Call Me Ishmael.

On 2^nd thought, please don’t ever call me that. While I may be blessed with a “giant sperm whale”, I’d prefer if you called me a name that didn’t remind me of failing summer reading tests in high school. (Apparently, reading the comic book version of Moby Dick and half of the Sparknotes for Grapes of Wrath wasn’t quite enough to pass… who knew?)

I figured with people starting to call to see if I’d survived the trip out west, maybe I’d start writing again, for multiple reasons: one, to assure people that yes, I am indeed still alive; two, to give valuable insights about this mysterious other coast; and most importantly, three, so I can take my lack of transitions from the old medium of the College Voice to this new, hot, sexy thing called The Internet. For those of you who haven’t heard of it yet, The Internet is this new thing where you take fancy-looking typewriters and connect them to each other through a fatter phone jack… as bizarre as it sounds, I think it might become popular some day.

Anyway, on to the meat of this, cause nobody likes vegetables and crap like that anyways. I’ve been living in California for a week now. I’m in a town called Mountain View, which is deceptive, because the view out my 2^nd floor window is an office building that looks nothing like a mountain. However, it’s only about 40 minutes south of San Francisco, so if I focus hard, I can just barely see the edges of Barry Bonds’ head sticking out around the office building.

Mountain View, and the Palo Alto area in general, has an interesting mix of ethnicities and races. As far as I can tell, my area seems to be a roughly equal mix of white people, Asian people, and Hispanic people… and yet, there’s no black people anywhere. Seriously, there might be less black people here than in Weston, if that’s possible. It’s not the all-white Weston thing where you look at a crowd and you might as well be looking at polar bears in a blizzard on a day full of white clouds; there’s plenty of non-white people, there’s just no black people.

I live across the street from Whole Foods, which is actually an abbreviation… the real title is A Whole Fucking Gigantic Lot Of Foods, and the place has enough food to supply an all-you-can-eat buffet for both Joey Chestnut AND Takeru Kobayashi. Seriously, they have like 20 types of chicken, 30 ready-to-grill meals, and more sausages than a gay porn orgy.

Even Chestnut grimaces at the idea of eating that much food.

My building has a hot tub, and it is, in the words of Paris Hilton, “hot.” I’ve always wanted a hot tub, so I’m pretty excited about it. My friend Jess tried to rain on my parade by informing me that hot tubs are basically a breeding ground for bacteria, but I’m not worried… I think she was talking about private hot tubs, whereas mine is a public hot tub that little kids who just rolled around in the mud and probably wiped their ass with their hands are doing cannonballs in and out of, so I’m sure it’s perfectly clean.

In my first week here, there’s been plenty of things that are throwing me off a little bit… I need some time to adjust. For example, the Mets played their night game against the Dodgers recently at 4 PM here, which threw off my plan of watching after dinner. Perhaps even more confusing, on Tuesday night, I got in a cab in San Fran (which, for those of you who don’t know, is Spanish for St. Fran, named after the girl who sat next to me in calculus), and immediately knew something was off. I couldn’t quite figure out what it was, until about halfway through the cab ride, I looked at the nametag on the window-divider, and realized his name wasn’t Mohammad. I’m definitely not in New York City anymore.

While I’ve only been here for a week, I’ve eaten at In-N-Out Burger twice, which pretty much makes me an official California resident now. I’d heard a lot about In-N-Out before I went there, but didn’t quite know what to expect… so for those of you back east, let me clear up a few things for you.

1) Contrary to popular belief, In-N-Out is not named for the speed at which you enter the restaurant, get your food, and exit the restaurant. It is actually named after the even quicker amount of time between when the food goes in to your mouth, and when it gets shit out of your ass. It’s delicious, but I’d hate to think what it would be like to eat it and then get stuck in traffic for an hour on US-101 with nowhere to poop.

2) In-N-Out has damn good burgers and delicious thick milkshakes, but their French Fries are more “eh” than a group of Canadians.

3) In-N-Out is great, and has surprisingly lived up to the hype that I’d heard from native Californians at college… but it’s no Fuddruckers.

My toilet broke a couple days after I moved in. It was rather strange… it wasn’t clogged or anything, it just kinda stopped flushing when I hit the lever. Fortunately, I live about half a block from a Target, so when I had to drop a deuce and the maintenance guy hadn’t arrived yet, I simply threw on shoes and walked over to Target to take care of some business in their restroom. However, upon arriving, I realized that Target is missing out on a golden opportunity. Think about it… Target’s logo is the giant bulls-eye, and they have public restrooms… why not have some fun and paint the logo on the bottom of the toilets? Trying to make my dookie land dead-center in a bulls-eye would be way more fun than the usual magazine reading.

I’ll try to write here once a week or so about my random Cali experiences. You can tell this is going to be a great blog because it starts with a penis joke and ends with a poop joke. And yes, I am turning 23 years old in less than a month.