Doubly Behind

A mystery:


Why would a city as decidedly image-conscious as Santa Barbara permit its chamber of commerce to use the above image on its main page? Could the organization that should rightly have its finger on the pulse of the Santa Barbara business world really not have found a single more aesthetically pleasing image? Something more representative of the city? Or at least a photo depicting only one person wearing unflattering shorts?

The Little Loquat That Could

In the garden behind my parents' house, there grows a loquat tree. It's been there since the summer of 2005, I'd guess, when I moved out of Isla Vista and spent a month at home before I headed to D.C.

Aside from photos and some hazy memories, this loquat tree constitutes my best memento from life in the Pasado House, that backyard wonderland that served as a setting for so many of my college stories. I have a few smaller artifacts, of course — my bamboo lamp, Space Potato — but they all exist in Santa Barbara, where still haven't removed my life all that much from Isla Vista. They somehow don't mean as much as this tree.

The parent loquat didn't even grow on our lawn. We were the "B" half of a duplex; the "A" half had this pruned-to-hell monstrosity that hung over the driveway and occasionally littered it with rotting yellow fruit. I'd seen the species elsewhere — on every block in Isla Vista, and occasionally downtown as well — though had I ever heard the term beforehand, I would have thought a loquat were more like a kumquat than an apricot. I lived at the Pasado House for nearly six months before someone pointed out that we could eat those yellow fruits, before they hit the cement at least. The front neighbors didn't seem to care that we picked the fruit, though I remember them regarding us suspiciously as we filled grocery bags with loquats twice a year. (God bless that year-long Santa Barbara County growing season.) We'd wash them. By and large, I'd eat them, spitting the smooth pits into the garden. I probably consumed a year's worth of potassium in a single harvest.

The Pasado House backyard had room to spare, and the longer I lived there, the more I made dangerous vegetative experiments. Some yielded fairly Frankensteinesque results, but others thrived, including a single loquat potted pit that quickly sprouted leaves. That, I'd estimate, happened no later than Spring of 2004, because the sapling had damn near exploded its pot by the time I brought it to Hollister.

Since going into the San Benito County soil, it has survived two sheep attacks, as well as seasonal frosts it wouldn't have encountered had it remained near its original home. Nonetheless, it's well on its way to full-fledged treehood and will probably grow fruit in the next few years. Though I only see it on the rare occasion I travel back to Hollister, I realized over this last Easter there that I'm glad for that. I probably won't live in Santa Barbara forever. In fact, I doubt I'll be living here even a few more years. But I don't foresee my parents leaving Hollister in the near future. Even on days when I can't imagine ever missing Santa Barbara, it makes me happy to know that I have one of my fonder memories of this place now firmly rooted at my childhood home.

God, I can't believe I let myself use that pun, but I honestly can't think of a more appropriate phrasing.

A small footnote: It helps, I guess, that I have memento doppelgangers here in Santa Barbara. As I mentioned before, loquat trees are everywhere, possibly as a result of some landscaping trend that happened to bypass my hometown. I see no less than three loquat trees on the walk to work.

Sunnycidal

The website for the paper I work for has a design flaw that results in staff members sometimes getting emails that were not intended to go to them. Allow me to explain. If you're reading an article, you can click on the byline to open up a form to contact that person. For example, the form for contacting me looks like this. If you click the link, you'll see that you merely need to put a return email address, type your message and click send, and you'd have every reason to believe that the email would reach me.

This doesn't work, however, if the person being written to lacks a email address at the paper. Basically, any editor or longtime staff member would have one. A free lancer, especially a new one, would lack this, and any emails sent to these people go to a general address that defaults to everybody at the paper, though the website would fails to tell you this. Thus, we occasionally get emails to free lancers praising or criticizing a given article, or maybe asking questions about it. Most of the time, these emails are rather benign. Occasionally, they're awkward and every now and then they're outright hilarious. Whenever one of this accidental mass emails shows in my inbox, I try to find the correct personal email address for the given recipient and put it into the website, so as to prevent this from ever happening again.

In late January, the majority of us at the paper received the below email.

I'm not sure if this was a prank or an honest-to-God email intended for some part-time staffer with a rather tumultuous personal life. Either way, it totally made my day. It's also a rather unsolvable situation, as the sender doesn't specify who he was writing — after all, you wouldn't necessarily include a salutation if you thought an email was going to one specific person — and I feel like anyone who received this would have felt awkward about telling the sender that the details of his failed romance were exposed for everyone at the paper.

I didn't post this for a long time, for fear that it could embarrass someone, but as time passed, I've become more and more convinced that it was, in fact, a joke, perhaps done in an effort to bring the paper staff's attention to this problem.

Now I'm sharing it with you all. If you wrote this, please tell me. In regards to your last question, I think you'd be a fantastic addition to my paper's staff.

Of All the Abbreviations

Nearly forgot.

We ran a story last week that mentioned the San Francisco-based law firm Morrison & Foerster, an institute which I only have awareness of by virtue of its web address, www.mofo.com. Yes, "mofo." I can only imagine that the other meaning of the term "mofo" has been brought to the senior partners' attention and that they chose to keep the web address.

This makes me happy.

Miss Orange Goes on an Adventure

For no good reason that I can recollect, I spent part of Easter weekend photographing a childhood toy — an orange ball that came bearing the name "Miss Orange" and that initially smelled like an orange. At the time, it seemed like a good idea to pose her among various bits of foliage.

Coney Island Disco Palace

Holy handbasket — I think Blogger just revolutionized the way I run this here chunk of webspace by inventing a vaccination against blogging apathy, an affliction that lowered the number of worthwhile posts last month and which also was aptly described on another blog just a few days ago.

Two wonderful words: "Scheduled posting."

Basically, I can make the best of the days I feel the urge to write, schedule the posts to automatically appear at a certain time on a certain day and then go on autopilot while my blog appears nonetheless updated. Of course, this could potentially lead to an awkward situation in which Blogger Drew ends up dead or in a coma or lost at sea and his blog creepily posting new little nothings on pop culture minutiae all the while, but that's really more of a problem for you and less of a problem for me.

A kicker: I scheduled this post to go up ten whole minutes after I finished it. Can you imagine?

Lady Pep

Aly set out this morning to find a sugar-free Red Bull. She returned with the can pictured below.

I could go into the lameness of marketing energy drinks to specific demographics — women, people trying to lose weight, video game players, homosexuals, lesbian gamers on diets — but today I'm just going to note that the can describes Go Girl as "beautiful energy" that contains "SUPER CITRIMAX," which in turn is described as a "mild herbal appetite suppressant." Women and beverage consumers should be insulted. Nothing that even approaches being herbal or mild should ever have the word "super" in its name, nor the suffix "max" nor be spelled in all capitals because "SUPER CITRIMAX" sounds like a Vitamin C colon bomb.

A better name: "Feminenergy."