The past few months, I’ve had several people try to shove their spiritual beliefs down my throat. In California, sometimes it seems like everyone has an belief system and they are selling their wares. So I’ve been digging into history to understand why California is, uh, like this.

Apparently I’m not alone. Writer Erik Davis is publishing a book called The Visionary State: A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape. The SF Chronicle has an interview with him about it. I liked some of his observations. For example, he points out how many (most?) of California’s kids grow up without religion, in what he calls a California heathen:

I was not brought up in any religion. I was not baptized, and I didn’t go to church as a kid. We celebrated Christmas, but in a cultural way, the way some Jews who aren’t religious refer to themselves as “cultural Jews.” And other than that, it was just California. It was skate parks and the beach and boogie-boarding and pot and Led Zeppelin. It was just that kind of “land of the body.” I think that’s the sort of generic culture here. It’s a culture of the body, of sensation, of the outdoors and the kind of goofy things that people do in the suburbs.

He also talks about how this left him feeling a little ungrounded and wanting to understand why his culture has such a different approach to religion than everywhere else. Some of his thoughts are pretty interesting and do help explain the weirdness of California weirdoes.

I have a small article in this issue of Bust about Switch, an online show that is designed to teach girls how to combine tech and crafty stuff. Excitement and creation!

People have been asking when I’m going to post about my Canada trip. So here it is:

From June 30-July 4, Kyle and I went to Seattle to visit his dad. On July 1, we took a clipper from downtown Seattle to Victoria, BC.

Victoria is a lovely, smallish city of about 300,000 people. It is also the capital of British Columbia. While the Northern tip of Vancouver Island get as much as 300 inches of rain a year, Victoria is protected by mountain chains on either side so that bad weather blows right over it. As a result, it has a pleasant Mediterranean climate capable of growing grapes and all kinds of flowers.

We arrived on Canada Day. After we checked into the hotel, we had dinner and then wandered around the city. Everyone was wearing red-and-white, the colors of the Canadian flag, and bands were playing everywhere we looked– including a street musician playing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. (I was extremely excited about this and my new Anne of Green Gables snowglobe because I am a nerd who likes nerdy things.)

(The lawn in front of the capitol building was covered with people.)

(Canadian children have to pee!)

After that, we sat on the lawn outside the hotel and watched fireworks. The show had some of the biggest explosions I’ve ever seen, but the finale was a little weak.

On July 2, we took a tour bus to The Butchart Gardens. This massive set of five gardens is the work of Jennie Butchart, the wife of Robert Butchart, who made a fortune in concrete. Although the garden didn’t have a lot in terms of unusual plants or surprising layouts, the place is absolutely stunning. We spent two hours walking through it.

(The Sunken Gardens–formerly a rock quarry)

(Kyle and me)

(The Italian Garden was my favorite)

After that, we went shopping, visited the Victoria museum, saw an IMAX show, and went to a bug museum, which was full of interesting insects, including the gorgeous Orchid mantis. At the end of the day, we had dinner on the 18th floor of a hotel. I tried an elk steak, which was a little on the gamey side, but worth trying. As we ate, we saw the sun set over the city.

On the way back, the capitol building was lit up like a Lite-Brite.

On July 3, we took the clipper back to Seattle and went to a baseball game. It was the Tacoma Rainiers against the Fresno Grizzlies, who lost. It was only the second baseball game I have ever been to. I really liked it once we were in there, although my main entertainment was a three-year-old named Hunter who kept turning around and poking us in the knees and then doubling over in laughter when we pretended to be shocked. Also, 10 skydivers jumped from a plane hovering 13,000 feet above our head and landed in the stadium.

On July 4, we flew back home. We got into San Francisco around 9:30 p.m., right when fireworks were going off. It was amazingly beautiful. Between the grids of orange and yellow streetlights, personal fountains glittered like hundreds of tiny mirrors refracting in a light, and then the bigger fireworks would burst up suddenly, unexpectantly delicate and colorful. You haven’t seen fireworks until you’ve seen them from the air.

I don’t know what I have been filling my time with, but it isn’t blogging. I don’t want to take time away from work (and IMing with my pals) during the day to write a blog post and I seem to be in a funk at night. Therefore, I have been away.

To make it up to you, here is a joke stolen from here:

How many screenwriters does it take to change a light bulb?
Answer: Ten.
1st draft. Hero changes light bulb.
2nd draft. Villain changes light bulb.
3rd draft. Hero stops villain from changing light bulb. Villain falls to death.
4th draft. Lose the light bulb.
5th draft. Light bulb back in. Fluorescent instead of tungsten.
6th draft. Villain breaks bulb, uses it to kill hero’s mentor.
7th draft. Fluorescent not working. Back to tungsten.
8th draft. Hero forces villain to eat light bulb.
9th draft. Hero laments loss of light bulb. Doesn’t change it.
10th draft. Hero changes light bulb.

Please stop nagging me. Every time I turn on the TV, some celebrity is making me aware of a cause that desperately needs my help. For example, in the two hours of TV I watched yesterday, Mia Farrow told me about orphaned children in Africa, some TV actor reminded me about breast cancer, and Leonardo DiCaprio told me how he’s worried about the environment.

Helping is nice. And I know you would all like Angelina Jolie’s career–after all, without her concern for ailing third-world nations, she would be known for being a crazy husband-stealer who, while undeniably gorgeous, is, let’s face it, a pretty bad actress. But come on. I have to listen to Dustin Diamond, Screech from Saved By the Bell, warn me about foreclosures because he might lose his house now? It offends my sensibilities to see people use the sick, the poor, the orphaned, and the financially clueless to get themselves some publicity. I can handle it sometimes, sure, but all the time? Celebrities, you have overstepped your place in society. Please go back to having affairs and going in and out of rehab, and I will go back to feeling quietly superior.

Thank you.

So, you go away for five days.

Your trusty and reliable friend comes over and waters your garden and pets your neurotic cat.

You come back, scamper out to your garden, and discover that your zucchini have grown to the size of a man’s forearm.

Ummm … yeah …

I guess I will be needing my mom’s zucchini pie recipe after all.

I am back. I will post pictures of our fabulous trip to Canada later this week. In the meantime, I forgot to mention I have a cover story in the most recent Pacific Sun.

From 1910-1940, Chinese immigrants were held at the immigration station on Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay. Because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, these immigrants were confined in prison-like conditions from anywhere to a few days to a few years while they waited to find out whether or not they could enter the U.S. With nothing else to do, the Chinese began writing poetry on the walls of the immigration station, which the state park department is now attempting to restore. Some of the poems are quite poignant. This was my favorite:

The silvery red shirt is half covered with dust
A flickering lamp keeps this body company.
I am like pear blossoms which have already fallen;
Pity the bare branches during the late spring.

Read more about this part of our history in my article.