Sunday, June 26, 2011

This one time I went to the beach

Today I decided to jog along the lovely stretch of beach in Del Mar near my apartment.  Sometimes I like to jog in the mornings during the week where bits of my story comes to me in little snippets.  I think the beach inspires me.  One time I went for a jog and saw seaglass on the sand and was touched.  I had read this book called "The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake" where the main character, this little girl, was described as seaglass by her mother.  Since then, the sight of seaglass makes me smile.

Today was more of a sight-seeing day since the beach was crowded with families and couples rather than the occasional jogger.  There was a young family on their way to the beach with Tommy Bahama chairs strapped to the parents' back.  They had two young girls with blonde hair so light it was almost white.  I couldn't help but notice that the youngest girl wore flip flops that were too big on her, as though they once belonged to her older sister.  I liked being close to them, as though I was somehow sharing an integral moment of their lives.

It was warm though the sun liked to hide behind the clouds most of the late morning.  As I jogged along the beach I noticed my surroundings.  There was a little boy about seven years old making a large W in the sand with his hand and I wondered how much sand he would get underneath his fingernails.  All that grit just to write in the sand.  Why not use a stick or your finger I wondered.  There was another family with two little girls although they were older, maybe five and seven.  They wore hats on their heads and bathing suits with a long sleeved top.  One wore pink and the other purple.  When the tide left, their father pointed in the sand and they quickly dug for what I can only imagine are sand crabs.

I remembered my own father showing my sisters and me how to find them.  They were so ugly but I liked how their legs tickled my hand.  I could almost remember those days at the beach when I was their age, burying our Barbies in the sand, making sand castles so huge you could sit in the middle of them.  The first thing my father would do was start digging a giant hole with our buckets.  Vanesa and I liked constructing the walls and getting the water.  Sometimes we'd get too much water and we'd have to re-construct the walls again.  I liked sitting in the middle of the castle and working from the inside out.  I would get so much sand inside my bathing suit but I didn't care.  I wonder if anyone would say anything if I brought a Barbie, a shovel and a pail to the beach and construct a giant sand castle all by myself.  I should try that sometime.

Saturday, June 11, 2011

This one time I went to E3

There was this one time that I attended E3.  This one time was Tuesday, no it was Wednesday because no one wanted to go on the first day.  I rode the Amtrak train for what felt like the first time with my co-workers and time seemed to fly by.  There was a mother who sat next to us wearing hiking shoes, glasses and a short crop of grey hair who was on her way to Yosemite with her teenage daughter.  She spoke to my co-worker about her son who wants to work in video games.  Only he's a composer and wants to compose music for the games.  Later I found out that the best advice would be for him to strip out music from an existing video game and add his own.  Instead, his mother was told to surround himself with people in the industry that could offer him advice.

Before we arrived there were these NOS girls handing out energy drinks.  What struck me were their outfits - bright blue spandex dresses that resembled something I once put on my Barbie back in 1986.  Only their dresses showed more cleavage and were much shorter than the makers of Mattel could ever create.  As an added accessory, they wore cut out cheap-looking sunglasses to make them look nerdy.  I guess nerds like a woman in glasses.

Once inside it was sensory overload with loud explosions on gigantic television screens of multiple video games.  I got a headache from so much leaping out at me, demanding my attention.  Instead, I checked out the "booth babes" at E3 which were rumored to be hired models and beautiful women, maybe even strippers.  I was not particularly impressed.

In an effort to wrap up this blog I shall say this:  I'm glad I went but I may have had more fun playing Glee karaoke.  Next time I'll bring my cheerleading outfit.