Perfect Day

I want to tell you about my day today- one that restored my faith in life itself- hope and faith for my life, my goals, my many curiosities and ambitions to make the world a more informed, tolerant and educated place.

After being up until 3 am watching 24 at the neighbors (I slept half the time- I'm just not sold on it haha) prior to a party at a friends house (nothing against the host or my party companions, who would presumably agree with the following statement, read: self-absorbed SoCal-local 20-somethings on college breaks, all self-consciously staring at how skinny everyone was, replete with some half-assed flirtation and semi-genuine 'life catch-up' efforts), today I spent the day with my good friend Sarah.

We did everything we did this past summer in NYC: eating, chatting, walking, museum-visiting.
Minus the world-renowned museums (and walking, for that matter).

And besides the fact that we were driving cars and in an exorbitantly cleaner city than Gotham, it was so refreshing to talk about how excited we were for even what the next 6 months of our lives will bring.

So here's the play-by-play of my perfect today:

We began at noon for a lunch (first meal for both of us) at a local organic cafe in spitting distance of the waves, muching on organic plates of goodness (read golden quinoa, hummus, egg-white omelette, fruit, etc), staring out at the Pacific Ocean, reflecting on how boringly idyllic California is: how though we are eternally grateful to come home to it, we hunger for more.

We discussed scholastic competition and how some peers our age are acting more like adults than ever before, down to wearing pencil skirts for fun and doing things on our summer 'vacations' to give us an edge in the workforce prior to graduation.

Is it eerily socialist that an undergraduate college degree is fast becoming a ubiquitously useless achievement, career-wise?

Or are we experiencing a contemporary renaissance?

Is our society benefiting from all this enlightenment- the fact that a Master's/Ph.D. today is what a simple undergraduate degree was to our parent's generation?

Let's hope: something we can agree on is that our Generation Y is surely one of transition (or maybe our 'revolutionary' spirit is all in our ego-centric minds).


Then we went to a local coffee shop/bookstore and looked for books on Palestinian views regarding the Israeli conflict (hard to come by in Jew-heavy San Diego), instead we found a shrine of pro-Israel literature. Eh, it was worth a try.

Over lattes, we chatted mostly about current gender issues, from hermaphrodites to homosexuals:
a) how it was awkward, frustrating and hard to inevitably support California's Proposition 8
b) abortion and how we just wished people were just more pro-actively responsible about their sexual health.


Then we went to Barnes and Noble in search of a map of metropolitan London, as it is somewhere I want to live within the next 5 years (and where Sarah has lived twice), and as I'm a planner/overthinker extraordinaire, I figure I should start studying its layout and scout for cost-effective, non-dodgy, fun neighborhoods to live.

I also got a hilarious quotebook called The Traveling Curmudgeon, basically a bah-humbug collection of anecdotes and sayings from Shakespeare, Twain and modern comedians on why one shouldn't travel.
I think it was awesomely poignant it was on super clearance for $3.49: to not want to travel is pigheaded, arrogant and ignorant: characteristics that even within the "dude that's so sick" SoCal culture, most people don't subscribe. Although silly and sorta thought-provoking, The Traveling Curmudgeon precisely represents the antithesis of who I am.


Then we went to Golden Spoon, another SoCal locale, where we ended up spending about an hour and a half spontaneously run-in chatting with people from our high school and an older single woman from our church whom we love because she's always traveling to exotic places to go hiking.

(For example, she sponsored herself when she climbed Everest Base Camp, raising $4,000 that built a school in Africa near where she had previously climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro. Among other things, currently 100 children are receiving an education at the school.)

Before bidding our farewells, she gave us some book and movie recommendations, discussed the importance of literacy and hygiene in developing countries, the sex-trafficking travesty of Southeast Asia, and how it is not just a romantic idea to want to change the world.


I wish more of my days could be like today, but I realize the beauty of it was all about reuniting to reminisce about life travel and experience. I suppose I'll have to get back out to living my life so that reunions and catch-ups will be even more memorably gratifying in the future.
The world truly is a classroom!

Can't wait!