This past weekend I made a trip up to NoCal (”Northern California” for those of you who aren’t cool enough to abbreviate…because abbreviating is obviously cool). My trip was split into three pieces: the greater San Jose area, San Francisco, and Berkeley.

I hopped in my car on Friday morning and made the five and a half hour drive through the desert by myself, with nothing to keep me company but the incessant singing of Lady Gaga (I swear, that’s the only music that plays on the radio out here). After stopping at a sketchy-looking Subway in the middle of the desert, I drove the final stretch to Los Altos, where I have some relatives. I got to spend some time with them eating good food, seeing Los Altos, and visiting Stanford. I even made my pilgrimage to the Apple Campus in Cupertino (I’m a dork, don’t judge).

The next day I went into San Francisco with the relatives and enjoyed a beautiful warm day. We walked around town, saw the Golden Gate Bridge, ate on the Fisherman’s Wharf, and absorbed some much-needed sun. It was good that I had been to San Francisco before, because the day went by so quickly! Before I knew it, I was hopping on the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) to go across the bay to Berkeley.

I met Kevin on Cal Berkeley’s campus and stayed with him until Sunday afternoon. The campus was packed with prospective students and parents who were visiting for “Cal Day”, a festival which basically schmoozes prospective students into choosing Cal. Highlights of Berkeley included killer calzones, watching Sylvester Stallone in “Cliffhanger”, eating breakfast at a mexican rooftop restaurant, and making fun of the goofy parents who followed their students around on Cal Day (no offense to all the goofy parents out there, but foam visors went out of style a long time ago).

On Sunday I drove back to Burbank (with Lady Gaga), stopping at a Chipotle on the way. Nothing makes for a better five hour drive than shoveling a huge burrito into your stomach! If I had an extra day or two, I would have tried to stop by Napa and tour some wineries, but I had to be back to work the next day.

Today's Useless Fact About My Life In L.A.: If you compare the number of hours I spend driving each day with all of my waking hours in California this semester, it comes out to around 15%. That means 15% of the time I am awake is spent in a car. Whoa. (yay for hour-long commutes!)

Now hold on just a minute before you get upset at me. I know I haven’t really had anything to say for over a week now. And I know that you’ve all been sitting anxiously, unsure of what to do with yourselves, constantly refreshing this page and waiting for a new post to appear. Or something like that.

It hasn’t been my fault. The last week has been crazy, to say the least. April rolls in, and all of a sudden things are due, projects are assigned, and things just get very busy. BUT NOT TO FEAR, I have some exciting(?) news to share with you: I recently took a trip to watch a taping of The Price is Right.

Yep, The Price is Right. As in, the game show that elderly people watch with the same level of enthusiasm that college girls display when watching Gossip Girl.

To be perfectly honest, I’m not exactly the show’s most dedicated viewer. Last time I watched it, Bob Barker was still puttering around on stage. Now he has been replaced by Drew Carey, who is funny but lacks Bob’s charm and senility. Nonetheless, I decided to go since the whole trip was totally free and was organized by our trusty ICLA RA Team™, an elite group of super-students who plan awesome events for ICLAers almost every week.

Anyway, what I didn’t realize is that attending a taping is nearly a day-long process. We showed up at CBS Studios at 9am and waited around for FOUR HOURS before the taping began. Four hours is a long time to be waiting outside of a studio. But it’s okay, we passed the time by making fun of the horrifically dressed tourists. (I kid you not, this one guy had a handlebar mustache and wore bright purple elastic jogging pants and an ill-fitting homemade t-shirt with an iron-on image. Another long-haired guy was dressed in leather biking gear and looked suspiciously like Tommy Lee Jones’ evil twin).

The producers do a brief 30-second interview of each audience member to decide who will appear on the show. The screening process seems like an exact science and they do it very quickly. I am pretty sure I blew my chances of getting on the show when I told them that I had no idea what I was doing. I’m not sure why I said it, but that’s just how it happened. Amy, on the other hand, talked about her homemade macaroni and cheese during the interview, which made me hungry but also made me feel better about my answer.

Of the sixteen Ithaca College students there, we were convinced that at least one of us would be picked to play. But nobody was. And neither was Georgia, the old woman who sat at the front and was celebrating her 97th birthday. So I occupied myself with wearing a name tag, shivering in the cold studio, and forcing applause for the incredibly annoying intern who was charged with keeping the crowd excited.

This isn’t to say the experience was bad. It was actually a lot of fun to see how shows like this are made and to watch the people freak out in person as they learn they are winning things like a trip to Japan and a plasma screen TV. (The people who lost got a bird bath as a consolation prize, which I think is just cruel. You might as well just give them twenty bucks and call it a day). It was a unique experience and definitely worth trying, even if you have to wait for four hours to see it. Plus, there’s always a chance of winning a bird bath!

This weekend I am planning a trip to the San Francisco area, where I will inevitably be up to some mildly amusing shenanigans which I can discuss in a future blog post. Until then, try not to cry yourself to sleep at night. This isn’t goodbye.

Back in the day (at the end of March), I stumbled across a pretty cool opportunity at work. Mallory had managed to get tickets to a special advance screening of "I Love You Man" because she knew someone who knew someone at Paramount (gotta love connections). The screening was the day before the film was set to be released (actually the night before... our screening was at 7 and the film was released at midnight). So we left work a few minutes early to get to the Paramount Theatre at the Grove, where the screening was being held.

I had never been to any sort of special screening of a film before, but it was much different than your typical moviegoing experience. The most obvious difference was the lack of previews at the beginning of the film. There were none. Instead, we just started 15 minutes late, as if we had already watched the previews. There were guys in suits standing around with super-cool night vision goggles to make sure that nobody was filming or photographing the movie. And there were special "reserved" seats in the theater for Paramount VIPs. Fancy stuff.

The movie turned out to be pretty funny, and seemed to get a pretty good response from the audience. We grabbed some Pinkberry on our way home, feeling happy that we saw the movie a whole four hours before the rest of the world. And that was it.

But don't be fooled, this isn't the only exciting thing that has happened in Los Angeles recently. In other news...

• ICLA-ers Sarie Drake and Mike Citera were contestants on "The Price is Right" when there was a group trip to one of the tapings (I, sadly, wasn't there. I'm planning on going to the next one, though!)
• I got a chance to check out the impressive artwork and the even-more-impressive views at the Getty, one of L.A.'s most famous museums.
• We had a Nicholas Cage movie night, which was nothing short of pure ridiculousness.
• I went to a club in Hollywood with some friends. Pros: good music & cool lights. Cons: high prices & girls with obnoxiously tiny articles of clothing (seriously, just respect yourself).
• I took some friends to Manhattan Beach. We went home sunburn-free!
• I watched "Casablanca" for the first time this week.

I'll keep you informed of more excitement as it happens. This weekend is bound to be full of crazy stories. Saturday is our semester-ly volleyball tournament. Or as I'm calling it, the "ICLA Volleyball Tournament of Champions and BBQ Fun Fiesta" (ICLAVTOCABBQFF). Also on Saturday is International Pillow Fight Day, which means a huge group of people is gathering in L.A. to have a massive pillow fight. I am debating stopping by to check out the action, but it will be taking place around the same time as the ICLAVTOCABBQFF. I'll let you know if I make it there!

On Sunday I got to hang out at CAMELOT GOLFLAND, a mini golf course in Anaheim that also has an arcade and something called “lazer jousting”… whatever that means. My good friend Kevin was in town (he goes to school in Northern California but was in SoCal for spring break), so we obviously had to find something ridiculous to do.

We hit the jackpot when we went to Camelot. They had five mini-golf courses, and we elected to play the most difficult one. There were two teams: Me & Kevin vs. Graceface & Joanna. Guys vs. Girls.

It was on.

We played all 18 grueling holes, hitting golf balls into pools of water and other obstacles with relative frequency. We kept careful score throughout the game and at the end, it turned out we were tied. So we did a Sudden Death Tie-Breaking Championship Round.

Grace chose the “Mission”, a hole that had a big replica of an adobe mission that you had to hit your ball into. It was the single most intense hole of mini-golf I have ever played, but in the end the guys emerged victorious by just one stroke. We gloated for a good twenty minutes and took lots of pictures (which will eventually make their way onto Facebook, for those of you who are interested).

Afterwards, we stopped by a restaurant called Los Cabos and ate a ton of mexican food before heading off to Downtown Disney, a shopping, entertainment, and super-touristy area right outside of Disneyland.

We were in awe of the fanny pack-laden tourists clambering around us as we wandered into the coolest store ever: the Lego Store. We spent a good twenty minutes in the Lego Store building things. Kevin made a giant pillar and a replica of David Blaine. I made a super-secret spy platform with windows. The five year old next to us just stacked random pieces together, forming little more than a blob of Legos. It’s good to know that while my maturity has stayed the same, my ability to build cool things with Legos has only improved with age.

After Downtown Disney, we drove to Yogurt Land, a self-serve frozen yogurt place where they charge you by the weight of your yogurt (which means you always get waaaay too much). Yogurt Land reminded me of a super-fancy and much nicer version of Jason’s frozen yogurt in Ithaca. Good stuff.

I drove home that night knowing I had accomplished four significant things:

1. I won a game of mini-golf by just one stroke. And I played on the “hard” course.
2. I ate a tamale.
3. I built a super-secret spy platform out of Legos.
4. I ate more frozen yogurt than your average person should eat in a month.

Now all I’m left with is a great sense of accomplishment. What did YOU do this weekend?

In case you hadn’t already guessed, I was definitely building up this story a bit more than I should have. BUT that doesn’t make it any less awesome.

A few weeks ago I engaged in an epic lazer* tag battle in an ancient temple-themed facility called ULTRAZONE. ULTRAZONE claims to be the largest lazer tag facility in L.A. So it seemed fitting that the largest group of warriors in L.A. (Ithaca’s ICLA students) should schedule a group trip there.

Mallory and I were running late from work and a subsequent Chiat intern sushi night, but managed to get there in time to play just one epic game. We walked into the temple-themed building, which looked like a poor attempt at reproducing a scene from “Indiana Jones”. The marginally curteous 13-year old employee gave us ULTRAZONE WRISTBANDS™ and we walked into the ULTRAZONE STAGING AREA™ where we were briefed on the ULTRAZONE RULES™ (which included the ‘Don’t Run’ rule, which is the most frequently broken rule in lazer tag…walking just doesn’t suffice when lives are on the line).

Casey and Kelli and I decided to join the red team, the sole reason being that red was easier to distinguish under the black lights than the other colors, which were blue and green. We entered the arena together, armed with guns and ready for battle. The inside of the arena was two floors, and included enough windows, catwalks, barricades and dark corners to excite even the most experienced lazer tag warrior. With music blasting and adrenaline pumping, we began the battle of our lives (which only lasted for about 10 minutes).

At the end of the game, we emerged unscathed (well, mostly…I took an elbow to the face at some point). Casey was the top ranked lazer-tagger, and I floated somewhere around 30th place (I know, you’re impressed). I’d definitely go back, despite the decided lack of fog in the arena (you can never have too much fog when playing lazer tag). Regardless, it still put Ithaca’s lazer tag place to shame**. There may be another lazer tag trip sometime this semester, and I’ll be sure to let you know if we make it to ULTRAZONE again.

That’s all for now, but don’t worry, I had an awesome experience at a giant castle on Sunday that you will hear about sometime soon.

Until next time –

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*Yes, this is spelled wrong. But when you spell ‘lazer’ with a ‘z’ it makes it so much more extreme.

**Ithaca’s EXTREME LAZER X on State Street is definitely worth checking out sometime, though. Don’t worry, they go heavy on the fog.