Life, liberty, and the pursuit of Patrick Chung's slow-ass face

I left this town in 2005 with the idea that nothing new or exciting ever really happens around these parts, which is why I decided to come back as little as possible. Palo Alto is to great place to grow up and great place to retire, but not a good place for someone in the prime of his life to hang around - kind of like salmonella living in your colon. (Salmonella, the bug responsible for typhoid, is transmitted via the fecal-oral route. This literally gives the phrase "Typhoid Mary: a lady in the street but a freak in the bed" a new world of meaning.)

Surprise, surprise: I've been back in Palo Alto for all of eighteen hours and already some spongeworthy things have happened.

Exciting happening number one: the UC Berkeley presence in the heart of downtown Palo Alto apparently has increased fifteen bajillion-fold. Walking down University Ave. with long-lost pal Jugant, we passed by The Sports Gallery. It's a nice, high-end sports memorabilia store that, growing up, I had always seen while in downtown but never really cared about, since most of their stuff was about teams or sports I didn't really care about, i.e. beisbol, U$C, ice hockey, Stanford (well okay a little bit, but not enough to buy the stuff), and all those other unimportant teams not named "The San Francisco 49ers."

On this sunny Bay Area day, however, as we casually strolled by The Sports Gallery on our way to Pizza My Heart, blurry familiar images flashed just outside the periphery of my right side, definitely enough to make me do a double take.

Script Cal...? Blue and gold helmet? Whaaassa haaappen?

It was a "BEAST MODE-AUTOGRAPHED MEMORABILIA ALL OVER THE WINDOW DISPLAY AND THE STORE SHELVES wait I think my pants are damp and warm yep there it is" moment.

Long story short, with the help of a little government tax return, I am now the proud new owner of my favorite moment of Cal football 2006, except this time it's actually WORTH SOMETHING:


Gordon: 1, Patrick Chung: still -$12,974.72 for mandible surgical repair and psychiatric therapy.

AND! The day goes on! I also put a down payment for a BEAST MODE-autographed replica full-size helmet.

But all would not go as planned for the day. Unfortunately, having just returned from LA, I had not yet done all my laundry, and so the only clothing I had left was one of my UCLA shirts, a simple gray shirt that writes "University of California Los Angeles." Simple, unpretentious, non-bombastic (I love that word).

After making my order at the Starbucks on this very same street that finally gave me a reason to love downtown Palo Alto, my love shattered in pieces like the skull of a newborn Chinese girl against hard concrete.

THE DOUCHEBAG BARISTA AT THE STARBUCKS WROTE "GO TROJANS" ON MY CUP. This was, of course, unacceptable, and so, with my ever-handy mini-Sharpie, I made the world right once again:




I can see the conference talk now:

"Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us this afternoon. In collaboration with a number of many of the best universities in the country, we would now like to present the conclusions of our twenty-year study on the correlation between the quality of tertiary education and post-graduation careers in the United States.

Among the most prominent examples of considerable success came from the University of California, Berkeley, widely cited as not only the best public research university in the country but the entire world over. What does a Berkeley degree mean in the country? We have found that it results in highly-sought attributes such as eternal leadership of prime marching bands, freaking hot/top-flight athletes, and the eventual ability to become hotshot dentists who can establish themselves in Santa Monica and purchase really, really badass cars, like a Mercedes C63 AMG.


(No, you can't tell that's an AMG, but trust me, it is, it's fucking sexy, and it belongs to my cousin, MCB '91.)


Unfortunately, we have found that the spectrum for this correlation is rather wide. On the other end of the spectrum, we now list a prime example from some school in the Los Angeles vicinity: nothing more than a minimum-wage barista working for a company rapidly shutting down hundreds of locations across the country.



The Trojan Network: your gateway to crappy coffee and steamed milk.