mood: beamingmusic: 'blue line swinger' by yo la tengo

i just got back from my 2 1/2 day orientation at uc irvine. i'm amazed. it was that good.

this weekend has been the most emotional i've ever had in my entire life. i met people from all sorts of different backgrounds and from all over california. there were about 50 of us plus 10 leaders to fill up an entire hall. basically, there were 6 halls competing in a pep rally kind of way.

in those very few days, i learned to make a fool of myself more easily in front of strangers. i learned how eerily friendly people are when they get a fresh start in a different place. i learned how tightly knit we are, even when we don't seem it at the least bit.

last night i didn't sleep. there was a huge dance in the humanities quad. (are you noticing i'm mentioning things i don't usually like, but without disdain or any hint of crippling sarcasm?) here, i really danced for the first time, and i was sure as hell embarrassed, but i didn't care anymore. the last song was don mclean's 'american pie', and as a finale, all of those hundreds of people joined hands and ran amidst the discoballs, dragging people around the quad with no concern for wristbones or phalanges. everyone was sweaty, hot, and grinning like idiots, singing along to the slow-motion final refrain. amazing.

the rest of the night, we did our best not to fall asleep with skits, cheers, late night raids of other halls, and other things. (it's tradition to stay up and watch the sunrise together.) it's not like i sleep early anyway, so i pretty much had the upper hand on most of my hallmates.

we had a more serious activity called 'crossing the line' which involved crossing a drawn line in the middle of the room if we met the standards of the question. i won't go through all of them, but basically, they went over race, gender, financial status, family history, and other, more personal issues. this is where i realized that we were definitely more intertwined that i previously thought.

then, at 5:30, they brought us to the top floor of the parking structure and fooled us. the spot is one where trees always block the sunrise. we did 'watermelon tai chi', which is tai chi that involves preparing a large imaginary watermelon. when the sunrise came, they yelled, 'we're sorry we can't bring you the sun, so we'll show you the moon!', at which point, every single leader mooned every single incoming freshman.

then came the closing. this was the most powerful part. the leaders had put 10 weeks of training into the orientation, so i could see how there would be tears in their eyes. but the thing was, that every single person in our hall was getting choked-up.

we had a final activity called 'touch'. in the game, you sit in a circle with your back to the center and your eyes closed. our leaders participated in this activity as well. a handful of people are chosen to get up and stand in the middle, while a question is read. they ranged between as shallow as 'touch someone who you think has pretty hair,' to more deep ones like 'touch someone who inspired you,' and so on. i will admit i was bawling. the activity lasted about and hour and a half and i was so surprise when i got an innumerable amount of shoulder touches, hair rufflings, and pats on the back, and on top of that, 3 all out from-behind bearhugs complete with sobbing noises. i was pretty much dehydrated by the end of it.

i never felt so loved in my life as i did in that room.

and that both scares me and makes me immeasurably ecstatic. it scares me because i'd known these people for all of 55 or so hours, and already, they'd outdone anything i'd ever felt from my closest friends back here in l.a. who had been my friends for more than a decade. all logic came falling through the open air like lead bricks, and at this point i still need to figure out how this could have happened.

but then i realized i was being the regular old pessimistic me. as corny as it sounds, i think for once that i'm going to exactly the right place i need right now. it's a little too complicated to explain what that place is, but that gigantic bolded statement (which is only the second to feature a font color change on my blog) should lead you to a conclusion you will understand but will have trouble putting into words as well.

---Goei---

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comic relief:

i knew that if i tried to drive home as i was, i would fall asleep at the wheel after 10 minutes, so i drank 3 cups of black coffee and a $2 energy drink from the parking lot vending machine. at first i put on the a/c and listened to 'blue line swinger' so as to appease my almost nirvana-like mood and let the caffeine kick in. when the last bap, bap, badah's finished, i popped in 'shutthefuckupanddrive', and arrived home in the middle of sonic youth's '[she's in a] bad mood', meaning i blasted home in half the time it took me to get there on thursday.