Nostalgia

Ah, Cupertino. The only city known to have more Asians than the whole of Asia itself. There are so many possible reasons to hate the city, except it’s nearly impossible to hate it when all your best friends live there. Even though it doesn’t sound possible, there are so many fun things you can do in Cupertino.

Start by planning to watch The Proposal with your friends at Vallco, then sneak into Up instead. Then take pictures in one of those “azn” photo booths, and start a war with your friends: “Hotshot and Otterpop versus Sexy Panda and Snuggles”. Take pictures outside the life sized movie poster board for both 2012 and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. What are Ron and Ginny looking at? There’s nothing up there but a ceiling. Take pictures in front of a store missing a pillar and an awesome purple suit – it’s still there, even after a year. Only later, you come to realize that the date on the camera was set to 130 years in the future.

Celebrate The Middle of Summer with a few of your best friends first by painting a t-shirt in honor of the song and your favorite band, both of which gave you the idea. Start the day by having a car-wash-water-fight. Then go to Garden Gate Elementary, still a little wet, armed with a bagful of chalk and your artistic sense. Draw all over the wall and the floor with Not Graffiti. Look at the angel…who turned into a devil? And is that Jesus 2.0 on the ground? What’s he doing there? 76 Days Of Summer…how will you spend them? And look over there, it’s that boom box you played your favorite songs out of. End the day with a walk to the Mary Avenue Bicycle-Pedestrian Bridge at sunset, listening to “When The Day Met The Night”, the song with the most fitting lyrics for the exact day in the middle of your summer vacation. It’ll be the best day of your life, no doubt about it.

Does your best friend love Mario, and is her fifteenth birthday upcoming? Well then the best thing to do for her birthday would be to grab one of your other best friends, rush over to Jo-Ann’s, and make a couple of candy pillows from Mario Party 8 – the Bowlo, Duelo, and Cashzap candies, to be exact. While making them, watch Pride and Prejudice and laugh yourself silly at Bingley’s stupid little laugh. Blee hee hee. Then laugh again when an 11 year old boy walks in right when Darcy and Elizabeth were just about to kiss and yells loudly, “Just kiss already!”

See how it feels to lie down in the middle of Ann Arbor Avenue with one of your best friends, on your other best friend’s birthday. Play the Rope Game and scare nearly every single driver on the road except for a couple of college-aged students, who drove past, whooping in agreement and giving you the thumbs up.

Next you all go to The Fray Concert. After making three of the coolest shirts ever, decorating them to look like The Fray’s album covers and adding your favorite lyrics on the back, you go to the concert and joke around about everything from Nazis and nachos, cheering wildly when the band finally gets onstage to perform.

Fast forward to Fort Night. You know how they say that sophomores in high school are too old for building pillow forts? Build one no matter what they say. Dress up completely in pink for reasons unknown and eat watermelon with a spoon, even if you hate it, which you do.

Skip to Halloween. Dress up as a pair of Santas, as Toad and Toadette, as two basketball players, and Violet from the Incredibles. Ever heard of that old rhyme “trick or treat, smell my feet”? Forget about it. Instead, sing Jingle Bells. Loudly. And have Toad and Toadette accompany the caroling with beatboxing. Guess who’ll get extra candy?

Now it’s another one of your best friend’s fifteenth birthday, and you spend the evening with her and your other best friend, playing MASH and groaning over ending up with creeps, living in a shack yet magically having the ability to travel everywhere with escalator feet. Then watch Becoming Jane, uncovering so many things you never knew about Harry Potter, Twilight, Pride and Prejudice, and the story you’re writing.

Then attend your and her surprise birthday party. It doesn’t matter that you found out about it before it happened, does it? You’ll still have fun, because of the color-coded m&m’s your friends bought for you, the army of Capri Sun and the tower of your favorite cookies – Oreos. Yellow boxers and apricot jam, aren’t those the best birthday presents ever? No sarcasm intended. End the day by watching Harry Potter while eating the best ice cream cake from Baskin Robbins ever, mainly because a part of the cake matches each one of our friends. You get awesome presents, including t-shirts of two of your favorite bands.

The next thing which you do as a group is go to watch Alice in Wonderland as a birthday party for the first girl out of your group to turn 16. And you eat cake, and give her color-coded sunglasses, and a t-shirt of her favorite band.

Throw a pool party on the last day of school! Dance crazily to silly songs and video tape it. Sing along if you want, because you’re all California Girls… you just don’t wear bikinis on top.

After multiple trips, you’re finally all back in Cupertino as a group, and you decide to start a band together. After much deliberation, you decide on the name The Paper Game, and record covers of “Hey Jude”, originally by the Beatles, and “Nine in the Afternoon”, originally by your favorite band, Panic! At The Disco. The next day, you all video tape an awesome magical music video for Nine in the Afternoon. You spend so many days together, and you’re all having so much fun that you can’t even tell why you laughed so hard at silly jokes. But undoubtedly the best part was when you all sat around the counter, each with a coloring book, and reminisced back to the good old days of kindergarten when the largest scandal was when someone colored Ariel’s hair green.

Yeah. You can do all that in Cupertino, if you’re one of seven best friends. We miss you too, Poornika.