Santa Monica Double Misfortune

I've spent the last two Saturdays down on Santa Monica Beach with some new friends from the Santa Monica singles ward. And although I had fun both times, in both cases it was slightly mitigated by an odd turn of events.

I got invited to the first beach party after I became Facebook friends with the sister of one of my sister's friends (got it?). However, when I got to the beach on Saturday morning and called her to find out where the party was, she told me that she wasn't coming after all. So I was essentially crashing a beach party full of people I had never met, but when I finally found the group they had been alerted about my arrival and they were all super-welcoming. We played much volleyball and just hung out for hours, and just before leaving I decided that I wanted to take a quick dip in the ocean. So a new friend of mine and I walked down towards the crashing waves, stopping unexpectedly about ten feet before the water due to a sudden flash of pain emanating from my left foot.

My first thought was that I had stepped on a jellyfish or some broken glass, but after dropping to the ground and inspecting my foot I couldn't find any apparent cause for the rush of pain. I had my friend examine my foot and he found buried in between my second and third toes the entire back half of a bee. He pulled it out and then spied the front half the selfsame bee flailing around on the sand. In the vast expanse of coastline stretching up and down Santa Monica, I happened to locate and step in the one square inch with a bee in it.

Back when I was on my mission I got a freak bee sting inside a grocery store when I grabbed a payphone receiver with an unsuspecting bee sitting on it (and had a similar, albeit much more extroverted "where did this blinding flash of pain come from?" moment). My hand swelled up so badly that it looked like an inflated doctor's glove for about two weeks. I was afraid that my foot would swell up similarly, but I reasoned that I was at least an hour drive away from home and since I was mere inches from the ocean it wouldn't hurt to stroll into the water for a minute or two. The icy blast of Pacific Ocean water actually made me forget the pain in my foot, and I stayed in and swam around for a good 20 minutes. After I got out it didn't seem swollen and it wasn't hurting, so I went out to dinner with my new friends and then took a long stroll down around Venice Beach (which I found to be a filthy magnet for the scuzziest people from all corners of the earth) before finally heading home.

However, when I woke up the next morning my second toe (index toe?) was crazy swollen and it really hurt to walk on it. (Later that evening I also had some serious chills and a fever, which may or may not have been related to the bee sting - any doctors out there want to chime in?) I spent most of the week with a subtle limp, but the toe was finally back to normal just in time for the next beach trip.

So last Saturday I rolled down Ocean Park Blvd, turned off on 2nd Street, and slid straight into a rockstar parking spot. I gathered up my beach accoutrements and marched down towards the beach. However, after a few steps I realized that I ought to have put in my contacts before engaging in swimming, volleyball, etc. So I grabbed my contacts from my bag and, using the roof of my car as a makeshift table, made the eyewear switch.

After the drive home I once again gathered up my accoutrements before going inside, but I realized one thing was missing: my glasses. I searched for them in my bag and under the seats of my car, but I knew exactly where I had last left them - on the roof of my car. The next day was Sunday, so I popped in my contacts and went to the local singles ward in Thousand Oaks, but ten minutes into the meeting it occurred to me that if I left right then I would have time to drive the 45 miles to the street where I lost my glasses and still make it on time to attend the ward with my new Santa Monica beach friends.

I knew it was highly unlikely that I would find my glasses at all and even less likely that they would be intact, but these were the very first and only pair of glasses I had ever owned and I wanted some closure with them. So about an hour later I pulled onto 2nd Street and crawled up and down the curb looking for them, like a soldier returning to the battlefield to retrieve the battered corpse of a fallen friend. After about five minutes I found my sad glasses lying in the gutter about twenty feet down from where I had parked, smashed flat with the lenses nowhere to be found.

I went through three stages pretty quickly: amazement that I had actually managed to find them at all, sadness at their pathetic condition, and acceptance, since I had been thinking for years that I should try out a new look after wearing the same frames for almost twelve years.

So what do you think - is Santa Monica Beach the new Sports Night? Will misfortune strike again if I dare return? This is California, after all, and there are plenty of other beaches to choose from.