As nat­ural for any Junior going into senior year, I’ve taken an inter­est in con­sid­er­ing my col­lege choices. The last few of my blog posts have encom­passed col­leges in the south­ern Cal­i­for­nia region, most of which where within a hun­dred mile radius of my house. How­ever, one par­tic­u­lar col­lege up in Santa Cruz Cal­i­for­nia cap­tured my inter­ests as a place of mys­tery, poten­tial, and oppor­tu­nity. The col­lege I am refer­ring to of course is none other than UC Santa Cruz.

Of all the col­leges in the UC sys­tem, UC Santa Cruz seemed to fit my aca­d­e­mic pro­file with over­all GPA aver­ages which were very sim­i­lar to my own, and a wide abun­dance of majors which fit the dis­ci­plines which I wanted to study. Pair that up with a rel­a­tively afford­able tuition, a full fledged swim team, and a rep­u­ta­tion for under­grad­u­ate edu­ca­tion, and I was ready to ship out to Santa Cruz the sec­ond I was accepted there. How­ever, tales of the lib­eral, hip­pie, tree hug­ger, rep­u­ta­tion that the school and it’s sur­round­ing city made for itself, caused me to ques­tion my unabashed love for the school, forc­ing me to travel up to Santa Cruz to observe the sit­u­a­tion myself. Thus, the first week­end of sum­mer vaca­tion, my fam­ily and I jour­neyed up to Santa Cruz as a roadtrip-college search– vaca­tion hybrid.

The drive up to Santa Cruz was sim­ply beau­ti­ful as we passed through Santa Bar­bara, San Luis Obispo, and the wine coun­try area. I gen­er­ally despise road trips due to their lack­lus­ter capa­bil­ity in hold­ing my atten­tion, but the beau­ti­ful sights of Cal­i­for­nia made this par­tic­u­lar road trip worth while. On the way up I read the novel “This Side of Par­adise” by F. Scott Fitzger­ald, and I took footage with my flip video cam­era. The com­bi­na­tion of my two favorite hob­bies read­ing and film­ing made the drive up all the more enjoy­able for me, espe­cially due to the great sights that I was able to cap­ture with my camera.

After a euphoric six hour drive we finally arrived at our hotel in Sali­nas Cal­i­for­nia. Sali­nas Cal­i­for­nia is quite pos­si­bly the most under­whelm­ing, pathetic, and for all inten­sive pur­poses, ghetto places that I have ever vis­ited. First of all the city is located sixty miles away from Santa Cruz, even though the stu­pid Mar­riott web­site said it was only twenty miles away from Santa Cruz. The city fea­tured no notice­able land­marks or points of inter­est, nor did it posses the beau­ti­ful sights of Cal­i­for­nia which we passed through on the way up to the city. The city’s din­ing cui­sine scaled to such daunt­ing heights as some El Tor­rito wanna be called “Chewy’s”. Finally, the over­all feel and atmos­phere sim­ply screamed fail­ure, as every­one looked like they where White, Mex­i­can, and/or Native Amer­i­can trash. There­fore, for the remain­der of this post, Sali­nas Cal­i­for­nia shall be iden­ti­fied as Fail­sauce California.

Since my body was reject­ing the air of Fail­sauce, caus­ing me to grow quite angry. I pleaded with my fam­ily to at least go to a city that didn’t utterly repulse me for din­ner. Thus, we jour­neyed to a city which I dream to live in, Mon­terey Cal­i­for­nia. Mon­terey is more or less the rich-bastard por­tion of the North­ern Cal­i­for­nia area. The city has a ton of golf courses and coun­try clubs, is a mecca for fine art and cui­sine, and on top of all this it fea­tures some of the pret­ti­est nat­ural beauty I have ever laid eyes on. To be quite hon­est, the area reminded me much of New­port Beach, except bet­ter. We ate din­ner at local pizza place that was hon­estly very good. I had grown accus­tomed to the crap the chains like Pizza Hut and Domi­noes spew left and right, and to eat a real home­made pizza tasted deli­cious. After that we explored the city, and that’s when we found the 17 Mile Drive.

The 17 Mile Drive is 17 Miles of pre­mium coast­line fea­tur­ing beau­ti­ful land­marks, a ton of golf courses and coun­try clubs, as well as a plethora of 10+ Mil­lion Dol­lar homes. The area was so rich that it cost $10 just to drive the route. For­tu­nately, the drive was well worth the price as I imme­di­ately fell in love with Monterey’s beau­ti­ful coast­line. I’m not even going to waste my time describ­ing it in words so just check out the footage.

The next day was our trip to Santa Cruz. After enjoy­ing a free break­fast, which was the least that lying Mar­riott in Fail­sauce could pro­vide for us, we took the hour jour­ney to Santa Cruz. The drive up to Santa Cruz was mostly unevent­ful as we drove through small farm­ing towns such as the Com­mu­nist ori­ented “Cas­tro­ville”, and some town that had an infat­u­a­tion with aspara­gus. Even­tu­ally, we found our way onto PCH and as we inched closer to Santa Cruz, the drive become far more pleas­ing to the eyes. We exited PCH at a street that lead us straight to UC Santa Cruz and within a few min­utes we were on UC Santa Cruz’s campus.

The first thing I have to say about UC Santa Cruz is that it’s mas­sive. UC San Diego which I thought was huge, sat on 1,000 acres of land. UC Santa Cruz is dou­ble that sit­ting on 2,000 acres of land. The school is scat­tered about a mas­sive red­wood for­est, in which ten sep­a­rate, essen­tially self con­tained, cam­puses can be found. The for­est scenery was sim­ply shock­ing, tran­quil, and over­all beau­ti­ful, as deer and an abun­dance of wild life could be spot­ted lurk­ing in the lush forests nearby the cam­pus struc­tures. While the cam­pus was very beau­ti­ful, it was a bit over­whelm­ing. Since the ten cam­puses were so spread out amongst the for­est, it was very hard to nav­i­gate through­out the school, and of course very lit­tle accom­mo­da­tion was pro­vided for cars. This means that the only plau­si­ble way to trans­verse cam­pus is by bike, and even that is quite dif­fi­cult as the cam­pus is hilly as hell.

Due to the fact that we vis­ited on a Sun­day, we could not receive a much needed tour of the school. Thus we were lim­ited to walk­ing and nav­i­gat­ing with our car, both of which were quite dif­fi­cult. My over­all impres­sion of the school is that it’s still a place that I am going to apply to, but I need to look into it deeper if I get accepted there. With that in mind, the place is truly breath­tak­ing, so check out the footage that I have of the cam­pus and the city of Santa Cruz.

My brother and I opted to ride our bikes down from UC Santa Cruz to the actual city of Santa Cruz. This was pretty cool as it was a beau­ti­ful ride, and all of it was down hill. The city of Santa Cruz was very bike friendly being a huge plus for our bike excur­sion. We met up with my Mom and Dad by the Santa Cruz board­walk where he had lunch. We ate lunch at some small “Surfer Café” which basi­cally served burg­ers and other Amer­i­can food. The place was quite tasty, and they had the best rasp­berry iced tea that I have ever tasted. It was both tangy, but unsweet­ened, rich, but not over­pow­er­ing, sim­ply amazing.

After lunch we walked through down­town Santa Cruz. The place was bustling with a ton of peo­ple shop­ping, and eat­ing lunch on the streets. Down­town was very clean and well kept, but I would like to point out that there were a ton of poor street per­form­ers and poor peo­ple . What I found par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing was the fact that these poor peo­ple where mostly white teenagers so they cer­tainly didn’t fall into the stereo­typ­i­cal “hobo” arche­type that most other cities have. One home­less per­son that I thought was quite amus­ing held a sign that read “Will back­flip for a dol­lar”, hey at least they try.

We returned to Fail­sauce to watch the NBA finals (*spoil­ers* the Lak­ers won) and after­ward we went to Mon­terey for some din­ner. Once again Mon­terey was sim­ply breath­tak­ing. The city looked beau­ti­ful under the evening lumi­nes­cence of the moon and city lights, while the Mon­terey Coast was as tran­quil and euphoric as I have ever expe­ri­enced from the sea. We found a nice look­ing restau­rant with a per­fect view of the coast and onlook­ing city. The place served excel­lent cui­sine at an incred­i­bly cheap and afford­able price, and it cer­tainly didn’t sac­ri­fice any class or style in the process. After an enjoy­able evening din­ner we cruised up and down the Mon­terey coast­line lis­ten­ing to Jazz, until hav­ing to return to Failsauce.

As a whole, I truly enjoyed the trip. The beauty of Santa Cruz, and Mon­terey alone where well worth it, but the beauty of the drive up was also an added bonus. The food in the Mon­terey and Santa Cruz area was also quite good, and both cities looked beau­ti­ful. I didn’t get the over­whelm­ing feel­ing of lib­eral, tree hug­ging, hip­pies, though I can def­i­nitely say that the gen­eral area has that kind of per­sona to it. How­ever, I would ven­ture to say that the lib­eral activist rep­u­ta­tion that the area has is unjust, and it cer­tainly isn’t as bad as peo­ple say it is. If I had to com­pare the Santa Cruz, Mon­terey area to Orange County, I would say that they are sim­ply dif­fer­ent. What Santa Cruz and Mon­terey lack in over­all rich­ness and lifestyle, they make up for with their sheer nat­ural beauty. As far as I can tell these cer­tainly aren’t places that are bad to live in. I wish to return to Santa Cruz and Mon­terey mul­ti­ple times through­out my life­time as my sort of “get away” des­ti­na­tion. If am lucky, my dream is to retire in Monterey.

This week marks the death of one of America’s great­est pedophiles,  enter­tain­ers,  pop icon’s , washed up celebri­ties, in the woman of Michael Jack­son.  Yes, on June 25^th, 2009 Michael Jack­son died of a heart attack after tak­ing too much pre­scrip­tion drugs  to deal with his numer­ous health prob­lems (such as the fact that as a black man, his skin took an unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cally white tone to it).  Despite the fact that he lost any shred of tal­ent or cred­i­bil­ity that he once had, touched many lit­tle boys,  turned from white to black, and more or less went bat­shit insane for the past ten years. Amer­ica decided to do what it always does with things that are inher­ently fake, mate­ri­al­is­tic, and harm­ful to oth­ers, and  chose to idol­ize Mr. Jack­son  and his legacy, which is appar­ently noth­ing more than a few songs about the A-B-C’s, and count­ing up to the num­ber three.

Now as a con­ser­v­a­tive tran­scen­den­tal­ist who hasn’t been in touch with a pop cul­ture pulse for years,  Mr. Jackson’s death had no impact on my emo­tional well being.  How­ever, the media blitz which ensued shortly after, and labeled Mr. Jackson’s death as some sort of  Amer­i­can tragedy beck­oned me to with­draw from my cere­bral eupho­ria of tran­scen­den­tal­ism, and instead come down to the gilded lev­els of America’s media so that I may com­ment on Michael Jackson’s death.

The death of Michael Jack­son is noth­ing more than a media embell­ish­ment of a man that was a shell of him­self. The visual sym­bol­ism of turn­ing from black to white, and hav­ing his face change from flesh to plas­tic, only helps to dis­play the fact that as Michael Jack­son aged older and older, his gen­uine­ness decreased lit­tle by lit­tle.  Con­sid­er­ing the fact that Michael Jackson’s life, was noth­ing more than a down­hill ride from fame and star­dom, into per­pet­ual insan­ity, one has to real­ize that this man’s life was truly a tragedy.  So why is Michael Jackson’s death being cel­e­brated as if he didn’t touch lit­tle boys, his music was actu­ally still in vogue, and that he lived a happy, healthy, and boun­ti­ful life (which he didn’t) ? Because the media told Amer­ica to, and like sheep in a slaugh­ter house, Amer­i­cans blindly fol­lowed what every­one else was doing.

Let’s take a step back for a moment. Thou­sands of U.S. sol­diers bravely gave their lives to ensure the safety and free­dom of  not only Amer­ica, but also the safety and free­dom of  war torn Mid­dle East­ern coun­tries. How are acts so noble, and lives far more beau­ti­ful than that of the aver­age per­son remem­bered? As a sta­tis­tic, the butt of Bush and oil jokes, and as a decid­edly shame­ful moment of Amer­i­can judg­ment. Con­trast that with a child per­former who lived the major­ity of his life vic­ar­i­ously through other chil­dren,  who sang a few pop­u­lar, yet for­get­table songs,  and who went over the deep end finan­cially, and reli­giously.  How is he remem­bered? As the great­est per­former to have ever lived, period, the epit­ome of “pop”, as an astute phil­an­thropist, and an Amer­i­can hero.

So please, before you start blar­ing Michael Jack­son music as if you were a fan  for all your life, cry in front of his star in Hol­ly­wood to “remem­ber him”,  cut back on your pedophile jokes to be “sen­si­tive”, or even watch any of the Michael Jack­son “trib­utes”, “mem­oirs”, and what­not. Remem­ber that Michael Jack­son was noth­ing more than a Vanilla faced nig­ger, who had dreams of never grow­ing up, and lived and died quite trag­i­cally.  There was noth­ing about this man that war­rants the media atten­tion that he is getting.

The one thing that every­one seems to be bitch­ing about lately is this fan­gled “Eco­nomic Reces­sion” which seems to be tak­ing the world by storm. Now a lot of peo­ple look upon this “Reces­sion” as a bad thing, after all, how can infla­tion, loss of jobs, the clo­sure of busi­nesses, and col­lapse of the stock, hous­ing, bank­ing, and mort­gage mar­kets be a good thing? How­ever, as an opti­mist myself I view the neg­a­tive effects of our “Eco­nomic Reces­sion” to be unique oppor­tu­ni­ties which if taken advan­tage of, will inevitably  make Amer­ica  a bet­ter place.   Now if one where to ask the ple­beian mind what the source of our “Eco­nomic Reces­sion” is they would  prob­a­bly iden­tify Bush, Obama, the Gov­ern­ment as a whole, or tact­less cor­po­ra­tions as the rea­son for America’s eco­nomic trou­bles as of late. How­ever, the more sophis­ti­cated mind (such as my own) will real­ize that the prob­lem lies not within one pow­er­ful or mono­lithic entity, such as the ple­beian mind seems to believe, but instead in the entirety of the Amer­i­can peo­ple. Now how can this  be?

Like any great peo­ple, Amer­i­cans were breed as war­mon­gers. The estab­lish­ment of our coun­try? War.  Want  some land to the south of our estab­lished bor­ders?  War. Save the French? War.  Teach the Japan­ese a les­son, save the French, and simul­ta­ne­ously become a world super power? War. Sus­pi­cion of WMD’s? War.  Etc, etc.  So as you can see, the urge to go to war is a nat­ural trait which flows deeply within the blood of every Amer­i­can, and has been passed down to us from our very own found­ing father’s. In fact, the urge to go to war is so vital to the exis­tence of our coun­try, that our found­ing father’s even made it a RIGHT (not be con­fused with a priv­i­lege) to own a gun,  so that every Amer­i­can would already be famil­iar with fire arms by the time the next war came around.  But we’ve seemed to have hit a small anom­aly in America’s nat­ural cycle of war and con­quer­ing spread­ing of freedom.

The Amer­i­can peo­ple allowed a lib­eral, peace lov­ing, Pres­i­dent who has never served in the mil­i­tary, and is BLACK nonethe­less, be voted into office. The result of course is that the peace­ful ways that this Pres­i­dent is impos­ing on us,  are nat­u­rally con­flict­ing with our born Amer­i­can instinct towards war, and due to our mind’s right­ful rejec­tion of his paci­fist ideals,  America’s har­mony has been dis­rupted, thus putting us into this “Eco­nomic Reces­sion” . The last time some­thing like this  hap­pened was when  Amer­ica elected Hoover into office, and we all know how that turned out with the Great Depres­sion and all.

How­ever, for me to sug­gest such a blame be placed on  our cur­rent lead­er­ship would sim­ply be asi­nine.  After all, in a democ­racy we must remem­ber that the leader merely epit­o­mizes the ideal’s of his peo­ple, thus clearly plac­ing the blame on the Amer­i­can peo­ple. Unlike the past two  cen­turies in which Amer­i­cans were proud to be blood­thirsty, fear­less, hard­work­ing,  indi­vid­u­al­is­tic war­riors. Today’s Amer­i­cans are fear­ful, lazy, all-conforming, sim­ple minded, ple­beians.  In the past, when an Amer­i­can wanted  some­thing they would go out and get it by them­selves with the urge to kill any­one that got in the way. Now when Amer­i­cans want some­thing they believe in try­ing to spread their idea’s for “the good of the peo­ple” so that other’s can join in their “cause”, hop­ing that with the power of team work they can accom­plish some­thing “together”. Now let’s con­trast the results of these two  rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent mind­sets of the Amer­i­can peo­ple.  The indi­vid­u­al­is­tic, balls to the wall, kill all in sight, Amer­i­can mind­set lead to an Amer­ica that was the undis­puted super­power of the world, who was bad ass enough to nuke Japan not once, but twice, and then get away with it because Amer­ica was Japan’s pimp and Japan was a rene­gade ho, who needed to get pimp slapped by a cou­ple of nuclear weapons in order to give up the money she owed (more on this later) .  The  team­work ori­ented, “let’s make a dif­fer­ence” Amer­i­can mind­set leads to an eco­nom­i­cally fal­ter­ing Amer­ica who is get­ting threat­ened by some five foot Asian prick, who has mis­siles that can’t shoot far­ther than a few miles. Super­power pimp with a nuclear pimp slap, or a poor fun­da­men­tal­ist who gets threat­ened by Asians, which Amer­ica sounds better?

The fact of the mat­ter is that today’s Amer­ica is rely­ing too much on “The Sys­tem” and not on them­selves. Things like “pub­lic edu­ca­tion”, “wel­fare”,  “unions”, and a whole slew of other social­ist ideals are killing Amer­ica.  So when par­ents who don’t give a damn about their kids enough to pay for a real edu­ca­tion bitch about a mas­sive reduc­tion in edu­ca­tion spend­ing. Or when freak­ing octo-mom com­plains about not get­ting enough wel­fare for her eight kids because she was too stu­pid to think that maybe she needed a job, or hus­band to sup­port her ridicu­lous amount of chil­dren. Finally, when unions cause the col­lapse of the entire auto indus­try because they’re too greedy to have to pay for their health insur­ance, vaca­tions, and then expect to receive the same amount of salary and ben­e­fits after they retire, and are no longer ATTRIBUTES to their com­pany, who do they have to blame?  Not the sys­tem, but themselves.

Now you might say “But Patrick, my Dad was a hard­worker, went to Col­lege, did every­thing that he was sup­posed to, and he still got laid off, how can you say it was his fault for los­ing his job?” Well it’s sim­ple really, your dad is noth­ing more than a mind­less drone. Any­body who is spine­less enough to work for some­one else, deserves to have their job lost at any point in time. In life, one has to MAKE a liv­ing for  THEMSELVES. Work­ing for  a big cor­po­ra­tion only does two things. 1) Pro­vide even more money to a cor­po­ra­tion that has already been mak­ing mas­sive prof­its for decades ( and who will prob­a­bly return an iota of what the indi­vid­ual con­tributed, in return). 2) Pay for some rich executive’s daughter’s  abor­tion.  So to put it sim­ply, because your dad was too much of a pussy to take a risk and put his tal­ent towards bet­ter­ing him­self. He instead played it safe and gave his tal­ent towards bet­ter­ing a cor­po­ra­tion, who repaid him by ter­mi­nat­ing his job since profit mar­gins hadn’t tripled for the first time in a decade.

Remem­ber, I am an opti­mist and I hope that this “Eco­nomic Reces­sion” brings about two things. The first is a war against North Korea, or Iran. This would ben­e­fit Amer­ica by rein­vig­o­rat­ing America’s long lost “War­rior Spirit”, and if World War II taught us any­thing, the sud­den com­pet­i­tive drive that war brings will prob­a­bly end the “Eco­nomic Reces­sion”. The sec­ond is a ceased reliance on “The Sys­tem”, and instead a return to the indi­vid­u­al­ism that made Amer­ica great.  And remem­ber, if the com­pet­i­tive spirit of Amer­ica is restored by a return to  risky entre­pre­neur­ial ideals, as opposed to the per­cep­tual safety net of big cor­po­ra­tions, than the Amer­i­can econ­omy will be unstoppable.

If I had to describe my Junior year in three words it would be “Ran­dom as Hell”. Now a lot of peo­ple asso­ciate ran­dom­ness with a sort of neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tion for one rea­son or another, and whilst I have had my fair share of ran­dom neg­a­tive things this year, I’ve also expe­ri­enced quite a few ran­dom pos­i­tives. One of these pos­i­tives in par­tic­u­lar, was meet­ing Christina Susanka. I really can’t go into too much detail on how I met and even­tu­ally befriended Christina. I recall work­ing on “Gen­tle­men Pre­fer Blondes” and being intro­duced to her early in the  rehearsal weeks.  Com­pared to the aver­age the­ater actress, who often times amount to noth­ing more than heart­less, spoiled, and far too lib­eral bitches, Christina had a par­tic­u­lar “down to earth” aura that made her like able.  The fact that Christina showed some well deserved respect for those of us on crew, was rea­son enough to like her, but there was some­thing much more to her that made her all the more appeal­ing as a friend.

Home­com­ing came a few days before open­ing night, and Christina joined our group as part of a three­some involv­ing Emily Crane and David Good­kind (which is very kinky might I add).  I still can’t say I really knew Christina at that point. I remem­ber her face for being in the play, and I knew she was one of the peo­ple I wouldn’t end up want­ing to kill by the time the play was over,  but aside from that I didn’t know much about her. As we went about the home­com­ing fes­tiv­i­ties, Christina took a lik­ing to my date, and I even­tu­ally got to know more and more about her as the night went on. I left home­com­ing that night with at least one solid fact about Christina, and that was the fact that she was wear­ing a green dress, and hap­pened to be wear­ing red short-like under­gar­ments. The only rea­son why I recall this, was because she told me that she was wear­ing Christ­mas col­ors, and had the dire urge to prove it to me.

“Gen­tle­men Pre­fer Blondes” wrapped up, and life returned to nor­mal. I sup­pose some­time dur­ing the few weeks of rehearsal Christina broke up with her boyfriend, and some crazy ass drama unfolded. While this was all hap­pen­ing I was too busy kick­ing ass on crew to care one way or another, but the even­tual  result of this drama  (or so I think) is that Christina was even­tu­ally inducted into my group of friends. The rest is a bit of a blur so I will stick to a few mile­stones. Christina played the part of the “Tran­sex­ual Pros­ti­tute” in “Most Beau­ti­ful Girl in the Room”, a part which she per­formed admirably. Christina played the crazy old grand­mother in the sec­ond school play “The Man Who Came to Din­ner”.  Christina then had the spon­ta­neous urge to come to a few swim meets, and thus she teamed up with Emily Crane to become “The McNally Broth­ers Super Fans”.  While doing this, she devised prob­a­bly one of the best chants that will ever be cheered for me, EVER. When the Han­nah Mon­tana movie came out she even had to dress up like her for rea­sons beyond my grasp. Finally,  Christina was even nice enough to accept a few ran­dom invi­ta­tions to fam­ily din­ners  which we held towards the end of the year.

Just off of the few arbi­trary activ­i­ties that I’ve described Christina doing, quite a few things can be inferred. First off, she’s crazy. Any­one who is will­ing to play a trans­sex­ual pros­ti­tute, a crazy grand­mother, make chants about my repro­duc­tive organs, and dress up as Han­nah Mon­tana, even though she’s an eigh­teen year old girl, is pretty crazy. Yet, it is this type of crazi­ness that makes Christina such a vibrant per­son. In a world in which every­one is expected to behave in a cookie cut­ter, con­ser­v­a­tive man­ner, Christina stands as a bea­con of insan­ity for all to gaze.  It is this insan­ity, which in most cases is con­sid­ered a bad thing, that makes Christina such an indi­vid­ual, and such a fun per­son to be around, and it is this insan­ity that I hope never dies as she journey’s in life. To coun­ter­bal­ance this insan­ity, Christina has per­haps the great­est dis­play of man­ners and cour­tesy that I have ever seen. After our din­ner par­ties, she sent my mom a thank you let­ter for invit­ing her, she showed up in beau­ti­ful, respectable dresses, and even offered to bring food to our gath­er­ings. It is not often that one gets to expe­ri­ence such abun­dant cour­tesy, and from a girl no less, and so I must point out, that Christina’s actions did not go unnoticed.

As I have described in this blog, I am cur­rently film­ing my lat­est film “Mes­sage in a Bot­tle”. With­out going into too much detail, the script calls for some­one to get hit by a car, and that some­one just hap­pened to be Christina. Know­ing Christina’s crazi­ness streak, I assumed that she would be will­ing to get hit by the car, but what sur­prised me the most was the fact that she was will­ing to get hit, again, and again, and again. I used to say to myself “I like my women like I like my punch­ing bag…able to take a hit”, but I never would have expected to meet some­one who could fit that def­i­n­i­tion so per­fectly. For some­one with no prior stunt work, a seri­ous risk for injury at every take, and hav­ing to deal with a direc­tor who kept beck­on­ing “One more time” five times in a row, Christina showed incred­i­ble resilience. Not only in the phys­i­cal aspect of being hit, and rolling over the hood of a car fif­teen times in a row, but in the men­tal aspect of being more than ready to do it again, and even act out dia­log after­wards.  I owe Christina din­ner for her work, and sac­ri­fice for “Mes­sage in a Bottle”.

Per­haps Christina’s biggest claim to fame (at least in my opin­ion) is the fact that she orga­nized a whole sur­prise birth­day for my best friend Mike. Mike is per­haps one of the best over­all peo­ple that I have ever met, and was totally deserv­ing of a sur­prise party the likes of which Christina had envi­sioned. Yet, no one was actu­ally will­ing to do such a thing for the young lad except for Christina. The party was well orga­nized, orig­i­nal, fun, and just an over­all blast to attend. Thus, Christina gets my respect for hav­ing the balls to orga­nize a whole sur­prise party, (most of which she paid for out of her own pocket) in order make one of my best friends have an unfor­get­table birth­day. There’s not much else that tops that.

Peo­ple often pon­der why I am such a flam­boy­ant chau­vin­ist, and while they only have to look  towards the near­est female to see why, I feel it is my duty to acknowl­edge one of the few excep­tions that the female gen­der has. Christina Susanka is per­haps the most  hard­work­ing, cour­te­ous pleas­ant, grounded, and above all, gen­uine female that I have ever met.  As a friend, her absur­dity always keeps things inter­est­ing, while her upbeat, open, and car­ing per­son­al­ity makes you want to come back for more. Christina has some­thing that I have never seen in a female, and that is the abil­ity to get things done, one can only hope that the rest of her estranged gen­der takes up after her. As ran­dom as this year was for me, I can hon­estly say that I enjoyed the ran­dom insan­ity that Christina brought to my life. As she moves on to col­lege I know I will miss her many escapades, but see­ing as how OCC isn’t too far from home, I am sure I haven’t seen the last of her. My only regret was not actu­ally get­ting her to make me a sand­wich, but then again she once bought me a baked potato so that will have to do.