fiesta and unrelated mutterings

one week (madre de diós!) before i hit tokyo again for a seven-week stint. since it's been awhile, i wanted to spend a few days con mi mamá y papá y mis compadres en santa barbara antes de salir a japón. and now i am practicing the wrong language! this is because i chose fiesta weekend to make a visit home. fiesta (officially known as 'old spanish days') celebrates SB's spanish-colonial, mexican and indigenous chumash heritage. the five days of fiesta feature parades with horses and children and confetti eggs smashed on people's heads, concerts and mariachi competition, dance performances ranging from flamenco to mexican folkloric to aztec, and even rodeos. there is much drinking and merrymaking and eating of churros and tortas and tri-tip tacos. fiesta is one of SB's more respectable gatherings of public drunkenness.*

so there was some taking in of the fiesta flavor. my painter friend gwen and i went to UCSB to see her cousin's exhibition at the art museum there, which consisted of her amazingly intricate quiltwork that is both erudite and beautiful. on monday, filmschoolgirl pulled a ferris bueller on her job interview and came up for a beach day with my goddog. we talked fiction, gossiped, and cackled before she drove back down to LA. a small pod of dolphins made a short appearance near the shore. mom sliced up fresh albacore sashimi for dinner that made my eyes roll back in my head, it was so tender and delicious. gwen and her beau and i had pizza and watched a terrible john waters movie, and i helped move some irrigation hoses on the ranch to continue in my tradition of 'it can't be a vacation unless there are chores involved.'

my last morning there, before dawn, i woke suddenly to the rattle-bang of my bedroom window. it only lasted a second or two so i figured it was an earthquake, and later that day i asked other people if they'd felt it but they hadn't. so i thought maybe it had been an annoyed ghost, like gwen half-jokingly suggested due to a conversation we'd had the day before. but i carried around this unlikely suspicion that maybe someone had tried to break into my parents' house before suddenly running away, or that maybe i was being haunted for making fun of my ancestors. then my mom called the next day to let me know it was actually the space shuttle coming back into the atmosphere. ah, right.



* see also: halloween in isla vista (although it's like, so much deeper** than just partying) and UCSB graduation-season couch-burnings.

** among the copy edit lapses in the article – eg, "right of passage" or "loop whole" – is this choice statement: "...she is sympathetic to arguments that Halloween is a dangerous place, particularly for women who are forced by the Isla Vista Halloween culture to dress more proactively than men or risk not fitting in." [italics mine]***

*** is it mean to mock collegiate journalists?