Making you jealous

Tonight I'm blogging. Every night this week I've worked on a personal essay. During my breaks and lunch at work I've been writing another essay and a short piece of fiction in one of my notebooks. I'm taking a little time off, so to speak, to free my mind and write whatever I want, or at least whatever meets the guidelines I outlined for this blog.

Santa Cruz. Since I'll be living there in less than three months, I've been doing a lot of research online about it. I have the Google search for "santa cruz, ca" among my new Safari bookmarks. I even have a folder in my list of favorite websites named "Santa Cruz." Inside it are links to the University of California, Santa Cruz; The Santa Cruz Sentinel; and a couple employment sites for the city. Here's a pic I found on Wikipedia. It's my new desktop picture, too:


It was taken from the UCSC campus, looking south toward the city and Monterey Bay. I don't know if you can see it very well, but I think Carmel and Monterey, along with the adjacent mountain ranges, are visible on the other side.

Here are some boring facts I've found about Santa Cruz. In the 2000 census, the population was 54,593. It's the county seat for Santa Cruz County. For every 100 females, there are 99.2 males (that fact isn't so boring). The climate is Mediterranean, with mild summers and rainy winters. Two active serial killers lived there in the 1970s, prompting outsiders to nickname the city, "The Murder Capital of the World." The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, famous for interrupting the World Series in San Francisco, leveled all the unreinforced brick buildings in the downtown area. The University of California, Santa Cruz was established in the mid-1960s as an alternative campus; it's home to the beloved Banana Slugs. The city hosts multiple jazz and blues festivals throughout the year. The Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk is the oldest beachside amusement park in California. The city is well known throughout the world as "Surf City." In 2003, the Santa Cruz city council was the first in the nation to denounce the war in Iraq.

One thing I hate doing is repeating myself. I don't know if I've talked about this before. Tonight I met a couple people for dinner, people I hadn't seen in a while. I told them I was moving, told them why, told them I had no clue what I was going to do job-wise yet. It feels like I've said the same thing a million times, repeated it all over and over and over. I can never remember who I've told and what I've told them.

One day at work this week we listened to KRUI, the university's student radio station. Everyone was getting tired of my jazz station. It made me realize why indy rock, "college music," or mellow music hasn't ever appealed to me: it's depressing as hell. That's exactly what I've never needed: something else to make me depressed.

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