01/05/08 - so sit back, and watch the oceans

waking up at 12 in the morning when I usually get up at 7 is a rare and beautiful thing. it wasn't hard to keep asleep those extra 5 hours seeing as the rain was pouring down and lulling my mind into a liquid state. after seeing the neon numbers on the clock i realized that i had roughly 4 hours till i hat to tail on out of my house to meet up with jordan. after watching some degrassi on the laptop i started getting ready at four, completely forgetting to pack my pajamas for cath's. my mother drives me to the el cerrito plaza where we check out the sidekicks at the t-mobile sotre before meeting up with jordan at starbucks. she gets nothing while i get a tall mocha frapp, the usual. (this is part of her bday present to me).we hop on our bart train to fremont and as we head further south, the weather just gets more and more vicious looking. it's night out now and we wait for cath to pick us up. the stations seems almost empty and we ringtone battle for a bit. cath's familiar car drives up and we jump in. i whip out my directions to the venue and we're on our way....after sloshing through a flooded section of the parking lot of course. after following the directions that lead us off the freeway and into a residential area, we realize we are anywhere but downtown san jose and that our directions were completely screwed. i call up chris and he tells us we need to go in the exact opposite direction and we eventually get into downtown and find the venue, but accidentally take the wrong street, and are completely going out of our way for a total of 10 minutes. once we find it again, correctly this time, we park and started walking toward the crowd of people towards the middle of the block. before we know it, a familiar face is coming towards us yelling "happy birthday!" and i get attacked with a hug. i feel happy that i'm with people that actually remembered my birthday this year. after lingering outside, feeling less out of place after nic's greeting we head inside to the dimly lit venue, pay and get our wrist bands. cath and i had seen these bands 3 weeks ago, so we decide to find the bathroom for jordan and explore the venue. jordan find the bathroom and returns advising us "it's wet." we walk around while waiting for the pilot's wife and ashes ashes to come on, all the while not being able to escape some seemingly familiar faces. finally it's before the start of the pilot's wife set and the three of us trudge to the font of the stage. the pilot's wife's semi short set blows me away and the different contrast lighting they used was pretty interesting. as they finish and ashes is setting up, we peek at the set list to see how many songs they're going to fit in. they take the stage with an amazing amount of "woo!" and applause and start into their first song. their set is fabulous as usual with a shoutout to the birthday girl, moi, right before my favorite song. as fabulous as their sets usually are, this one had the highest energy level i'd ever seen them give off. it seems bumped up 100 more times. they end, and seeing as this is a cd release show, jordan buys me their new cd, aries, for my birthday as well. with another "happy birthday" and a hug, we head outside and wait for jordan to get picked up by her dad. (oh the dad jokes. it will never end.) cath and i are shaking from the cold and walk to the car, and head back to the freeway with the intention of getting some well needed in n out once back in fremont. we listen to some rediscover and talk about hydroplaning which we actually do once, and finally pull into the in n out parking lot around midnight. we both order the same thing: #2, no onions. aw..how cute. once we get back to cath's we stay up till, oh, around 4:30, 5ish in the morning and crash, me in my clothes, no pajamas.