Has it really been a month since I’ve been Top-5ing?! ☺ Why yes, yes it has. Happy Monday! I would’ve posted sooner but last week was full of transitions that kept me super busy. Let’s do this:

1. Congratul-8-tions to the class of 2008—pre-school, elementary school, middle school, high school and college! I went to my friend's English Department graduation at UCLA and lo and behold James Franco was also walking the stage! I didn't know he was also a creative writer and hoped to pursue an MFA. I'd love to workshop with him one day. I wanted to see my friends walk at their universities in Northern California, but I'm sure they were too busy being enlightened by their commencement speaker—Oprah—and making speeches of their own. ☺

2. Now that its summer I kind of have more time to read whatever I want, so I've taken up quite a few. There are what I’m starting with:

Dubliners by James Joyce
America's Best Short Stories 2007 by Stephen King
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Yes Man by Danny Wallace

My Amazon shopping list of books to read is endless. If I were a super hero, I'd want my super power to be able to touch any book and acquire all of its data, and be able to search for whatever answer I want and find it. Basically I want my mind to be the ultimate search engine data base. Paper beats rock and brains most definitely beat brute any day in my book!

Also, since it’s summer, my friends feel compelled to prevent me from falling into my workaholic tendencies and take me on spontaneous adventures. We were hanging out in Long Beach last night and when we left the bar my friends decided we should go check out Laguna Beach since we’ve never been down to the actual water. It was midnight. So we drive down. It just so happened that the grunions were hatching so we got to watch them flap back out into the ocean. Then they couldn’t remember where Pacific Coast Highway ended so they decided to find out. We followed it to a path that led us back on the 405S and ended up heading down to San Diego. I’m in and out of sleep at this point. Once there they decided the only reasonable thing to do at 3 o’clock in the morning was to go ghost hunting, so the first thing that pops up on my friend’s iPhone was “screaming” tree. We drive down to the creepy, isolated hills on the outskirts of San Diego, and I wake up in the car at 4:15am to us driving past an abandoned slaughterhouse down a very narrow dirt road toward a sole tree standing alone in a clearing. It was creepy. After that freaky encounter I directed them to my favorite optical illusion—gravity hill. We let the car roll backwards a good three times. ☺

The sheer randomness of this account has inspired me to write a story, if not my own slasher film. We’ll see if this goes anywhere. ☺

3. eBay Live! was last week and I was painfully jealous :) I will make it in 2010 (Orlando). I must! I love this year's location, CHICAGO ! The Navy Pier and the water surrounding the city and so much more. I think Roman is obligated to Top 5 with me, since he IS in the city where High Fidelity was filmed. ☺

4. I’m in the middle of moving and it’s prompting me to go through all of my stuff. I’ve heard people say that you should give away 30% of your possessions each year, and I definitely agree. In fact I’d like to give away more! I want to keep my life portable because I intend on traveling a lot throughout my life, so I must leave my pack-ratting days behind.

I have a TON of paper—notes, bank statements, and so many other unless sheets of paper from the pre e-statement age. I’m going to type up all of my paper notes and am thinking about scanning all paper documents that I don’t really need. Is that the best route to go? Tell me what you think, or if you have a better method for downsizing your life. Also, being an English major and avid word enthusiast I have a TON of books. I need to plant lots and lots of trees to balance it all out. ;)

5. I’ve always enjoyed Dave Matthews Band and their music videos but only recently have I finally sat down and taken the time to look into their career. I was amazed and have been very much inspired by their path and by their charitable measures. I am completely enamored and have a great deal of respect for them as individuals, and hopefully I’ll get to catch them live or meet them someday. ☺

Speaking about bands who do wonderful things, I just checked the results for the 30 Seconds to Mars auction and they raised over $8,000! Lovely!

TAGS: Top 5, graduation, UCLA, James Franco, Stanford, Oprah, summer, reading list, books, adventures, grunions, eBay Live!, Chicago, High Fidelity, down-sizing, Dave Matthews Band, 30 Seconds to Mars

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