Surf City

With the help of my friend Tristan in the UCLA geography department I successfully made the move from Los Angeles to Santa Cruz for the academic term. For the uninitiated, Santa Cruz rests on the north end of Monterrey Bay in northern California, the closest large city being San Jose. It's most famous in pop culture for its reputation as "surf city," and is often thought of as one of the inspirations for all those Beach Boys songs about dreamy California. It's known in the world of geography as the center for agro-food scholarship and research. For example they have the longest running "alternative" experiment farm at a university in the United States, called the Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems (CASFS), where I hope to volunteer a few hours per week. It's a welcomed change from last term at UCLA, where I was bogged down with stress over the four classes I was trying to finish up. I have a more open schedule here whereby I'm working directly with one faculty member. We've developed reading and writing objectives for the quarter, and I essentially chip away at those while taking a course and participating in a couple reading colloquia. I will return to L.A. in a couple of short months.

Dealing with life in L.A. became for me a matter of controlling disgust. I discovered that if I was able to put all of the negative feelings that emerge from life there into one mental category, then it is much easier to control. I succeeded in doing this a few months ago, and the category of hate - the emotional trashbin as I like to call it - is simply "transportation." It's like a scapegoat that, while crucially important to my moral worldview, is a nice container for chanelling and quickly dissipating frustration from my life. I believe that in transportation many strides can be made to ameliorate some of the political and ecological issues we face. There are so many deep problems with movement in Los Angeles, however - not the least of which are distance and corruption - that taking it personally will obliterate one's soul. Part of my solution in accepting that I can't immediately change the way people are attached to their cars is by joining them, or at least partially joining them. In January I took the California motorcycle rider safety course and bought a 1985 Honda Nighthawk 650 cc motorcycle (below).



It's free to park, costs $7 to fill up the tank, and can get through traffic jams by lane splitting. I was using it for 1-2 trips per week on average in L.A., but now in the small town of Santa Cruz (population ~50,000) I can ride my bicycle everywhere on the beautifully structured bike lane system. In fact, since riding the motorcycle up here from L.A. it has basically sat in the driveway collecting dust. In the highway-intensive ride to move here I decided that highway motorcycle riding is not for me. It's extremely psychologically and physically intense and fatiguing because there is not a moment when you can stop concentrating about safety.

Living in Santa Cruz has so far been like an ascetic retreat. I live in a beautiful house with a couple in their 40s. We each have our own wing in the house, and share the commons. There is a great back porch with an outdoor fire place.