Santa Barbara Parties

What up world,

I just came back from Santa Barbara. The pictures will be posted up soon. I had the honor of rollin' with the infamous League of Pogi Gentlemen. We left around Thursday morning at 10. Got to Santa Barbara around 4. Sound check happened around 5:30. And the show started at 8. The acts were good. Probably one of the most notable was this girl, Gigi, from San Diego. LPG did their thing and got good crowd reaction. After the show, we ate at Super Cuca's, famous for the finest Mexican food in Santa Barbara. And then we proceeded to the afterparty. And let me tell you this: those SB kids really know how to party. This is what I really wanted to talk about. The differences between Berkeley's party scene and SB's party scene are very obvious and yet there are very important subtleties. Oh yeah, and we came back Friday.

The Ingredients of a Good Party (as experienced from Santa Barbara)

• The girl to guy ratio has to be at least equal to or greater than 1.
• Alcohol, music, and dancing seem to be very appropriate. Anything less than that seems to be inappropriate.
• Fame doesn't hurt. But if it's a really good party, then it doesn't really matter.
• The girls were hot, and yet they seemed to make no distinction of preference whether you were ugly or not. You are automatically accepted.
  
• I guess you could say that people in Berkeley would classify SB girls as sluts. But I didn't get that at all at Santa Barbara. This is weird for me to say, but it's the first time I noticed the difference between slutiness and an open sexuality. The girls at SB are examples of the latter. Or maybe it could be me just trying to convince myself that there's a difference to cope with the idea that I was rubbing elbows with sluts, but I highly doubt it. I would argue that sluts is an elitist term (with negative connotations and connections to gold digging or attempted shallow associations with popular persons through sex). What's the difference in SB? Even if they were sluts, it meant a lot to me that the girls used their slut energy to make EVERYONE, including us out-of-towners/strangers, feel comfortable, and not just a select few. And to me, that's not slutty at all. It's a lot better than going to a Berkeley party, being a resident, and still feeling awkward with people you see on campus all the time.
  
• The guys were dope too. They were just as friendly as the girls. In Berkeley, it seems like we like to take our academic competitiveness and bring it to the fiesta, which effectively kills the fiesta. Maybe the problem is that Berkeley dudes make it too obvious that they're competing with each other for sex. The testosterone levels drive the males to give each other cold stares or express overly aggressive machismo behavior. And it wasn't even a big thing in SB. Guys'll just ask, "What you drinking?" or "That's a dope ascot you got on." (No homo) It's just little phrases like that that break the ice in a big way.
• SB has a better sense of what the purpose of a party is. SB Kids party for the sake of partying and having fun. Berkeley kids party to avoid family issues, forget about personal problems, or to run away from the last midterm or the next midterm you're gonna take. BIG DIFFERENCE.
• If you're standing on the wall, the girls will pull you to dance.
• If you signal a girl, she'll probably dance with you.
• The sign of a good party is being able to do nothing and having it still be easy to approach practically anyone.
• The hand shakes are long and lingering, and not in a creepy way. To me, that made all the difference in the world. It was almost like them saying, "Hey, we're all humans here. There's no need for fear between anyone." Also, when they see a player, they be givin' high five.
• In SB, they really do party like rock stars. It seems so pathetic in UC Berkeley how much people invest in their own image. SB people have their image, and yet they let their personalities dictate who they are. Essentially, the Bears are just fakers.
• They know when to stop drinking. Berkeley people don't decide that they're drunk until they're throwing up.
• There was a bum, who also happened to be a pirate, who also happened to be the only bum on campus, and I wasn't afraid at all when he shook my hand. I lied, the bum pirate had a bum girlfriend.
  
• They say that Santa Barbara was the STD capital of the world. But after experiencing SB, we were convinced that rumor was fabricated by UC's like Berkeley so that the girls have an excuse to be snobby and make it totally natural for regular-people-who-just-want-to-meet-people to be portrayed as weird or stalkerish. It was hard to swallow that the parties we've been going to defeated its own purpose before they even began. Parties exist to socialize with other people, not to stand around in your own little group and have hifalutin ideas of how much cooler your group is compared to other groups in the room.

It was really difficult driving back from Santa Barbara to Berkeley. The nostalgia automatically set in. They really have something special down there. We have our highlights too, but it was nice to experience a parallel universe, where space and time were very distorted. I'm not going to say that we were cheated out of a proper college experience because I don't believe that. To be honest, it would be difficult to party like that every week. But I will say that we were cheated out of a proper college party experience. I'm glad that I got to see what one was like. We kind of realized that we can't change the environment up here. The best we can do is change ourselves.

Thank you to all those who showed us a good time at Santa Barbara. It must mean a lot if I'm actually writing a thoughtful post.

-Cas Ruffin


(photo courtesy of iciwici)