What happened in between, part 1

I went from April 2012 to August 2013 without writing an entry here, and kind of a lot happened in that gap. Here are some of the highlights…and lowlights.

So in between rejections from the two UCs I applied to (LA, which didn't surprise me, and Santa Barbara, which kinda did), I got an acceptance from California State University, Northridge. Somehow I had applied for their most impacted major, Cinema and Television Arts, and they decided I was worth taking on with my combined 2.83 GPA. Woohoo!
After I finished at Diablo Valley College in May of 2012, the decision ultimately came down to two schools, Northridge and San Francisco State. SF was naturally the first I got to visit since I live an hour away, and…well, I wasn't exactly blown away. I had applied there as a journalism major with cinema as a backup, and while their journalism program is top-notch, I wouldn't have been able to double major in cinema. And on top of that, I'd be commuting again, and I'd had enough of that in 3 1/2 years at DVC. But the biggest push, I think, came from Roxanne. I saw her shortly after the campus visit and my disappointment must have been obvious. Maybe she already knew I was leaning toward Northridge without even having set foot on campus yet because she was pretty high on it. Plus she asked me not to pick SF State just because she was still in the Bay Area, because she was about to apply to medical schools that fall and who knows where she might wind up—she refused to let me sacrifice my own dreams and goals for her, and it made me love her just a little more.

The trip to Northridge happened in early June, just before mom's birthday, and I was sold almost immediately. The proximity to three of the Big Six studios (Disney, WB and Universal), the facilities, cheap flights between Burbank and the Bay, and oh yeah, the fact that the library was used as Starfleet Academy in the reboot of Star Trek didn't hurt either. I sent Rox a picture of my newly printed student ID and said "Well if this doesn't make it official, I don't know what will." With that out of the way, the rest of the summer went incredibly smoothly. The annual huge-ass barbecue with friends saw twenty people descend upon the Treehouse for ribs, burgers, booze, Cards Against Humanity and more—plus my buddy Melville pulled a Walk of Shame/Stride of Pride the next morning, so that was a victory for him. (He and the girl wound up dating for nearly a year after that—his first girlfriend! I was proud of the guy.) Rox and I celebrated our second anniversary with a weekend in Monterey, a trip where I had planned to propose to her had the incredibly long odds of me being accepted to UCLA gone in my favor, but thankfully we were just able to enjoy a couple days of just-us time. (At least when I wasn't shivering and being all sick from an infected bug bite.) And I still remember the last words she said to me the night before I left: "I love you. I'm so proud of you."