I’ve been meaning to write a blog entry for months, now. The last one was in February, right when I passed the year in LA mark. It just feels like now that I’ve been here a year, it shouldn't be about adjusting to being here, anymore, it shouldn't be about the journey to LA; it should be about fine-tuning, about living here. As soon as I say it I know it's unreasonable, but I think there's been a part of me hesitating to admit that I’m still an outsider here, even if more and more of me is becoming an insider. I’d say I have my left leg and arm in the door of Los Angeles. So my torso is still in limb-o.

No worries, though; my torso is doing quite well, what with this 5 classes/week yoga regimen I've been on. I think I’m on the edge of yoga being almost entirely playtime. I have this spot on the right side of my lower back that still pinches when I do deep backbends, but it's lessening I think. First I learned to notice when things hurt, instead of plowing through in typical gymnastics-style. Then I figured out the alignment to keep my knee happy, my shoulders happy, my wrists happy (that was a recent one -- my right wrist just stopped hurting in full wheel, last week). So the back is the last bit, I think. And that would mean getting to spend entire classes just getting fuller in the poses, instead of rehabbing. The focus on the wellness side of the spectrum, instead of on the disease side.

In March I applied, hopefully, for an Acroyoga teacher training. It’s 2 and a half weeks in august, at a retreat near Santa Barbara, backed up against national forest. With a cliff-side jacuzzi. And reportedly amazing vegan food, 3 meals per day. So 2 and a half weeks of doing a combination of acrobatics, yoga, and Thai massage all day, with other incredibly physical people, in heaven. Um yeah.

The speed bump: this year, they decided only to accept applicants who already have yoga teacher certification, which I don't. My friend Celia, who introduced me to Acroyoga, offered to write an enthusiastic letter of recommendation for me. And I asked my favorite yoga teacher, Lucy, as well. And I wrote some pretty nice essays about my experience as a gymnast (14 years), a coach (7 years), a teacher (13 years), a massage therapist (3.5 years), and a yoga student (5 years). So basically, I begged them on my agile knees, and, well, they made an exception for me.

The teacher training will make it so I can teach my own classes in LA. There are only 2 classes in all of LA, and they've been very inconsistent. One of the teachers, my friend Celia, just left for the Peace Corps, to Nicaragua, for 27 months. Another is leaving for New York for the summer. The last one lives about 10 miles away; about average distance, in LA terms. But then, I only have an arm and leg in the door, and they're definitely not straddling anything gas-powered. Unless you want to talk about beans for a minute.

I don't expect to make any real money with this. I just expect to make me real happy with this.

I'm hoping to do a normal yoga teacher training, right afterwards. Which I do expect to make some money with, but not real money. But massage is proving irritating at best, in Los Angeles. The licensing (which is city-based instead of state-based) is an expensive, headache-causing, bureaucratically difficult, offensively prostitute-assuming, practical joke. It must be. For instance, I can go 5 miles west, into Beverly Hills, a city that is surrounded on all sides by Los Angeles, and need a whole new license that costs an additional $1000. In the alternate universe where I’m on a TV show, some audience is laughing hysterically at the absurdity of California.

And the education requirement for massage therapists is super low -- 150 hours in some nearby "cities", and 300 in LA, compared with 600 in Illinois, and the 750 I have. So the market is flooded with sub-par MTs. Which means the whole infrastructure of jobs is aimed at sub-par MTs: low pay, high turnover rate, and ignorant clients.

I wanted to start a private practice, but no one wants to drive to a massage, in LA -- they already drive everywhere else. If they're not going to a full spa with steam and sauna and showers, they want the MT to come to them. I understand it. I wouldn't want to get back in my damn car, either. However, I don't do housecalls. When you work in someone else's home, the work is on their terms. They don't listen to you, and they treat you like a glorified pizza boy. When they come to your private office, they have already chosen to be proactive by coming to you.

Writing work may be just around the corner. If the pilot for a cable channel that Daniel is rewriting gets picked up, he'll be the executive producer, and will hire me on as an assistant. No telling when it might get picked up -- the soonest would be September. Anyway if not this, Daniel seems determined to involve me on everything he works on, so it'll be the next thing. I just sent him a plot outline I’ve been hammering away at for my own screenplay; he said he'd read it that night on the plane to the shooting location for the pilot.

So writing work is likely to happen, and potentially pretty soon -- but it's unlikely to be predictable or constant.

So yoga it is. I don't think it pays great, but I’ll get free classes out of it, which is starting to be worth a lot of cash to me, at 5/week. And it won't slowly break my body, the way massage does when I do enough of it to make a living, at this here crap-paying spa I work at. Speaking of falling apart, the spa is on track to losing all of its most senior employees. There’s been a steady wave of departures since I arrived, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the one that smells bad. A friend of mine who's been there since it opened (a year and a half ago) just left this week. I’d like to be next. The only reason I’ve managed to tolerate the management this long is that I genuinely like and care about my coworkers.

My circle of friends is finally big enough that for my birthday this past weekend, when I only invited folks I feel really comfortable around, it was still enough people to be a party.

So this is it, the last year of my 20s! I like to occasionally remind people who get upset about turning 30 or 40 or what-have-you, that if we had an extra finger on each hand, we'd count in base 12.

(As it applies to this example, I’d have 6 extra years until my 30s.)

But I do sense a shift in my M.O.. Not that it's not always shifting, either. I suppose birthdays just provide an arbitrary span of time for contemplating your life, a reminder to consider the concept of aging.