. . . o n e . m o r e . t i m e . . .

sundrenched, rainsoaked

3-27-'02: 3:26pm

trying to be spontaneous is rightfully an oxymoron. up until now, that's all i'd ever experienced. the tired and worn out practice of saying "well, we'll just do whatever" while the people around me are forming long and complicated plans to do crazy things. because if it's crazy, it must be spontaneous, even if it's been planned weeks in advance. we'd been planning our spring break trip to seattle for months, but never really discussed what we were going to do.

"we'll just do whatever we feel like doing." he left it at that.

"when are we going to come back?" i'm always hopelessly trying to make sense of things, rationalize, organize.

"when we want to come back."

"so about when?"

chris looked at me, irritated. "how about this. we're not deciding when we come back until we get there."

fair enough.

we arrived in seattle earlier on monday morning than we had expected, not quite sure what we should do. chris got the sudden and quite non-linear idea to go to bremerton. none of us had ever been on the ferry, none of us knew how to get there. this didn't seem to matter much. we boarded the ferry and stood on the deck, enjoying what is to be one of the pacific northwest's two sunny days for 2002.

the funny thing about the trip is that i could type out everything that happened and you could fall asleep reading it...but it was still fun. mitch asked every passer-by in bremerton "do you know where mxpx lives?" we almost got lost going to tacoma. chris and my little brother fought the whole time they were there. jon and chris took a little styrofoam and plywood boat on a voyage in the bay by day island. we went and bothered taco at fred meyer. we walked around seattle, enjoying the rain which had come back after the one day of sun. nothing major happened.

we somehow ended up at alderwood mall sometime in the evening to eat, and afterward, chris decided he was going to drive until he found an ice cream place he wanted to eat at. this put us at a baskin robins in marysville at 8pm, not sure where we were going to sleep that night, not sure what we were going to do for the rest of the evening.

"i'm up for driving home right now. switching off." jon suggested as they compared drivers' liscences.

"sure, why not?"

i was ready to go home.

so we drove the 6-or-so hours, switching drivers every hour or so. i sat in the seat without the seatbelt the whole ride home, being ignored...but at least i was headed home. the night was clear as we drove across the drab state, even more lulled by the 1-90 scenery in the dark. jon and chris took their pants off and sat in their boxers to stay awake.

the shortest and longest trip i ever took to seattle, and i still have three days of spring break and a weekend to go before classes start. being spontaneous, i found out over the last 48 hours, is really not so bad.

b a c k / f o r w a r d