80 on the Open Road

My God, it’s beautiful here.

The land meets the bay, eager in its slope. Even looking east, towards the hills, I can feel the water. The highways here slice through the voluptuousness of the earth, mounding up in greens and browns and sensual crevices.

I love driving here; it’s exhilarating in a way unfamiliar to the tightly twined gray strands of freeway and flat strips of road where I come from. I feel I could drive for hours so long as the sun doesn’t set, and perhaps even a while more once it does. The watery blue sky, beautiful, the solid slate gray streaking down, beautiful, beautiful.

Freedom, freedom, singing in the wet swishing of the tires.
This is the freedom in the rebound of my sneaker sole as it slam-skips over concrete sidewalks in the weekday gloaming.

It’s a lovely place to sink within myself, serene. People upset me, the world frustrates me. I know at times I seem chronically unhappy, I am keenly aware of this now more than ever. But so long as I can sink I know I’ll be okay.

Really I’m very normal.
I can prove it.

My parents have been happily married thirty years, I have an older brother who has finally found peace in his life and charming future sister-in-law. I have a pet parrot named Taco.
I majored in molecular environmental biology and my favorite class was endocrinology (I have a talent for it, so it would seem anyway.)
I’m a strong swimmer, I love the ocean and I adored dolphins when I was a child.
I sleep with a well-worn stuffed koala named Sam, with a piece of string around his neck.

I like seltzer water.

The color blue.

And I like making people happy.