phoenix alternative

Tonight was the Phoenix Night showcasing the very best of Westmont tallent in music, poetry and art. It was a really rad night and Rachel Petty did a really amazing job producing all of this. I was honored to have one of my digital pictures chosen to be displayed tonight as well as published in the Phoenix '12 magazine that comes out next week. This is NOT the picture that was chosen, HERE is that photograph. This one is an alternative - it's basically the exact same shot but this time I focused on the actual sunglasses rather than through them.

ONE WEEK

one week and these stupid sad faces will be no more! For the frist time in the better part of a year we can actually talk without using efing skype. I can't tell you how sick and tired I am of slow internet connections with lagging audio and pixelated faces!!

the key to success:

dance in the street with a penguin suit on

key #2: always keep a penguin suit in your trunk like Taylor

Anne Marie Lisa

My 99 year old italian great-grandmother: my Mama Lisa. She's the core of my family: our strength, our wisdom and our inspiration. She's honestly in better health than I am these days. This was her at Easter, just as beautiful and classy as ever! 

my brothers need help

My brothers need your help! Two of my best friends, Nathan and Josiah, need help raising funds in order to come back to the ever increasingly expensive Westmont next Fall!! If you can donate any of your time, energy or money, please do!! Any little bit helps! Check out their FACEBOOK PAGE for more information!!

 

formal attire: go big or go in the ocean

Bedouin Sheikh

don't you know we're dangerous

we'll kill you

little cousins

frigid baptisms

sandy celebration

Easter is by far my favorite day of the year. Christmas get's all the holiday hype, but I tell you this: Jesus' birth would have not ment much if he hadn't DIED on the cross and RISEN again!

Easter the real hap-happiest day of the year folks! My church, the River Church of the South Bay, has this tradition of meeting early early in the morning to celebrate this joyest of days at the beach, and it's by far my favorite thing we do! The weather could not have been better this year, thank you LORD for that! As we celebrated Christ dying on the cross for all of humanity and the resurrection after three days, we were surrounded by the beauty of God's wonderful creation! Throughout the morning we listened to the waves crashing next to us and watched dolphins continuously pass by as well as pelicans dive bombing into the ocean. It was such a blessed Easter - HE IS RISEN! 

this kid...

part of me really wishes he had this in Europe just to see the looks he'd get. the other part of me is embarrassed to call Matt my friend with this on...

practice makes perfect

butterfly

singing in the rain

It was that time of the spring semester again. The entire campus came to a standstill for one week (well really for weeks before but professors don't seem to care about that). SPRING SING WEEK! On Saturday nearly the entire student population - granted there are only 1200 of us - with our friends, families, alumni, faculty and basically every single person in California that is somehow related to Westmont College packed into the Santa Barbara Bowl for a night of epic proportions. And by that I mean us students making absolute fools of ourselves and showing off our nonexistent vocal abilities in 8 minute skits. Dorms competing vigorously against each other (guys and girls split except in my tiny dorm) all for a pizza party - oh and absolute bragging rights. 

My dorm, Emerson, has never in the history of Spring Sing even placed. This year we set out to change that. Expectations were extremely high for my dorm, but we were prepared to deliver. As I'm driving down to the bowl, a few rain drop started to fall on my window. Then a few more, faster and faster they droped. By the time I get to the bowl, it's close to pouring. The vast majority of everybody's props and costumes are made of cardboard and water based paint - not good. But, as they say, the show must go on, and go on it did! It poured while we waited in line for over an hour outside the bowl and while we took our seats - the students sitting in the now half flooded pit. By the grace of God, the rain stopped and the skies cleared right before the fist skit went on - and yes because this is a Christian college everybody was praying for it to clear up. I guess God wanted to see the show too, and no dorm disappointed. And honestly, the rain made the night so much more memorable. It was epic.

Apart from some soaking wet costumes, out act went almost flawlessly. We had the entire Santa Barbara Bowl laughing nonstop. When the last dances had been danced, and the last songs sung, it was time for the awards to be handed out. The whisper in the pit was that it had to be Emerson taking home the gold. There had never been an Emerson skit like ours, we could almost smell the gold. When the awards were handed out, we made history but fell one place short of gold. Page Men went home with the gold, Emerson silver, and Armington Women took the bronze. 

I can't deny that I wasn't a little bummed. Page Men were good, but I thought we were better. And I've only heard from students that it should have been Emerson, but o well. We still made history and we had a ridiculous amount of fun in the process. Plus we made the front page of Westmont's newspaper, not page men. 

Here are a few film shots from our soaking wet evening:

 EMERSON TOGETHER! FOREVER! FOREVER!