Day Twenty-Six: I Meet With A Terrible(?) Fate

7/11/15, 11:29 PM PDT

Today, I finally visit Comic Con! Or technically, the stuff outside of Comic Con, since I didn't have a badge. But hell, Lawn Con is cool too.

I took the trolley to get here. Unsurprisingly, it was packed.

I had about three inches of air between me and that glasses girl on the
bottom of the frame. Half an inch more, and Sam would've teleported
between us with a taser, so thank god she didn't.

Immediately, the first thing I saw was this huge skyscraper cling of Conan O' Brien.

Fun fact, I actually meet the guy that designed all the clings in San Diego
later today, but keep on reading to find out how.

And the second thing I see were the infamous Jesus protesters.

I think these guys are actually Satan protesters, but same thing, right?

The third thing? Cosplayers.

This guy was Peter Parker. He looked better in real life,
when you could see his super blue eyes and the fact that
he looks exactly like Tobey Maguire.

Deadpool and... Deadpoolette? Not sure but it was pimp.

Hey, that's my main in Melee!

A beggar asking for change A Master Assassin!

And after that I didn't really see anything because my eyes immediately honed into this thing:

Yes, the obstacle course from last year was BACK. And this time, I could actually run it! I waited in line...

My view, after the first 20 minute wait.

And waited...

My view, an hour into the line.

And waited some more...

My view, two and a half hours into the line.

Until I finally went inside. Here's how this year's course looked!

Bruce Lee not included.

They added a Ninja Warrior-esque warped wall and a cargo net! Was I excited to finally run, after a year of sadness and regret that manifested itself into physical injuries? 

HELL YEAH I WAS. So I ran it. No, I didn't run it. I sprinted it.

...And after the cargo net, I tripped on grass, fell, and hyperextended my elbow.

The first thing I saw when I fell, except much, much worse.

The crowd made a HUGE "OHHHH!" of disgust when they saw me fall. And medics IMMEDIATELY rushed over to me.

And you know what? I ignored them. And I ran across that rolling log thing, and I finished the course anyway.

And then I immediately got my arm wrapped because having your arm flop around was definitely not a good thing. They anticipated that this sort of stuff would happen, so they had an ambulance waiting outside. Which I got to sit in.

The nice paramedics actually took my picture while I was there.

Ignore the dark, bottomless chasm in my shorts. It's nothing.

Since it was just my arm that was mangled, as opposed to, you know, my head, I was pretty fine after that fall. I got to talk with CJ, one of the paramedics, on my way to the hospital and I told him I wanted to be a VFX artist. Surprisingly, he said he knew a guy that did that sort of stuff and gave me his number to contact him for an internship! Funny how that sort of thing works, huh?

I eventually arrived at the hospital, got a bunch of paperwork and stuff to fill out, and had my arm X-rayed. On the way to the X-ray room, while I was holding my limp, dead, shriveled-up left arm in my right hand, I heard a guy behind me call out to me.

I turned around, and I see some guy in a hospital gurney, his left shoulder wrapped up, but otherwise looking totally fine. I never met this guy in my life, so I actually thought he wasn't talking to me. But then he asked,

"Are you from Comic Con too?"

Holy shit. THIS GUY GOT HURT ON THE OBSTACLE COURSE TOO. We shared stories about how we both messed up on the course (the paramedics listening in thought it was hilarious that the guy dislocated his shoulder on the Leap of Faith), and we had a good laugh because we both said the same thing.

"Totally worth it."

So yes, there's my experience of Lawn Con. And even though I did get to miss out on going inside with my friends and seeing the Adam Savage panels and celebrities and exclusive merchandise and all, I still stand by the words I said to my friend with the dislocated shoulder in the hospital.

Today was totally worth it.

RFotD: While in the waiting room, I met the guy who designed the building/trolley clings for Comic Con. He was a pretty large but short guy with a slight Spanish accent and he called me crazy for going on the obstacle course. He's a pretty cool guy.

Day Twenty-Five: We Receive "The Talk"

7/10/15, 9:26 PM PDT

Of all the awkward scenarios I can think of, I think T-Pop with Sam's mom and two of her uncles talking about how we aren't allowed to do anything that could get our relationship an "R" rating by the MPAA would be one of the higher placing ones in the "Awkward Scale."

Right up there with "Walking in on parents at their most intimate," and
"Angela getting signatures from the Gears of War people in Comic Con."

Seriously. Over a bowl of curry ramen (which is a lot tastier than it sounds) and honey brick toast, they decided that this was the perfect time for them to tell me that if I so much as touch their daughter, I would be a dead man.

It was awkward. But it was also funny because at some point, Sam's mom went into SO MUCH DETAIL that even Sam's uncles said her mom was nagging too much.

But honestly, have you seen me and Sam? We're like this in public:

It took us almost seven months before we regularly held hands in public, and
even then, the first time both of our palms were singed from the satanic unholiness.

We'll be fine, Mama Mallari. We'll be fine.

And if we do mess up, then her uncles know where I live since they dropped me off home, so I'll be a dead man soonafter.





RFotD: The only consolation about that awkwardness was that I got to eat delicious, T-Pop honey brick toast.

Day Twenty-Four: Hollywood And Monopoly Prison Hell

7/9/15, 9:37 PM PDT

We actually didn't return to San Diego yesterday. We stayed in LA with Sam's family, since Justin, Sam's brother, wanted to explore Hollywood, which was a once in a blue moon occurrence. So today, we hit up Hollywood!

We saw a neat little sculpture on the way there.

I looked it up, it's called "Progress" by Earl Krantz.

Our first stop was a particular star on the walk of fame, because Justin really really REALLY loves him:

Helyn and Jasmine are just sitting there because Sam's mom told them to.

Then we went to the Chinese Theater, where I've actually never been before. And even though it's not genuinely Chinese, it is still very very pretty.

I don't understand why The Mandarin was so mad...

Because this place is really pretty.

The big highlight of this place was the concrete slabs with celebrity hand/footprints on it. Most of them more or less were the same, but I noticed that a lot of them were talking about some guy named "Sid."

Poor guy. All he wanted was to be a science kid.

There were a few cool ones too, like Matt Damon and his tiny feet, and Vince Vaughn and his MASSIVE feet, but for the most part they were largely the same thing. A bunch of handprints and a bunch of footprints. Except for Marilyn Monroe, who had like... two dots instead of footprints because of her high heels.

For you dedicated readers, if you remember the creepy costumed people I saw walking around New York, asking for tips when I went last year, I have an update. They moved to Los Angeles. And they've increased in number.

Bee-do, bee-do, bee-do...

We also hopped on a train, where they had a... interesting picture on display.

This is what the nightmares of a Republican look like.

So where did we go on this train?

Nowhere cool, that's for sure.

We actually just went around CityWalk since Universal Studios was EXPENSIIIIIVE. Take a look at some of the stuff we found!

"I hate these things so much. They're like little
rats, they're everywhere." -Christina

Sam's cousin, John, had a close encounter with Jaws.

Either that or last night's longaniza finally snaked its way
out of John's large intestine.

And we found THESE THINGS.

OH MY GOD.

REAL LIFE SIMPSON'S DONUTS. We were worried that it was made out of plastic and not really edible, but after we figured out that the words "freshly baked daily" on the box weren't just there for decorative purposes, we were ALLLLLL over these guys.

Yeah, there was a chocolate one too. We also bought it.

I can understand why Homer Simpson loves these donuts so much, they are delicious. And no, to all you naysayers, it is definitely not just a bigger version of any old pink frosted sprinkled donut you could buy at any old donut shop. This one's different. It's made by Lard Lad. And because it's made by Lard Lad, it's made with fresh dough, hand-picked sprinkles, and expertly-crafted pink frosting of the highest caliber. Lard Lad imports sugar from the deepest, most untouched regions of the Amazon Rainforest and carries them by hand, one jar at a time down a 45-mile jungle trek to a processing plant in Brazil, where ten Swiss chocolatiers delicately fold the sugar over a hundred times to achieve the perfect, and I mean perfect glaze.

And that process is repeated for each donut.

We also found some cute socks. Take a look!

I didn't know Sam was embroidered onto a sock!

The rare and elusive Stacosaurus.

I wish my name was Godofredo.

They also had those license plate things they sell in every state, but they had two very important missing names.

It was destiny, Kayla. Meanwhile, Angela and
Christina were full.

Oh and we found Sam's birthing bus again!

And no, the bus name isn't referring to the woman in the left.

Afterwards, we went back to Sam's family's house and played a nice, wholesome game of Monopoly.

Just kidding. It was the most cutthroat Monopoly battle ever. We played this variation called "Monopoly Empire."

More like "Product Placement: Board Game Edition."

The goal was to either make everyone else bankrupt, or own enough properties to stack their tower to the top. We had a few house rules added, but it's basically Speed Monopoly.

And stuff got INTENSE. I think it was pretty tepid until I was four spaces away from winning. I had an Empire card that basically let me steal any player's topmost property (the one they most recently bought), so I decided to use it to steal Kate's four-space occupying Samsung property. I would have won, but she blocked it with her Empire card and everyone started SCREAMING at that point. The room got a hundred times hotter, everyone was sweating, Sam's cousin's forehead vein was coming out, it was HYPE.

When one of the players started to look like this, you know it was an
intense game.

Sam, because of unlucky dice rolls, went to jail at least 20 times. At one point, her cousin, Jasmine, got a Get Out of Jail Free card, which she wanted to donate to Sam to spare her more time in the stony lonesome. And you know what she said?

"No. I don't need your charity."

The next turn, she immediately did more prison time.

Her luck was so bad that at one point, she landed one square next to the "Go To Jail" tile. Since there were two dice, it's impossible to roll a 1 and go to jail again, right?

Well, for Monopoly Empires, they have a special die where instead of a "one" face (as in, the face of the die that you can roll a "one" on), they had a "swap" face. If you rolled both dice and rolled the "swap" face, you could either swap your topmost property with another player's topmost property OR move the number of spaces the other die got.

Samantha rolled a "one" and a "swap." She had the most valuable property in the game, so swapping was out of the question. So she went to jail.

A one-in-36 chance dice roll. And she got it. And she went to prison.

I never let that go when we ate dinner later that night. And I'm never gonna let her hear the end of that.

RFotD: Typing blog entries with one hand SUCKS.

Day Twenty through Twenty-Three: Four Days, Eight Claps

(Note: I'm gonna lump the next four days in one post because there is SO MUCH I wanna mention and making separate posts would be too cumbersome/time consuming)

7/5/15, 11:17 PM PDT

I'm not gonna lie, I was pretty nervous today. Not only because today is the start of my and Sam's New Student Orientation at UCLA (which meant that we'd finally be meeting some of the scary talented people we've seen on Facebook).

It was also because I was forced to eat Sam's cooking before we left.

That isn't meat. Those are pancakes.

Fortunately, before we left, we managed to dilute the salmonella with some delicious, delicious ramen at The Boiling Point in Los Angeles. It's in the middle of nowhere, but it is TOTALLY worth it. Just look at this thing.

And they pour you more broth for free if you need it.

After finishing most of the bowl (and Sam refusing to eat the lobster claw floating at the top), we downed it with a shot of mosquito eggs in sake.

It's mmm mmm good.

Just kidding, it's some sort of basil seed drink that's really sweet and REALLY GOOD. Oh, and we decided to try out a delicious MANGO ICE CREAM MACAROON SANDWICH. And a thing they called a "snow cube." We got the green tea flavor, but they also had mango and pudding flavors.

No, the green tea snow cube wasn't just an ice cube they dyed green, it was
also really good.

Also, this wasn't in The Boiling Point's menu, but we also saw this in another restaurant before we left.

It's also what Sam calls me when she really wants to spice things up.

After a thirty minute car ride and a BILLION steps up The Hill, we finally made it to our dorms in UCLA. We did a super awkward "icebreaking" activity called "Move Your Booty," where basically everyone gets in a circle, someone in the center says "Move your booty if you (insert some activity here)" and everyone that has done that has to switch places with someone in the circle. The last person to get a spot goes in the center, asks the next "Move your booty if..." question, and so on.

It was awkward because after the first six rounds, we ran out of questions. So every time some poor unfortunate soul got stuck in the center, they said 

"Move your booty if.... uhh..."

Followed by silence. Awkward, painful, silence.

We eventually finished playing and walked to Westwood (the area that UCLA is in) to explore. They gave us free reign to explore as long as we knew that we had to wake up at 7 to check in the next morning. So we went crazy.

Just kidding. The craziest we went was walking to Target, finding out it was closed, and walking back to Diddy Riese to people watch.

The line was like half a block long and we were still full of soup, so
we didn't wait in line for the 1 dollar ice cream.

We went back up to Rieber (the building where our dorms were) at around 11:30, I met my roommates, Nick and Jose (who I accidentally called Juan by accident at one point which made me feel horrible), and went to sleep, ready for a big, big day tomorrow.

7/6/15, 11:19 PM PDT

Considering that the room we were in required us to share a single shower and toilet between SIX GUYS, we had to negotiate a bathroom schedule. We didn't have to be anywhere until 9 AM most days, so we shouldn't *have* to wake up ridiculously early, right?

Unfortunately, all six of my roommates took RIDICULOUSLY LONG SHOWERS so we staggered out our bath times to happen every 30 minutes. Me, being the pushover that I am, got stuck with the 6 AM shower time. So today, after four hours of sleep, I woke up a full two hours before I had to, shambled over to Rieber court in my zombified state, and got my BRUINCARD.

My face isn't normally this stretched out, promise.

Soon afterwards, I met the lovely people I would be spending the next three days with. We were a nice group of humanities majors (all English or Linguistics, such as myself). Sirena, Theresa (which she explicitly said was spelled with an "h"), Artiom (which people liked to call Artery), Jaya, Hannah, Maria, Melissa, and our New Student Advisor, the mysterious woman known only as "Arnisha."

Today largely consisted of us going into the Ackerman Grand Ballroom for RIDICULOUSLY long amounts of time. Most of it was kind of informational, but I'm not gonna lie, I slept through a good chunk of them, with the whole four hours of sleep during summer sort of thing. Thankfully, I sat next to Artiom most of the time, and he fell asleep too, so when my group prodded him awake, they wouldn't notice that I'm asleep right next to him either, and I avoid getting in trouble.

You know what was interesting today though? The interest faire that they had during lunch. Sam and I found a creative writing club!

Cute name too!

There were other clubs we were interested in, like ballroom dance club, and especially the Daily Bruin. But I think the highlight today was when UCLA's band performed for us. And they performed amazingly. Take a look!

At one point, the members of the band walked up to the crowd. And since we were right in the front row, I managed to take this picture:

She's happy because she sees Jake's future in the reflection of the trumbone.

There was also the "World Famous" UCLA Cabaret/Summer Nights in the Union session, which was adorable. They sung a bunch of cute songs, and changed the lyrics to turn the songs into pro-UCLA, anti-USC propaganda. And damn it, it was so cute that it worked.

The most beautiful hour-long propaganda session ever.

Here, they were performing a parody of Adam Sandler's The Hanukkah Song
but with famous Bruins instead of Jews.

As for the Summer Nights in the Union, it basically consisted of a casino area (with free poker stations where the person who had the most chips at the end of the night won a basketball jersey!), a board game area, a (missing) photo booth, and the famous "Club Jamba," where they basically turned UCLA's Jamba Juice into a dance club.

Not gonna lie, Club Jamba was pretty cool. It was also very sweaty, and Sam and I didn't really want to play poker or board games all night, so we basically went back to our dorms.

Sorry that Sam and I aren't party animals, guys. But we'll get turn up someday or another at UCLA, promise guys.





7/7/15, 11:29 PM PDT

Today, we were in for a very rude awakening, courtesy of burnt microwave popcorn.

Because some moron decided to cook up some popcorn in a microwave that doesn't have a working turntable at two in the morning, the fire alarms went off.

In the entire dorm. All nine floors of it.

Now I don't know what kind of fire alarm system is so sensitive that it evacuates an entire dorm from burnt microwavable popcorn, as opposed to, you know, figuring out that the "fire" is only in one area and setting off the sprinklers in that one isolated area. I mean I'm not much of a fire alarm expert, but I believe it was incredibly unnecessary to wake up the entire dorm (and especially me) over Orville Redenbacher's design flaws.

But whatever, it was a bonding experience. I got to hear a few of my orientation friends use new, colorful vocabulary that I've never heard them use before, so I believe ultimately, we were brought closer together because of this fire alarm.


The delicious UCLA campus food also brought us much, much closer together.

Only because there were limited seats in the dining hall, so we had to
practically sit two people per chair.

Later, we planned out our schedules for the ensuing feeding frenzy that is class selection happening tomorrow. It took forever to finally have a schedule that I liked, made more complicated by the fact that one, I had no idea how the class signups worked in UCLA, two, that I had a TON of requirements to fulfill, and three, that I had none of my AP scores sent in yet. Which was a LEGITIMATE concern since my AP scores could cover some of my requirements and save me some time at UCLA.

The first and second issues were cleared up by Arnisha and the awesome class selection workshop they had at Rieber today, but the third is still a BIG BIG problem (As of writing this, July 11, I still don't have my AP scores sent in).

But whatever. I eventually figured out which classes to sign up for, and since today was dedicated to figuring that out, Sam and I had a lot of free time to look around.

We found out what Geico cavemen do in their spare time.

So easy, ages 5 and up can do it!

Sam's life slogan was there, right under that 500 days of summer sign.

As you can see, her mind is very very open to our love.

And we found the bus that Sam was born in!

They named it "Tumbleweed" because that's what Sam looked like when
she took her first steps on this earth.

The definite highlight of the night was the scavenger hunt though. Basically, all of the people in orientation got into groups and had a list of things on campus to take pictures of at night. And it was FUN. They had us running around EVERYWHERE and even though it was really creepy sometimes, it was all AMAZING. Here's the stuff we found.

Founder's rock.

Nursing building.

The "tiny garden" east of the life sciences building, which was a total
bastard to find.

An "s-shaped" rock.

The "diamond" above the life sciences building.

The rules to the Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden.

We got back at around 2 AM. 100% of us were very, very sweaty.

And yet we could still eke out a little smile at the end of the day. UCLA
does that to you.

I quickly took a nighttime shower, and got ready for a very very stressful day tomorrow.





7/8/15, 11:19 PM PDT

WE SIGNED UP FOR CLASSES. And it was ridiculously stressful.

The way it works is that you meet up with your orientation group and your NSA. Since they only let each group use two computers to prevent 200+ freshmen from signing up at once and crashing the system, we had to decide who in our group could sign up first and who could sign up last. And we did that by drawing numbers from a hat.

Thankfully, I drew the number 2, which means that I got to sign up for classes first, but it ultimately didn't make a huge difference because everyone in my group got the classes they wanted, which is AWESOME.

Afterwards, we had our last tour, where our tour guide told us a bunch of dirty lies about UCLA. I mean she tricked us about stuff like how a counselor died in front of a water fountain, or how if you ever need help on campus, you can just stand in place and hold up your Bruin Card and the student body will eventually help you out. Some of the little myths they told us were GREAT, because even though they're just urban legends, they make the campus a lot more interesting, it's amazing.

We ended the day by getting Bruintized. Basically, we dipped our hands in UCLA's famous inverted fountain, signifying that we were officially members of the Bruin family. After that initial dip, we are not allowed to touch the fountain's water until we graduate. And those that break that rule have to stay an extra quarter at UCLA every time they break it.

Pre-bruintization.

The last time my hand will touch the fountain's
beautiful water for the next four years.

After heading back to Rieber, we packed up our stuff, walked around campus for a bit, and finally, at last, Orientation was over. It was a great four days, and I'm really thankful I got to spend it with awesome people. I don't think these past few days would have been as fun without every single person that I've met and hung out with. Hope to see some of you guys in the fall!





RFotD: Michael decided to lump these four entries into one because he didn't want the first day to be buried underneath the other three posts. Genius, huh?