I am not a fan of family vacations. My idea of an ideal vacation is staying at home and drinking my weight in iced coffee and completing a TV series from start to finish in yoga pants. However, the other three members of my family unit have a different idea of how vacations should be spent: together.
This spring break we hurled ourselves into the air via an aluminum cylinder with bad coffee selections all the way to Northern California to see my mom’s brother. Don’t get me wrong, I love seeing my family, and California seems like a nice place and all, but of the five days I spent in this lovely state, I noticed a few glaring things.
- Everything is thirsty.
California is going through a drought. Probably due to it’s massive population and the fact that girls everywhere are having daily baths to exercise the use of their new $12 bath bombs. However despite the fact that the government has issued multiple laws and warnings to limit unnecessary water use, I still found places that had full-flush toilets, sprinklers going on in the middle of the day, and Chinese restaurants with those forever-waterfall-things that flow as you enter the establishment. In addition to all of those thirsty things, the people who inhabit this state are also quite thirsty, but not for water. Whether it be for attention, recognition, or affirmation, everyone here cannot pick their head up from checking their Instagram accounts and the Geotag location on their Snapchat (of which I found there are over 65 of in the state alone). Somebody get this state a cold glass of wake the hell up.
- Yet everyone is drinking
Despite the extremely apparent drought occurring in the state, everyone who lives here happens to look extremely hydrated and healthy. How?
Cold pressed juice of course! Apparently cold pressed juice is no regular juice. It supposedly resets your body with a delicious combination of things you would (and probably should) never think of putting together. For just $10 a bottle you can get a lovely combination of kale, turnip roots (for the skin of course), agave (what even is that), kombucha (a tea I think), the saliva of a mountain goat (hydrating), an old washcloth (fiber), and a handful of dirt from your neighbors backyard (to keep the cost from skyrocketing). The thing that makes this whole marketing scam successful is that everyone is trying to be responsible for setting the new trend for it. As a result, people actually have to pretend to like it. And then set up a separate bank account for it. And eventually, it’s own refrigerator because it can really only be kept at a certain temperature supposedly.
- Traffic is a reflective time
Never in my life have I listened to so much NPR. Coming from the East Coast where everything is a relatively short distance away from each other, I found it kind of ridiculous that you cannot get from one location to the other without jumping on a freeway and sitting in traffic. All of the road signs that are supposed to be kelly green are now a lovely shade of vomit green from the exhaust fumes, and no one needs a different excuse for being late besides “Sorry, the traffic was horrendous”.
While sitting in traffic and feeling as thought it would be faster to do a refreshing jog on the side of the Almaden Expressway to stretch my legs, I had a lot of extra time on my hands to ask the hard questions, like :
What was the original purpose of freeways?
Did anyone think that two lanes was going to be enough?
How much money would it be to barge through these three private properties to build another lane?
I’m sure there’s an accident, right?
What if we came up with a new license plate system?
I wonder if anyones license plate spells: 13UTT5 (hehe butts).
- Recycling is everywhere
I consider myself relatively green. I try to limit the use of water bottles, I hardly do laundry unless I have to, my showers are pretty short, and I use that weird vegan toothpaste in a biodegradable tube.
This state takes my lame green-ness to a whole new level of ecologically aware.
Every single house has a garbage can for stuff that can’t be recycled. It’s usually pretty empty.
They also have a recycling bin that has about 10 different recycling options. Bottles, Bottles where you can get 5 cents back, Cans, cans that a smashed, bottle caps, plastics, plastics with food residue, food for compost, food not for compost, paper, newspaper, cardboard, white cardboard, batteries. Or something relatively similar to that
You would think that with ALL THIS DAMN RECYCLING that they would’ve come up with a better way to get rid of all of the fuel emissions caused by the absurd amount of traffic, but alas, there is simply an HOV lane for the electric cars and ‘more than one passenger’ vehicles. So everyone else is basically screwed.
- The tan
I’m not gonna go on a rant on how everyone is tan. Because that’s true. But, I will go on the record and say that NO ONE is PALE.
Except me. I am pale. My Scottish, Irish, and British ancestors are all up in heaven (or down in hell, I’ve heard stories) laughing at how ridiculously glow-in-the-dark I look next to all of the tan Californians with their probiotic beverages and their birkenstocks. No amount of lying or convincing argument could make anyone from here believe that I live here. I do not live here. I live in a slightly (very very slightly) warmer version of the tundra. I am of a pale people.
How people get this tan is beyond me. Because when they’re not in their car sitting in abysmal amounts of traffic or inside at their computers, they’re walking from parking lot to parking lot getting back into their car to go sit in more traffic on their way home to be inside more. I don’t know what kind of parking lots they have, but I would like to invest in one personally. It seems to do wonders for the complexion.
The main conclusion that I came to during this vacation is that I am far too cynical to ever live in a place like this. Despite being walking paradoxes of hypocrisy, the people here are actually pretty nice. Kind of an annoying nice actually. Makes you realize how much closer to Canada they are. Maybe they can borrow some of their water.
