give me my dark back

last year was the most frustrating year of my UCSD career. to relieve frustration, i used to go driving around sandiego at night, alone, with music cranked up. on other days when i didn't feel like driving or wasting gas to keep myself sane, i would go to the beach. i would sat on a bench and stare at the wave for zarquon knew how long. sometimes i brought my guitar along so i could fiddle with it and sing some songs while at it. this method also worked well in keeping me sane althroughout the schoolyear.

i'm moving out of my apartment and leaving san diego tomorrow (friday), so i thought tonight i should pay a visit to the beach that had saved me from going insane last year. i thought once more, before i part with it for good, i would enjoy the wave and let it relieve me from my anger and frustration. so i did. i drove down there, parked my car, and sat on that same bench i used to sit on all last year.

then i saw a flash of light.

and sounds of laughter.

and more flashes of light.

staring into the dark corner of the beach to my left, i saw three or four people, seemingly college students, playing at the beach, taking pictures of each other. i thought they would get over it after they got everyone in the camera, they didn't. the flash kept flashing for over five minutes. apparently ucsd accepted more dumb people this year than they did last year.

it is understandable that they would've wanted pictures as a proof that they had gone to the beach. what is not understandable is that they went to the beach at night, when the nearest streetlight is five-hundred yards away, and you have to get yourself used to the darkness for a few minutes before you can even see the tip of the wave that comes crashing into the beach. did they really think that the flash of a 35mm camera would show the background that is the beautiful pacific ocean, in addition to their pretty faces? if they were grade school kids, i would tolerate that kind of stupidity, since i didn't develop an intuition about the strength of camera flash until 6th grade, but they are college students. and they supposedly got accepted into UCSD, which is in the top 10 public universities in the united states. this sort of incident kinda made me wonder if our school is overrated, or that dynes used university money to bribe the judges.

what made it worse is that these kids took pictures with the camera right in front of their faces. while the flash might not be bright enough to illuminate the waves that were 10 feet away from them, standing right in front of the camera means that you'll be seeing your mugshot very very clearly, up to the point where your face would be completely white.

marianne madden from the UCSD guardian once wrote a brilliant article, "The MySpace Generation: 40 Million Morons Strong," bashing the existence of a horrid thing that is myspace. this article, throughout my four years of reading the guardian, has become my favorite article, next to bryce warwick's satirical sport articles. there, madden claimed, and i quoted, "There is a reason why successful Web designers only make up a select portion of the population. Most people have the design sense of half of a dead swan (or, on a good day, a half-dead swan)."

apparently, these kids i saw at the beach today didn't even come close to half a dead swan.