welcome to portugal

Well, more updates would have been posted while I was staying at Pat's house in California, but once Pat and I attempted to install a Dance Dance Revolution hybrid onto Pat's computer, his mouse and keyboard ports were sent to sleep with the fishes, his motherboard tied onto both to serve as a brick.

I attended Pat's graduation a few days after arriving in San Jose, where it took over forty minutes to name off everyone graduating within the class of over six-hundred. I sat among Pat's mother, her friend, and Pat's grandma, all of which leaned forward in their folding chairs to converse around me. All of us constructed a list of congratulatory gifts graduates had received that Pat had not -- necklaces spawned with folded dollar bills, excessively large signs, T-shirts adorned with senior photos, noisemakers, old women toting balloons, and the list goes on. We formulated a method of compensation, though, which was to call out to the audience when Pat was named off that he was our "Pat-Cake," as in the "patty-cake" chanted in the nursery rhyme except altered so that Pat could retain some scraps of masculinity.

Earlier that day, I drove a Camaro into a ditch, which was probably due to the fact that not only do I not have my permit, but I haven't even taken drivers' training.

One night, I had a dream that I was wandering around my school, and it seemed as though everyone was chatting about my diary and naming off their favorite entries. A girl who used to be a friend of mine who moved up to Minnesota from Alabama in second grade declared that an entry entitled "welcome to portugal" was her favorite. When I woke up, I immediately resolved that the next entry I wrote I would call "welcome to portugal." Not only that, but I would mention nothing about the nation of Portugal. The only reason I'm writing this is so that I may fulfill the prophecy, you see.

Our day of departure from California was solemn as opposed to the bouncy, incessantly grinning disposition I had expected. Pat and I had cooked a muffin in a pie pan the night before and decorated it with messages in frosting and candles, but by the time we were settling into our seats at the San Francisco airport, we realized we had left it behind and had only gotten a chance to eat a fourth of it. Luckily, I took pictures of it with my digital camera once we had lit the ring of candles, so that had to suffice for our inability to consume the fruits of our labor.

Today we visited numerous garage sales we had circled in the paper while sitting at Starbucks, in order to supply Pat with some necessities for his future apartment. I think the fact that all we got him was a small hamburger-shaped thing with miniature butter knife-like spreading utensils protruding from it, I'd say our search was rather unsuccessful. At one place we were awarded popsicles, and at another I saw what had to be the granddaddy of all inflatable pools. Not only did it have a shallow wading pool, but it had a palm tree that spurted water and a slide. If I owned a pool like that, I'd never be seen without water-wrinkled skin. My mom, Pat and I visited Target afterwards in order to purchase a pool like it, but as we were carrying it to the check-out line it occurred to me that I'd never use that pool again after today, so I slid it back onto the shelf. Instead, I watched Pat play Super Smash Brothers Melee and beat Public Enemy No. 1 (known as Donkey Kong, Jr. by the masses), and we wandered down the phone aisle and pressed the buttons. We mourned for a little girl who pressed her dirt-ridden hands against the video game display case and exclaim excitedly that Tony Hawk: Pro Skater 2 was in stock. As my mom stood in line buying two DVDs she had chosen, I tried on hats that were strewn on top of some shelves, and not only did Pat laugh at me, but the people that walked by did as well. I decided that my inconceivable degree of hotness is drastically reduced while wearing a hat from Target, especially when I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I caught my reflection in a mirror sitting upon the jewelry counter.

Afterwards, we swung by a music store to pick up some strings for Pat's guitar, I fed Pat a leftover sandwich to hold him over until dinner, and now he's playing Suikoden 1 as I fulfill the prophecy of "welcome to portugal."

To end this on a suddenly confusing note, I think the reason you only hear rap and pop blaring from car stereos is because anyone smart enough to listen to other, more deserving genres of music are intelligent enough to realize that maybe people within a five mile radius don't share their taste in music.

Good night.