew a tree. lurch drew the leaves. a.c. painted the leaves of a nearby tree, which i ended up running into and getting paint on my face and hair. i drew a pony. a nice one too, but to keep constant with the jungle theme, some painters from another school turned it into a zebra. of course they ruined it.

when it came time to clean up, i went to the bathroom and rinsed my hands. i was surprised at how easily the paint came off: all it took was water and a little elbow grease. with the october chill rolling in, it made me wonder of what would happen when it rained in the coming months. eventually i shunned this idea from my head so i wouldn’t feel guilty. take that brain.

we planned to go to sergio’s house after that, but the funniest thing happened. i made my way to his house with ease, but it was sergio who got lost on the way to his own house. he ended up on the edge of the beach calling andres, who was in my car, for directions. they still choose to blame me for this because i was driving off too fast. i choose to blame sergio for not knowing where he was despite having visited st. gerard’s twice in the 4 days prior to the retreat.

when we did get to the house, we just sat around and talked, some had a slam dunk contest on sergio’s rarely used basketball hoop. i made an interesting drawing of a gay go.th monkey complete with black eyeliner, fishnet stockings, and flared hip. when 5:30 rolled in, a few of our female friends came over to initiate the portion of the retreat called ‘relationship talks’. the freshmen are young, inexperienced, and most importantly, hor.ny teenage boys. it’s basically a free-for-all question-answer session. sounds interesting, right? I wasn’t able to attend, though, as much as I wanted to. i had to pick up the food for that night’s dinner and give sergio’s mom a ride to work. so instead of listening to my friends being cornered by questions about ‘the texture of the g-spot’, i had to drive mrs. somma, who is extremely intimidating, to santa monica during rush hour. huzzah.

before dinner, a faculty member, mr. castellanos, came to sergio’s house to eat dinner and engage in a prayer service. he’s a very spiritual person, and the prayer service was powerful, despite the fact that i don’t belong to a religion. he left after many jokes and fun conversations, and we proceeded to pass out letters the freshmens’ parents had written to them at back-to-school night a week before. they wrote their own letters back to their parents and we made our way back to loyola.

once there we dropped our things off in our classroom and went to mass. i was tired and the auditorium was stifling with heat, which is a bad combination. we got back to the classroom where we would spend the night and started to set up our various forms of recreation. i was abnormally fatigued and missed out on some of the crazy antics i know took place that night.

conversely, i woke up way too early at 6am, which was 2 hours before the wake up call. i saw that they had drawn various pictures and written various stories all along the white board in front and side. i felt left out, so quietly i got up and walked to the board, dodging all the sleeping people on the floor. i proceeded to add to the mural of group 40. having been influenced by loyola for way too long, i proofread the stories and proceeded to add correction marks. i’m weird. get over it. once that was done, i started to draw animals, such as a horse that was saying, "horse." and a rock that was saying, "rock." and one of my favorites, a faceless version of my head/hair that was saying, "brandon."

once everyone woke up, i was finished and waiting for the administration to call us out for breakfast. not only because of the food, but because the coffee’s free and i’d been jonesing for a cup since the night before. we cleaned up rather quickly and well, and wrote thank you letters to the ‘relationship talk’ g.irls, mr. castellanos, and mr. and mrs. somma. after another prayer service and a video featuring clips and photos of various retreat day activities, we bid adieu to the freshman.

i came into the weekend dreading this retreat, but i think it was a hell of a lot better than i expected it to be. our freshmen rock and could kick your freshmen’s asses any day.

unfortunately, we didn’t have a camera to photograph the mural, but if they post pictures on loyola’s website, i’ll be sure the mention it. until then here’s loyola high school’s website.

and thus ends the monster post. (whew)

---Goei---