My Hotel California

Can you believe that we are just 2 weeks away from spring break?  I definitely can't.  It's pretty crazy to think about.  The quarter has been flying by, even faster than summer quarter did.  

To start things out, here's a picture of the pillars in front of the Kodak, where No Country for Old Men has already been installed at the 2007 winner for Best Picture.  Haven't seen it, probably won't, but man wasn't the Departed awesome or what?

So this week was a pretty good week.  Last weekend I had found out that a friend of mine from Penn State, Matt Case, was coming out here to the West Coast with a bunch of his friends for their Spring Break.  Matt and I were both counselors at Summer's Best 2 Weeks the summer after our freshman years.  Well, Matt's an awesome guy, and I don't actually remember if we have seen each other since camp 2 years ago, but I was definitely looking forward to at least meeting up with him at some point while he was in LA.  

So Thursday night as work is finishing up, I get a call from Matt, telling me he's up at Pepperdine and that he and his friends are coming down to Hollywood and stuff and wanted to know if we could hang out.  I was pretty excited and looking forward to seeing him and meeting the people he was with.  

Well it turned out that he was out here with six other friends who knew each other in random ways but were all in Young Life, and that they didn't really have a place to stay and were hoping to avoid a hotel.  I talked to Rob, but felt bad because my apartment isn't really my apartment, but he was cool with it and we were happy to offer our couch and floor space to them.  

Anyway, I met up with the kids at Hollywood and Highland.  They were all very cool and I got a high five or two right off the bat.  We were going to walk over to Baja fresh to grab some dinner, and as we did Matt and some of his friends were really excited when they saw this girl Haley, the lead singer of a band called Paramore.  I saw her too, and I didn't know who she was at the time, but maybe she can maybe count as my fourth celebrity sighting.  Anyway, we walked into a store, I had to ask one of Matt's friends what store it was, and it was American Apparel.  After looking around in there for a bit, everybody decided they'd rather have pizza, so then we went over to California Pizza Kitchen for some dinner.

On the way over to California Pizza Kitchen, in front of the Jimmy Kimmel Studio and the El Capitan was this set up for some kind of small filming, probably a car commercial or a Jimmy Kimmel spot.  It was kind of interesting, so I took a picture.  Just another night in Hollywood.  Sorry its so blurry!

At dinner, I told them about how cool Mosaic and Erwin McManus are, and they had all actually heard of him.  Some of them were reading his books, too, and one of the guys, Chris, is actually coming out to LA to start a job in the summer, and so he was very interested in learning about it.  It was just fun to be hanging out, eating dinner with a group of cool, solid people like that.

After dinner, we came back to the apartment, and after a few circles around the block, we found a place to park.  We hung out for a little while and then everybody went to bed.  They got up and got on the road to head to San Francisco at six on friday morning.  

So anyway, it was a lot of fun being able to see Matt and meet his friends and it was especially great to be able to help them out with a place to stay and all.  I talked about this to Matt a little and was thinking about it, just about how cool it is to become friends with somebody and even though like we don't go to school together or live near each other, out of nowhere a random opportunity comes up for us to meet up again. 

Just thinking about it, I feel so lucky and blessed to have the connections and relationships with the different people that I have.  Definitely these meetings and opportunities to help each other out are anything but random, and are just awesome ways that I continue to be blessed and inspired by amazing people.  I'm just feeling very thankful for the people that I have met and connected with in my life.  

And you know, as much as it's going to absolutely suck when all of my college friends and I graduate and many of us are led in different directions, its going to be absolutely amazing to have a network of people that love and care about each other to support and and help out one another and meet up whenever we're together.  I know that its inevitable that we'll all fall out of touch with many people after college, but I know that regardless of how much all of us are able to keep in touch, many of those connections will still be there.  That's just really cool, and makes me extremely excited about our post-college years.  

Not quite as excited as I am for Spring quarter, of course, because its going to be fan-freaking-tastic.  

Anyway, Matt and his friends are up in San Francisco today, and are coming back to LA tomorrow, and they might be trying to make it to Mosaic tomorrow night.  That'd be pretty awesome, and I might have an opportunity to help them out with floor and couch space sunday night before they fly home on monday, too.  

Well thats about it for now.  I'm going to probably be spending much of today working on design work for the ccm opera, as next weekend Mom is coming to visit.  It should be a lot of fun and will be great to see her.  I also might have to run over to Best Buy to check out Paramore, since Matt's friends were playing it on the way back from Hollywood to my apartment and it sounded pretty cool.  Plus I think they sang one a Paramore song at Mosaic a few weeks ago.  

Alright, I'm out.  Have a great weekend everybody!

much love,

Alex