It's lonely at the top.

So Friday night I was in my room listening to the girls on my hall get ready to go wherever they were going, feeling somewhat put out that I hadn't been invited. If I hadn't already had plans for the night, it would have been a pitiful scene. I know I could have gotten myself invited, but it's not the same as being asked. Petty, yes, but I'm telling the truth here. I went out to Coronado with some of the people from the newspaper staff and we ate gelato, walked the beach, and returned to Point Loma to watch an interesting French movie. (Called "Paris Je t'aime," it comprised 20 directors' five-minute shorts depicting loves in and of the city--very cute and thoughtful.)

Saturday I forced myself to sleep in, and after laundry and brunch I sat at my desk doing Spanish homework. Midafternoon, tired of studying alone on a weekend, feeling sorry and pathetic, I wandered down the hallway and got myself invited to go shopping (I told you I could do it if I wanted to). But somewhere between the racks of obscenely priced and ridiculously posturing clothing (I'm sorry, but real rock stars and hippies do not shop at Macy's) I lost my desire for companionship and wanted only to retreat to my dull, uncommercialzed haven. And I did, reveling in the familiar, perverse joy of going to bed at 9:30 on a Saturday night.

Today I was done with trying to find someone to hang out with. I bicycled to church alone, sat in a pew alone, exchanged a few pleasantries as best I could, and came back in time for brunch. But the weather was irresistible, calm and sunny, sparkling and blue, and there was no way I was going to spend it holed up in my room (or tanning, like half my hallmates did). No, I decided to take a page out of Emily Blunt's book and bike to the Ft. Rosecrans National Cemetery out on the naval base.



I once went scuba diving with my dad out by that island in the picture above. I sat next to the grave of someone named Ralph who was born in 1887 and died in 1959, because my grandpa was named Ralph, and it felt appropriate. I spread out with the Madame Bovary I had to read for Lit 203 and commiserated with the wind blowing straight off the water. I thought about the things that one thinks about in a cemetery with the sharp, limitless line of the horizon curving endlessly.



I also thought about getting a road bike. It's embarrassing how many bikers left me in their respective dust paths. One cyclist smiled benignly as he passed me struggling up a particularly steep incline and said, "It's harder without gears, isn't it?" I just agreed politely and kept pedaling. My beach cruiser is cute, but let's face it, not designed for a place whose name literally means "hill."