Robin "Avatar" Carr

I’ve always believed you can tell a lot about a person by the type of bagel they order. You can tell even more if they get flavored cream cheese. In light of this, I suggested to meet with Robin at the Bagel Café on a lazy end-of-May day. Arriving a few minutes late because I needed my Starbucks, I sadly used my credit card for my three dollar and fifteen cent order. I knew I needed to save those 3 one dollar bills for my upcoming delicious bagel. Noticing his shaggy brown hair, non-commercialized t-shirt that I forgot to ask about, and towering height, at least compared to me, I asked, “so what bagel are you getting?” I thought he told me a blueberry bagel with plain cream cheese, but I would soon find out that I was mistaken. He suggested we sit outside at the nearby park; an excellent suggestion considering the Santa Barbara sunny weather and an unusual one considering most people suggest to sit on the chairs right outside.

Sitting across from one another at a nearby bench, he whipped out his bagel which to my surprise had bruisy colored cream cheese. As I mentioned before, it takes a particular sort of character to order flavored, particularly non-strawberry flavored, cream cheese. Usually strawberry cream cheese is just for girls. But blueberry? Who orders blueberry cream cheese? Apparently Robin does- which intrigued me more than I’d like to admit. Looking around, I couldn’t help but remark how beautiful it was outside, how much I love the parks around the area, and how there is a grave merely four feet away. He nodded and agreed about the first two, then seemed to ignore- probably for the better- the last comment. After finishing our bagels and, on my part breaking the remainder of mine up into pieces on top of my grande-americano-sweetened with no room for sugar drink, we started getting down to business. Somewhere along the way talking about theoretical physics, I started taking notes about black holes. He said that, “Black holes suck everything in.” He added that you would think that because they slowly suck everything in and get bigger and bigger, then they’d eventually take over the world. To the contrary, he said, “if nothing is next to a black hole, they start to lose mass because positive matter and antimatter cancel each other out.” I couldn’t help but thinking about how much money they could make on zit cream if, as the zit grows in size, the cream diminishes it more and more until it’s gone to “the point of no return.”

He also mentioned that if you get sucked into a black hole, it would stretch your body out like that stretching torture machine in The Princess Bride. Thinking that this might be the last time to ask space questions, I had to mention, “so why isn’t Pluto a planet anymore?” I’ve seen the facebook group, actually was part of it, but never summoned the ambition to wikipedia it. He laughed and informed me that it’s an astroid from the Kuplar belt. At this point I noticed that Robin made the space stuff interesting, but I was still curious about some of his guilty pleasures. He said that he’s addicted to t.v., especially the Nickelodeon show Avatar. Actually, he said that it is currently his favorite show. I looked at him skeptically, but he defended it by saying, “No, it’s really cool.” He explained that four classical elements earth, wind, water and fire attack everyone using real Chinese martial arts moves. Apparently the airbending uses Tai Chai. I asked him how he could possibly know this and he said that he used to do martial arts. I was still skeptical he could tell what moves the animated characters were using and he added, “I actually looked it up on Wikepedia.” Without Wikepedia, he would never know that the one blind character uses Southern praying mantis Kung Fu. He said that while he watches it which he got his “friend” hooked on too, he enjoys eating the Avator fruitsnacks. At this point, I decided that I really liked Robin. He wasn’t afraid to admit embarrassing things. Next I asked if he likes any other sort of activities and he said swingdancing. Seeing his laugh and hearing him talk so passionately about Avatar, I pictured him swing dancing in his room with a blue blueberry flavored fruit snack hanging out of his mouth. Also, Nickelodeon would be on in the background.

You might think that Robin has interesting and varied interests, but he had just begun. He started talking about Middle Eastern history and military robots. Apparently, a military robot can fly around in the sky and shoot people with advisement from humans. The military is currently working on allowing them to operate on its own. However, the problem is that it can recognize people, but not distinguish friends from enemies. The implication of these UVA’s in future wars is that, if they replace soldiers, there will be no cost to start wars because no one will lose their men. Somewhere along the way of discussing- or rather him introducing me to technological advances- he notices a man on a very tall 10-15 feet unicycle peddling around the street. We were distracted and then changed the topic to books. He said that the DaVinci code is like the Scooby Doo mystery show. I mentioned some embarrassing books I’ve read and we waged a bit of a war as to the most embarrassing. I’m not sure who won, but he said that over his summer when fellow lit majors were struggling to finish The Idiot, he made a contest with his friend to see who could read the entire series of Animorphs the fastest. Rivaled only by Goosebumps, Animorphs, if you don’t recall, are those books with a cat who turns into a lion or something on the cover. I also thought that they were the books where you could flip to different pages for alternate endings, but he assured me that he thought only a few of the books were like that. He lost the contest, by the way, which was probably for the best.

Expressing that I quit reading Harry Potter by the middle of the third book, he voiced some advice for the Harry Potter fans. If you want to get it the first night it’s available, then you face a dilemma. You need to find that line between being too tired to enjoy it fully and wanting to read it as soon as possible. I hope Robin finds that line as well as the other readers. Nearly two hours after the first bite of my bagel, he points out a crater covered by a bush and said “Is that a tree or did the bush just eat that?” Sensing the burn on my backside and my itchy skirt, I was a little bit sad that I had to continue on with my day after my interview with Robin. By far one of the sweetest, most complex interesting guys I’ve met so far, I wish him the best of luck with Harry Potter and everything else.

Mrs. Bit O Honey: A story in Joseph Mitchell Style

Lee Desser had straight mousy brown hair, a reserved complexion and very dirty shoes. “Shoe’s don’t say anything about a person,” she said. “And they certainly don’t say anything about me.” She came to Santa Barbara in 2007, expecting sunny days, rich friends and, above all, a tranquility that would be her excuse for her failure as a writer. She was born into a family consisting of her father, mother, and younger sister , which unbeknowengst to her sister, she held in the highest regard. As a primer expert on how to overcome psychological and behavioral problems in order to receive pets from her parents- one cat and one dog- she knew that her life would be in order. As a middle school material girl, Claire retained a dignity from prominent adults often lost with the application of makeup, addition of short skirts, and removal of nail-polish individuality. “Claire’s like one of those pretty magazine girls that you convince yourself is secretly suffering from low self-esteem in order to make yourself feel better,” she frequently brought up. “If you ask her ‘How are you today?’ you can’t help but shutter from the answer because when she replies ‘Just great,’ you can’t help but feel that she actually is, which just makes it all the more unbearable.”

In my time spent with Lee, she rarely referred to her father. When her sixth grade humanities teacher displayed charts of a rollercoaster and of a straight line and asked, “what are your relationships with people like?,” she thought ‘like a rollercoaster with the exception of my father.’ “My father would have the kind of funeral that others dream their lives for,” she said. People he had lost contact with would come to the podium and tell brief anecdotes about the time he treated their nineteen person table to an all-you-can eat brunch or how he took the role as the father figure for their son, they would say. He lived a kind, decent life; one Lee aspired both to live and avoid. His success as a person and failure as a freak intimidated and disinterested her like a solved Rubics cube. “We rarely fight, but the only time I reveal myself is when I’m having problems with my mom.”

Lee used to think that her mother secretly despised her because she gave up her career in order to have kids. “When I was little, it always seemed like my mom was pregnant, but no babies ever came out. I wonder if she was depressed or relieved,” she said. In recent years, she has accepted that when parents say they love their kids equally and couldn’t imagine their lives without them, they’re full of bull. “From what I can fathom, parents are a lot like kids, just older and less curious.” Her dream is to live in a Alzheimer’s retirement home on Ocean and Montana.

Lee loves her family and hopes that one day her kids will write a favorable short biography of herself. She hopes that she doesn’t die of type two diabetes from eating too much candy bit-o-honey which can be found at K-Mart.