Entry tags:

joyous occasions i will treasure forever, surreality

In my continuing quest to tag all entries anyone could possibly ever want to read again with informative tags, I re-discovered The Tale of the Mud People.

UC Santa Cruz was a trip. It was broken into eight colleges, each with a different academic focus (now ten or more, I believe.) Mine was Porter, the arts college. The sculpture outside of Porter was known as "The Flying IUD." I was several times able to direct people to pick me up merely by telling them the correct road plus "Turn left at the Flying IUD."

Our mascot was the banana slug. They are shy creatures, rarely spotted, native to the California redwood forests which surrounded the school. The administration was against this choice, feeling that a slug, however large and yellow, lacked fighting spirit, and overruled the students' choice to institute the sea lion. The students rebelled, and the slug was once more crowned. I used to have a T-shirt reading "Fiat Slug." ("Let there be slug.") At my graduation, the provost amazed the audience by delivering portions of the commencement speech via ventriloquism with a banana slug puppet.