From the 3rd Coast to Lalaland

2008-05-21T11:26:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-02-16T10:04:00.000-08:00

Day before yesterday, I went to a job interview. The writer/producer, Daniel, for whom I've been doing research, recommended me for a receptionist job with his manager. It's a low-paying "Industry" entry-level job, justifying (justifiably) it's low pay with the incredible opportunity for meeting people from every level of the game. The two-going-on-three-person company encourages their receptionist to chat with the clients, get coffee, form friendships.

There's also the possiblity (maybe (possibly)) of working for Daniel as an assistant on a new show for a cable channel. He assured me that if I get the receptionist gig, he will steal me away if the show gets made, and he winds up needing an assistant. If (if (if)).

I cobbled together an interview outfit, realizing the travel shirt I bought recently would work for an office -- a good thing, since I own absolutely no other button-downs, and my shopping muscles are exhausted from a multi-day hunt for a dress to wear to two weddings, this coming weekend.

I arranged the clothes carefully on hangers, used one of Mark's work shirt bags to cover them, and attached them to my backpack.

After stopping at Whole Paycheck and eating a huge salad way too fast, I went to City Yoga to meet up with Celia, the new friend who introduced me to acroyoga. We did a little partner stretching, and then she flew me for a little while, while we discussed her impending trip to Venezuela, for 2 years and 3 months, for the Peace Corps.

45 minutes later began The Practice, with Noah Mazé. The silliest, most challenging yoga class I've ever taken. And the only one I've attended where I'm decidedly at the bottom of the pile. When he named some poses I hadn't been able to do 3 months ago, I moved to the wall for balance, but discovered I could do them easily, and moved back the the middle of the room. One pose that we'd never tried before (and that Noah warned us John Friend had broken his toe, attempting), and that several very advanced people had trouble with, I did easily on the first try (pincha mayurasana hopping to plank pose).

Noah mentioned the idea of he and I going on a bike ride around Griffith Park, some weekend. I meant to be encouraging, but was so surprised to be singled out that I'm afraid I didn't do much more than nod.

I biked over to the talent management office, found a diner next door, ordered an iced tea, and used their bathroom to transform from Yogachick to Clark Kent. Not a trace of sweatiness left when I was done.

"And you have reliable transportation, of some sort?" he asked at one point during the interview.

"Yes," I nodded.

"A car, or...?"

"Well, I ride a bike, actually."

"A bike? Did you ride here?" He asked, all a-shocked.

"Yep," I said.

"Do you ride in the dark?"

"Uh huh."

"What about when it rains?"

"Sure --"

"Come on!" he said, smiling.

"I have rain gear, and besides there's an express bus right to here, if I wanted."

"Wow, that's great," the other employee said.

"Well I couldn't do it. Do you know how to drive?" he asked.

On the way back from the job interview, having transformed back into Yogachick, and relieved to have seen they were both wearing jeans (I heart California Casual), I took off on a street I didn't know, but which seemed to be going in the right general direction. And without a map, I made my way back home via some lovely residential streets, picking up cat food on the way, and without getting lost.

As of exactly 2 weeks ago, I've been living in Los Angeles for one full year.

2007-12-25T13:21:00.000-08:00

It's 68 degrees, and I'm sitting on the patio of a beautiful craftsman home, listening to the trickle of water in the koi pond nearby, with a giant orange cat purr-mewing as he circles me on the rattan sofa.

I'm wearing a tee shirt and jeans and flip flops.

Also, the general consensus seems to be that it's Christmas.

This morning, my 6 person family sent a grand total of 233 emails back and forth, from 3 locations, in 10 different threads, in a little under 3 hours. That's an average of about 13 emails written per person per hour, or one email written per person every 4.5 minutes -- as well as a little over one email read by each person each minute. For three hours.

And actually, I think it was a little easier to follow than our conversations in person.

We all agree it was a mistake not to get together on Christmas.

When we'd exhausted our poor little nubs from typing, I closed my computer and sat for a moment in my big quiet apartment. Mark was at work at his fantastic new job at the Chateau Marmont, and I had to get out to Pasadena to fulfill my housesitting duties. But I have discovered that it is very hard to get up when there is a kitten purring on your lap. And even harder when there are two of them.

So I sat for a while, practicing my independent hand coordination, scratching behind Miss Jones's ears while I petted Bowie's tummy.

Today is the first day in a while that I have not felt overwhelmed.

I've started doing research work for an ambitious feature film project for the aforementioned TV writer. Because of the strike, it's unpaid work at the moment, but it's an exciting project, and an exciting opportunity, and I feel valued and respected.

Mark has just finished his first full-time semester back at school, while holding down his new full-time serving job. He's applied to transfer to UCLA for next fall, and has two complete albums of music ready to be recorded this Spring and Summer.

I've cut my spa massage days from 4 to 2, so that I can spend more time on writing, and I've found my way into acroyoga, a combination of yoga, acrobatics, and Thai massage. I have not one but two friends within 1.5 miles, either of whom I can call at the last minute to go out for unplanned meals or movies.

I know where the black beans and enchilada sauce are at the Mexican grocery, I've fallen in love with Korean concord grapes and Asian pears from Han Kook Supermarket, and just the other day I was ran into someone I knew in a place I hadn't seen them before. (In Chicago, by the time I left, I'd gotten to the point where I couldn't leave the house without running into someone I knew. This is a start.)

I have even learned to say "It's cold today!" when it drops below 60 degrees, and almost mean it.

And I've adopted kittens! Who make me much happier when Mark's not home, and who have a knack for dropping the stinkiest farts I have ever encountered.

Speaking of which...

I scooted the odoriferous cats onto the nearby blankets and got up. I grabbed my keys, my CDs, and walked out to the rental car we have for the week (so we can visit Mark's folks in Orange County, during the holidays). I drove over the big hill that Mark and I biked up for that first party we went to. I assumed, at the time, that it was par for the LA course, but now know that the hill is isolated in the flat basin of Hollywood. I drove myself to the freeway (remembering it's free, but it's not express), and headed to Pasadena.

In a month and a half, I'll have been here a full year. And you know, life is pretty good.

Merry Solstice, everyone!

2007-11-14T13:37:00.001-08:00

October 17, 2007

It was refreshingly gray out, and I wore a jacket. Not so much because I needed it, but because I could, and because it's the time of year where one starts wearing jackets, sweaters, socks, layers; when you get to armor yourself after months of just a thin thin barrier between your skin and the hot air, your skin and others' skin on the bus. It's an advantage of having seasons.

But LA has something more like a gentle biannual phase shift. Just a few degrees and some smog-clearing rain. So three blocks from home I unzipped my jacket, and a block after that I took it off.

The dentist's office made me think of a blood donation center, or a shabby DMV branch -- low-slung cement and dingy windows that don't open, designed with the assumption of air conditioning.

I wondered if it might've been wiser to choose a dentist in Beverly Hills, or even just northeast of me in Los Feliz, where the well-off hipsters live.

I waited with my feet up on another chair, deciding that if they were offended, then next time they could be ready for me at my actual appointment time.

The dentist was a big guy with immaculate teeth and breath like my Sudanese friend in Chicago -- sweetly spicy like licorice maybe. Not bad really, but not minty fresh, either.

He overelaborated the importance of gum health, pointing at pictures of horrifyingly blackened tissue. I started to get the feeling it was more or less a sales pitch for the "deep cleaning" he was now recommending. I agreed to it, partly just to get him to put away the pictures, and decided to make sure my massage patter was both less repetitive and more encouraging.

An assistant came by to take my credit card to make the payment before the service. It seemed a little odd, but I figured it probably had to do with the poor immigrant populations around Hollywood.

The dentist tilted the chair back and, without warning, stuck a needle in the gums by my molars.

"Gngh," I grunted with surprise at the sharp pain. Had it hurt this much in the past?

The next jab, midway to the front, was even sharper, and I gripped the purse on my lap with both hands. Before I could take a breath, he jabbed again by my front teeth, and panicky pain seared through my head and down into my chest.

"Stop," I said, and involuntarily grabbed his arm to pull the damn thing out of my mouth. I wanted to slam my elbow into his fat face, but since that seemed impractical, my fury welled out immediately through my eyes.

"I'm sorry," I said. "You could've warned me, dude -- I just needed warning," I choked out through alarming unwanted sobs.

"I'm sorry," he said, and he and his assistant watched me cry. "You have such nice teeth, you're not used to this," he said.

His assistant handed me a dixie cup of water while he raised the chair. I stared out the high square window and tried to breathe, choke-choking.

"Get her the gift bag," he quietly ordered the assistant. She must have gestured at the plastic bag sticking out of my purse. "Oh," he said, and I wondered if he would scold her later for being too quick with the gift bag. As if a free toothbrush and floss were deeply placating.

"I'm sorry, I've probably needed to cry all week -- I should've done it before I came here," I said, not sure if that made any sense to a dentist and his assistant. They just watched me. "Could you give me a minute?" I said.

"Sure, sure," he said, but kept watching me.

"I mean without staring at me," I said.

"Oh," he said, and they moved away, out of the semi-enclosed area, like a teeth-pulling cubicle.

I stared fixedly out the window and tried hard to breathe. When that didn't work right away, I tried to reassure myself by thinking about the fact that I was going home for a visit to Chicago in only a week. That seemed to have the opposite effect, so I went back to breathing.

After longer than I'd hoped, I called them back, let the chair be lowered down again. The assistant squeezed my hand nicely, and I tried not to think while he scraped and poked and plucked at my bits of exposed skull.

When it was over, I got up and turned the wrong way to leave, disoriented as if I'd just emerged from a train station in an unfamiliar city. I turned around and found my way out of the low-slung concrete, and escaped into the sunny day. The gray had cleared away already. I reached up and touched my lips, which were neither swollen nor drooling as it felt they might be.

I put on my sunglasses and crossed the street. The huge Mexican grocery store was right there, so I decided to check it out and get something in my stomach to settle me.

The entrance was in the back, through the parking lot that I'll almost certainly never use. I walked through the sliding doors and was greeted by a decent-looking array of produce. Not as well-lit or clean as the Korean grocery, but the avocados were 3 for $1, there was an assortment of cheep beer, the cantaloupes were $0.79 each, and there were frozen bean and cheese burritos for $0.69. I grabbed a few to try, figuring Mark would like them even if I didn't.

My left arm loaded with a cantaloupe, 3 avocados, and 4 burritos, I inspected a red tea kettle for a couple minutes, until I realized I wasn't feeling capable of making qualitative assessments, and put it back down. I looked at the mops, but like every other L.A. market I've visited, they only had the string kind, not the spongy kind to which I'm accustomed.

As I walked around, I noticed I was the only person there who wasn't Mexican, and wondered how much I stuck out. As I dumped my foodstuffs on the conveyor belt, I imagined the woman behind the register saying "Did you see that drooly gringa wandering around like a pollo perdido?"

I put the objects in my purse before they could plastic bag them. She counted out my change in Spanish, but said thank you in English. The pimply teenage bagger grinned at me, not with me, I felt, as I walked away.

On the walk home, my jacket tied around my waist, I looked at the pink houses, orange houses, green houses. I hadn't walked down that block before, but, I realized, I might get to a point where I knew each house by sight. This was a place I would probably come to a hundred times, over the next few years. I tried to imagine what that would mean:

I saw an image of myself as efficient and preoccupied, walking briskly home with a weekly quota of tomatoes and avocados, thinking about complicated issues of work, people, systems of organization, frustrations, and triumphs of which I don't yet know the shapes or names.

I turned a corner and found myself canopied by sycamore trees that leaned gracefully over the street. A breeze drifted over my face and arms. I took a deep breath, and it tasted green and good.

2007-09-14T10:02:00.000-07:00

The fan has been on in the new bedroom for a week, and it still smells like polyurethane. I'm trying to be patient.

I unpacked the boxes, uh-gain, never sure what I was going to find because they've had contents marked on them 3 times now. On some I scribbled over the old markings, on some I just wrote on a different side, and on some I couldn't be bothered to write at all. I think those were the ones I packed after 11pm.

The heat wave was incapacitating -- like February in Chicago, we realized that one simply must not be ambitious about a day's plans, during August in LA. We slogged around sweatily, dreamt of rain, stuck to the leather sofas, and moved the fan from spot to spot, trying to figure out how to create a wind-tunnel in our little railroad-style half of a duplex.

Potential new tenants came in and out, and I tried to be encouraging without sounding like a salesperson, and I spent a lot of time on the phone with our landlord, trying to find out if anyone was thinking about committing. We had a 6 month lease, but wanted to get out a month early, as we anticipated rental possibilities might be drying up by October.

Well, that and we were just done with the place.

It was a sweet little duplex, but the small annoying things about it started to add up to a larger annoying mass: the one tiny closet with broken doors, the mile and a half to the closest real grocery store, guests having to go through the bedroom to get to the bathroom, the six (counted 'em, six) barking dogs that lived next door, and so on and so on.

It was great as an escape from the House of Douchebaggery, but it had worn itself out making us feel welcome.

So I glued myself to Craigslist once more, presenting compiled apartment pages to Mark, arranging series of viewings. We plodded through the heat, looking at a lot of mediocre places.

And then we found El Mansione. Hardwood floors, two bedrooms, a private hedge-surrounded patio, our own entrance, huuuuuuge livingroom, huge bathroom, 3 big ole closets and a linen closet. Two and a half times the space of our old place, for less than 1/3 again the price.

I took a million pictures to show Mark, who was at work when I went to see the place. It was in a state of medium disarray, being renovated after the last tennants' 12 year stay. I hesitated to pay for the $60 credit check, not sure I should commit to a place that was $300 more than what we were used to. I was the first person to see it, though, and our leasing agent warned me that it would go fast.

I took the pictures home, and found myself staring at them for unreasonable periods of time. Mark said it looked great, but left the decision to me, since the extra rent money would be my responsibility. I waffled, back and forth, back and forth. But the next day I realized: It's El Mansione!

We signed the lease. And then we walked around our new neighborhood, and found a big beautiful Korean grocery half a mile away, a 7-11 and a Mexian market two blocks away, "Ethical Drugs" pharmacy, sushi restaurants, korean BBQ, thai restaurants, and the Hollywood sign, looming above. In case I forget why I'm here.

And on top of all that, I found out that one of my sister's best friends from college is living less than 3/4 of a mile away! And another friend 1 1/4 miles away! And my bike shop a mile away! And the train a mile away! And almost no hills!

As we walked down the street, giddily eating celebratory chocolate Pocky, I felt something on my face. I stopped in my tracks.

"Did you feel that?" I said to Mark. He was looking up at the sky.

"I did, and I don't see an air conditioner anywhere."

"Rain! That's rain!"

"Yes it is."

"Or, well, drizzle anyway."

"An omen of positive change, I think," Mark said.

"Definitely," I said, reaching for another Pocky.

We found our sublettors, moved out as fast as we could, to accomodate them, and piled our furniture in the middle of our new huge living room, while workers came in and out, still cleaning and painting and refinishing and installing.

And it's been a week and two days, now, and everything is done. I've unpacked and arranged furniture and bought bathmats and we eat breakfast on the patio every morning. This was our 5th move in 9 months. And now I think we're done, for a good long while. Here's home.

View from the bed:

2007-07-01T22:15:00.000-07:00

Saturday, June 30, 2007

I gingerly removed my sweaty tank top, cringing as it peeled off of my sticky aloe-covered skin. I stood in front of the fan we bought from a Brit who was moving back to England, selling all her belongings for precise amounts: $3 per chair, $40 for the new twin futon, $0.50 for the dry erase marker, $2 for the white board, $4 for the fan.

I took a deep breath and thought about showering, but instead started sorting through my closet, looking for something that would touch as little burnt skin as possible. I put on my gray miniskirt, which was a little tighter than I'd remembered, and a thin cotton tank top. I scrutinized myself in the mirror, changed the tank top twice, and then a third time, back to the first one.

My coworkers have only seen me in either sweaty biking gear or the black pants and black shirt spa uniform.

I took off the miniskirt and chose a knee length skirt instead. Much easier to sit in. I debated between the more healer/massage-therapist-appropriate flats, and the gray heels with sequin hearts I'd bought for an irresistible $10. (Ross Dress for Less is like TJ Maxx, but even cheaper and even less organized.)

I put the flats in my purse and wore the heels, put on eyeliner, eye shadow, lipstick, sparkly bobby pins, bling bling dollar store earrings, the whole thing.

I stood in front of the fan again, having broken a slight sweat from all the clothes changing, stuffiness, and probably from my heat-radiating skin.

A horn honked from outside, and I walked (rather well, I thought) in my heels, out the door, out the gate, into her little white car.

"Hey there, fancy!" Annie said.

"Thanks, hi!" I said as I settled into my seat and shut the door. "You look fancy cute too! Nice skirt," I said, admiring her frilly beaded hippie dealie.

"Thanks, yeah, I got it at one of those boutiques on Southport when it went on sale," she said, and I remembered, jarringly, that she had lived in Chicago for a few years. Along with about half of the people I've met out here. I thought about what kind of Chicago she knew, given that she went to those shops on Southport.

"It was one of those things where I was like yeah, that skirt is cute, but it's not worth $120, I don't care which of your friends made it, sorry. But yeah when it went on sale, I was like okay, I'll pay $60 for it."

"Well it's very nice beadwork," I said.

"Thanks, yeah, I wanted to dress up, but I didn't have time to shower, so I just left my hair up," she said.

"Oh, yeah, me neither, oh well."

"So this is my grandma car, sorry about the bottles down there," she said, referring to the Fuji water bottles in the passenger footwell. "You can put the seat back further."

"Oh that's okay, I've got short legs. Thanks so much for the ride, by the way."

"Sure, well we'll see; I'm terrible with directions, really honestly I shouldn't be driving a car, I'm a total mess about navigating. Even with the GPS unit I'm just a disaster, really."

"Well I'm in no hurry. And I have a map and a general idea of where were going," I said.

"Cool, yeah, we'll make it there I think. My dad just got me this thing, which is great, because I really really hate being lost, I mean I just freak out."

Annie drove and found something to apologize for every few minutes, keeping a steady monolog. I started to feel tired.

"Woof, I just got sleepy, sorry," I said, yawning. "I ate two of those big cookies at work, for no good reason. I think the sugar is hitting me."

"Oh, yeah, totally."

"I wish they would stock fruit or something, for snacks."

"Yeah, they used to," she said, "or at least granola bars, but lately it's been all sugar, or occasionally bananas, but by the time you figure out they're for us, and not the clients, they're all brown and mushy -- oh I think that was my turn."

"Turn right in 100 feet," said the GPS unit.

"Oh, no, okay, we're good," she said, taking the expressway exit. Or sorry, the freeway exit. Asking where the expressway is, here, just gets you shrugs and blank looks. It's free, but it's not express.

Annie apologized for her mediocre parallel parking skills, and for the tricky door locks, and we walked up the block until we saw an apartment full of balloons, and decided it must be Janine's.

The apartment was pleasantly populated already, and there was guac and chips and celery and lots of tequila. Annie added half a bottle of Gray Goose, Rose's lime juice, and some gin to the mix. I opted for water, taking pity on my poor skin.

I gave Janine another birthday hug, an outside work hug, and sat down with a couple of coworkers, everyone exclaiming over everyone's outfits.

"It's so nice to see you all in clothes you actually chose, you know?" I said.

"I know, right?" Kristin said, sitting with beautiful posture and a dress whose neckline dove halfway down her torso, beautifully tanned skin glowing from the Hawaii blue and grey floral cotton. I was impressed.

"Isn't she beautiful?" Kara asked, staring at Kristin with me.

"Seriously," I said.

"No, you're beautiful, look at you!" Kristin said to Kara. She was wearing a leather pencil skirt, and a tight white tank top with a drapey neckline that somehow highlighted her freckles, very striking on her Japanese face.

"You're both breathtaking," I said.

Almost the entire massage staff was at the party, and the manicurist, and a couple of the aestheticians. Conversation inevitably turned to bitching about our bosses: the gay couple owners and Bradley, the flamey-but-supposedly-straight spa director.

"Do we really believe he's straight?" I asked.

"No," three people said in chorus.

"I mean I don't know," Kara said, "but I mean, honestly."

"Yeah, I dunno. I kind of think he might just act flamey so he can get away with saying things people don't let straight guys say," I said, interested to see what they thought of the Bradley Personality Theory I've been working on.

"Huh," Kristin said.

"Totally," Kara said, toasting me with her tequila.

"Were you there when he told me I was 'stinky?' And had me raise my arms so he could spritz me?"

"Oh my god, I was totally there," Kristin said.

"What??" Kara said.

"God how demoralizing and insulting!" Kristin said.

"Yeah, and it was like my second day there. I was trying to go with the flow, you know? I think he just wanted to make me feel small. Whatever," I said. "But did you hear what he said that one time about shaving one leg?"

"Shaving a leg?" Mara, the manicurist, said.

"Doing what??" Kristin stared at me.

"Yeah, ok, he was just like," and I screwed up my face and voice into my best Bradley purse: "He was like 'Sometimes, when I get really lonely, I shave one of my legs, so it feels like I'm sleeping with someone else.'"

Kristin collapsed onto the rug with an "Oh my god" or three.

"You're kidding," Kara said, her mouth open.

"When I write my massage-spa TV pilot, that's gonna be a headliner," I said.

We discussed the camera in the break room, and the backasswards scheduling policies, and the celebs we'd worked on and what they were like, and the crap pay, and generally talked some good old-fashioned shit.

I watched everyone get a little tipsy, sticking to my water with a twist of lime, changing how I sat every few minutes when some part of my burn started complaining too much.

"You okay? You look fidgety," Annie said.

"Oh, I burned at the beach on Friday," I said. "I put on sunscreen literally every 45 minutes, but I was out for like 4 hours, and it was only 15 SPF, so..."

"Yeah, this Southern California sun'll get ya every time," Jack, another therapist (and that elusive character, The LA Native) said.

"Yeah, you could totally get away with that in Chicago, it's crazy," Annie said.

A cake was brought out, and we sang happy birthday -- I changed keys half way through -- and the party started prepping for an adventure to the nearby clubs and bars with dance floors. Annie and I agreed it was a good time to take off, since we both had to work in the morning, so we started making goodbye rounds.

I tried to hide my cringe when Jack squeezed my scorched back in a surprising friendly embrace (he'd said once, at work, that he's not a hugger), and I wished Janine some awesome birthday dancing. Everyone hugged me, some more tightly, more comfortably than others, but the intentions were uniformly sweet.

Annie seemed to have been caught in an apologizing loop (for not being able to go to the club, for not bringing food in addition to booze, for apologizing...), so I called to her from the door and waved, giving her an excuse to break off her sorrys.

I walked in my ridiculous heels back to the car with her, and we wound our way through the Los Angeles freeways toward Echo Park, hitting a wicked patch of traffic (at 11pm!), and making a few wrong turns before she deposited me safely at my door.

I thanked her again, said I'd see her in the morning, and went inside. It was still warm out -- the first time it's been warm past sundown, since I've been here. I wondered what made the difference, why the dry air was suddenly retaining heat.

Mark wasn't home from his closing shift yet, so I lay down in my fancy outfit, waiting for him to arrive so I could show it off.

I wasn't really tired. I thought about what my outfit might've told my coworkers about me -- the pink and gray tiger-stripe tank top, the velvet gray skirt with slits on the sides. Kind of 90's, a little out of style maybe, but very coordinated. I decided I looked good.

From the way people had acted, I gathered they were all mostly unfamiliar with each other's dress styles. I got the feeling they hadn't socialized outside of work together, before.

And I lay on my bed, thinking about how easy the party had been, how I hadn't even been tempted to use any social lubricant, had easily stuck to water. The spot on my back where Jack had gripped with his fingers still felt a little raw, and was radiating a little heat. But hey, at least it was meant to be warm. I don't mind a little overshooting, now and then.

I've been missing my massage school peeps, and my little massage spa family from the dive spa in Chicago. I'd wondered if that kind of bond existed at this place, and I just wasn't seeing it, hadn't been let in, yet. But I don't think it did exist. I think the dry air just suddenly decided to retain some heat.

2007-06-15T11:55:00.000-07:00

We've got posters up, boxes unpacked and broken down for storage, and we've had not one but two barbecues in our little back yard. Summer seems to be heading toward full tilt, I'm getting good at this spa job, and my quads and calves have grown to make my (ever-more-familiar) hilly commute a little easier.

And I'm even working on writing a feature film (on spec), under the guidance of Daniel, the TV writer I liked so much. We videochat and we IM and I read and watch a ton of movies and it's a big step.

Life is settling into feeling like a life. And I know which way is north.

"I kind of miss winter," Mark said to me this morning while we sat in our sunny, high-ceilinged white living room, on the white leather sofa, finishing breakfast.

"What? Already?" I said. The words 'I miss' have started creeping into our conversations, here and there. But winter?

"Well, if not winter, the winter aesthetic, you know?" he said, spearing another bite of fresh pineapple. "Like the wood paneling and the brick. That 70's insulated feel."

"Yeah. I don't miss that, yet," I said, arranging watermelon and plum on my fork. "I miss the lake, though."

The Lake. The Lake The Lake! A quick bike ride and you're on the little span of sand at Fullerton, people-watching, sun bathing, water sipping, pale people, fat people, tan people, thin people, a blur of color, walking, jogging, biking by, 40 feet away.

Mark took off for work, and I sat thinking about water and sun.

We're 16 miles from the beach, here, and the beach here is The Ocean. It's big and wide and salty. And there's this thing called beach tar. You walk the two or three hundred feet of sand to the water, and when you leave you have mysterious black tar on the bottoms of your feetsies, sticky salt on your skin and in your hair.

And woe to you if you don't wear sunscreen! This is no Northern Sun! This sun is Southern California skin-scorching serious!

Not that I've made it to the beach yet this summer -- there's no train to the coast, just an interminable bus.

Aw, it's not so bad. Sour grapes. I hauled myself up from our white sofa, made myself presentable, and biked the half block to the Mexican market. I picked out a banana and an apple and a peach and went to the counter, where I also plucked up a locally made coconut pastry of some kind.

"Hey, beautiful lady," our friend the owner said, as he rang up my purchases. I'd put on makeup and a fancy necklace. I've started doing that again, lately, the makeup thing. Now that I'm not so distracted by just getting from A to B, figuring out which way is up, I have energy for light blue eyeshadow.

I smiled at him, said thank you, bought my fruit, and hopped on my bike for the park. I rode around the path encircling the reservoir, and found a lovely spot on a slope in the shade of a big old palm tree, where I sat reading quite happily for two and a half hours.

And tomorrow I learn how to golf with my new friend Danny, and the next day I go for a hike in Griffith Park (where the Hollywood sign is) with my new friend Amy, and next week I go to the beach with my new friend Hanna. There are a lot of new friends around. Maybe someday I'll get to take a few of them to The Point.

2007-05-15T13:46:00.000-07:00

A month since the last post! Impossible! Now time is speeding up, instead of slowing down. I guess it all balances out, in the end.

April 16, 2007

We've settled into our new home, one half of a little house behind a house (and have started referring to any failed first endeavor as "a 1357 1/2," the number for the House of Jerks). We rented a U-Haul and moved our stuff in one big load, and then made a loop through Glendale and Burbank (suburbs of suburbs) to pick up a Craigslist sectional sofa and $40 refrigerator.

Why did we need a refrigerator?, you Midwesterners and East Coasters may ask. Good question! But there's no good answer. In LA, landlords often do not supply refrigerators or stoves. We were lucky to get a stove, but for a fridge, we were on our own. Apparently people cart their appliances around from apartment to apartment out here. I've been told that the rights are heavily on the side of the renter, in LA, so maybe this is the Landlord's Revenge.

We stopped first to pick up the beige sectional sofa and chair, for $100, from a lady in Burbank. I'd called about it that morning, leaning on our new kitchen counter (not a roommate in sight to scrutinize my actions), where my computer was picking up a wireless signal.

"Hello," an unenthused male voice answered.

"Hi, I'm calling about the sofa for sale on Craigslist?" I tried to be chipper.

"Hold on," he said, and then I heard him shouting gruffly, "Someone about that sofa you're giving away for a hundred bucks." I grinned. A woman with a raspy voice but a pleasant demeanor came to the phone, seemed excited to have a call about it, gave me the address, and said we could have a matching chair, for free, if we wanted it.

When we arrived at their little bungalow, a For Sale sign nestled in with flowers, a miniature fence along a stone path to the door, she answered the door in pink and beige grandma finery.

Her son, a behemoth of a man with geek glasses and a polo tee shirt, carried most of the thing out to the U-Haul for us.

"Oh, gosh, that's okay, we can --" I started to object, and then just stopped when I saw him toss a third of the sofa on his shoulder like it was made of styrofoam.

I chatted up Grandma, about having just moved here, about California, about moving in general. She explained they were moving to Arizona, and were getting rid of as much as they could. I asked about a couple of pretty wood tables, but she said no, we're keeping those.

"You're taking the pillows, I assume?" I asked about the nice new throw pillows that had been on the sofa.

"Yeah, we're keeping those," she said.

Her son came back for another round of hefting, and Mark helped him this time. Not because the chair was too heavy for him, but because the weight of expectation upon his gender outweighed the furniture by a landslide.

"Oh, you know what, you take them," Grandma said to me, smiling, and patting me on the back.

"Really?" I said, smiling, "Are you sure?"

"Oh yeah, you take them. I'm glad you got the sofa," she said conspiratorially, handing me the pillows.

The last pieces of furniture were stowed in the U-Haul, and Mark and I thanked Grandma and her son profusely.

"Oh, I'm so glad you got the sofa," she said again. We liked her, too.

"Me too!" I effused.

We hopped in the truck, and continued our loop, this time for the fridge.

It turned out to be pretty ugly, even for a refrigerator, but hey, it worked and was $40, so we loaded it, with the guy's help, on its side, on the back of the truck. It was heavy. I was not sure how this was going to work out on the other end, without help or a dolly.

But burn that bridge when we come to it, I thought, and hopped back in the truck, navigating the cul-de-sacs like a pro, winding our way back to our new home.

Mark was tired and starting to fade, by the time we got there. But we had to unload the truck and return it, so we got to it. We got the fridge out of the truck and onto the street, without too much ado. But this was not going to be easy.

"I dunno, Mark, I don't think we can carry this thing." I said.

"Sure we can; I carried tons of fridges at Burnside," the apartment complex he used to work at.

Mark then tried to heave the heavy side up from the ground, and got it up a couple feet, but clearly was not walking anywhere with it.

"Put it down put it down!" I said, seeing him strain.

He put it down.

"You okay?" I asked.

"...Yeah," he grumbled. I was pretty sure he must've pulled something, even if he didn't know it yet, or didn't want to know it yet.

"Okay... This is an older fridge than you've probably moved," I pondered.

"I forgot, we had a dolly at work," he said.

"I think we're just going to have to do a sort of tip and walk thing. Kinda slowly spin it, you know?"

We started in on it: tipping it up, spinning it around, putting it down. It was slow and annoying.

"We're going to tear up the grass," Mark said when we neared the lawn. I got some cardboard and tried to make a path. The cardboard kept slipping out of the way, or hitting our feet while we tried to spin the Monster Fridge.

"This is ridiculous!" Mark lost his cool. I had no rebuttal. It was ridiculous.

But suddenly, from nowhere it seemed, 3 men appeared, a father and his two sons, the father explaining in broken English and the universal language of refrigerator-hoisting gesture that they could help us.

The five of us tipped and lifted the thing up, up, up the little set of stairs, into the house, into the kitchen, in no time.

"Thank you!" Mark and I said.

"That was amazing!" I said.

"No problem," Dad said. "We leve across the street, juss over there. An my seester leves nes'door," he said.

"Oh, nice! Yeah, I think I met her this morning," I said. She'd stopped to introduce herself. Dad offered to help with the sofa, too, but we said no no, we could get it.

"I'm strong!" I said, striking a silly flexing pose. They laughed.

"Okay, you let us know, you need more help," he said. His teenage sons stood shifting from foot to foot.

"Thank you so much," I said, shaking hands with each of them. They filed out, saying goodbye.

"That was awesome!" Mark said. "I think this neighborhood is, like, all families."

We loaded the sofa into the house, easy by comparison, and collapsed onto it, tired but happy. Our new house was so airy and cute and Ours.

That night, we made dinner and watched an episode of "Battlestar Gallactica" on my computer. I got up to get some water from the kitchen, and felt odd for a moment.

I turned to Mark.

"Hey! Look at me! Look at me going from the living room to the kitchen to get water -- with No One Watching Me!!" I said, realizing the wonder of having our own place, a douchebag-free-zone, of being unwatched.

"Yay!" Mark said from the sofa, and held out his arms for a hug. I walked over with my water, set it down on our collapsable little table, and curled up in his arms.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

(one month in -- no posters yet:)

2007-04-12T19:28:00.000-07:00

Thursday, April 12, 2007

There's a windstorm today, and it blows around the tall tall palm trees that line my street so that they bounce and bob and all their poofy leaf tops get a lot less poofy.

The power has been out most of the day, so I sit at the library charging up my battery so that we'll have something to do when we get home to the top of our hill, with no light to read by.

When people ask me how long I've been here, I keep thinking it's been at least 3 months -- I was actually saying it'd been three months, until Mark corrected me.

I paused, disoriented, when I realized I was a full month off.

But anyway it feels like 3 months.

We're moving again, just a mile away, this time. Our roommate situation has proven untenable. I spent a couple hours writing out the story of the general douchebaggery of it all, trying to find a way to talk about it that was descriptive instead of angry. But it got deleted accidentally. The idea of fleshing it out again is as untenable as the roommates, so I will consider it rendered by accident to the footnote it should be.

We are glad to be leaving.

As a closing cap, here are some pictures from what is, admittedly, a very charming little nook of Echo Park:

2007-03-22T04:17:00.000-07:00

It's four am. My eyes sting a little, I guess from the water I splashed on my face and the fact that I'm not asleep.

I've been sick for two weeks, now, and I've been told it's not uncommon to be sick for a full month, upon arrival in LA. Something about the air quality. And also it's spring, and even in the land of eternal sunshine, I'm told it's still in vogue to get sick in the spring.

I had dinner last night with three actors, a french horn PhD candidate, and an old friend from high school and college (just visiting). It was a girls' night out, in celebration of Lindy getting a lead in a feature film. We talked about racism in The Biz, segregation, tsunamis, earthquakes, how to lose weight in time for filming, the fundamental insecurity of personality and land in LA, how women get lonely, here, lacking female friends, some of them not knowing how to have friends because they're too busy looking for connections.

My veggie sushi roll came, but I saw no soy sauce. I waited a bit, to see if maybe someone was going to bring it, but no one came.

"Is it gauche to ask for soy sauce, here?" I asked Lindy, only half-joking.

"Gauche!" she laughed. "Here it is, Maddy," she said, passing me a little ceramic pitcher I hadn't seen.

I tried to cough into my cloth napkin, to blow my nose quietly, between pieces of sushi (a dollar a bite), following the conversation of these actors, so smart, so educated, so beautiful, so visibly self-conscious, as they talked about jaw-lines and type-casting.

I am certainly lonely.

2007-03-19T18:40:00.000-07:00

March 10th-11th, 2007

I heaved my bike up on my shoulder and trotted down the stairs to the Metro Red Line. I felt serious and official (and secretly a bit silly) with my matching red and black bike shoes, gloves, and pannier, and I could tell by the expressions of the other Metro riders that I must've looked it, too.

The train came soon, and I found an easy spot to sit with my ride. I tried to keep it's dirty greasy bits from touching my nice dress pants while the train rocked from side to side. We rumbled from stop to stop, and soon I was at Union Station, where I switched to the Gold Line for Pasadena. I'd done this trip before, with Mark.

I bungeed my bike to a railing on the gold line train and sat down across from a middle-aged guy in a breezy black and blue shiny button-down tee-shirt. It looked like the right kind of thing to wear in California.

I watched the scenery go by for a while, feeling not quite nervous about my meeting, but maybe just anticipatory.

"You goin' camping or something?" the guy asked me, indicating the large pannier on my bike.

"Yeah, actually, I am." Most of the people who talk to you on the train in Chicago are crazy at best, belligerent at worst. But he seemed all right.

"Nice weather for riding today, huh?" he said.

"Yeah, definitely -- I only rode from Echo Park to the red line, but it was lovely," I said.

We sat in silence as the train started uphill a bit, and I looked out the window, trying to absorb the landscape and let it start feeling familiar. A bit of nervousness crept into my chest. This was my only real TV writing contact, my best shot at getting connected where I need to be connected.

"So how do you like Echo Park?" the guy asked me.

"I like it a lot," I said, glad to have a distraction. "It's a pretty interesting place. It's getting gentrified, but it's still very diverse; it's got a lot of character. And it's a little cheaper than most places around here, seems like," I said.

"Yep, yep," he nodded languidly, somehow comfortably reclined on the uncomfortable seats, long arms resting along the back of the bench. "I live in Pasadena, and it's just ridiculous. It's $1600 for a 1-bedroom, you know? I have to share my place with a roommate. We trade off between the bedroom and the living room," he laughed.

"Yeah, I'm sharing a room in a 4-bedroom house with my boyfriend for the same price that got us a 1-bedroom of our own in Chicago. Like right in the middle of Chicago, close to everything."

"Mmmm hm." There was an easy pause while we both looked out the windows. "So where you going camping?" he asked.

"Well, actually, I don't know. I have a meeting in Pasadena, and then I'm meeting up with my brother. He's in town for a few days for work, in Arcadia, and his group is gonna put my bike in their truck and take me with them wherever. They do desert restoration work."

"Nice, nice. That's nice that you're close with your brother."

"Yeah, definitely," I said, and we talked easily about family, and the way siblings can support one another, and his kids, and California's easy living. It was the third time that someone had mentioned the ridiculous rent prices in the same conversation with how easy it is to live here.

I shook his hand when we got to my stop. "It was nice to meet you," I said, "I hope I run into you again."

By the time I had gathered my stuff together, he'd already started chatting with an older couple that had sat down in my spot.

I disembarked and unrolled my pant leg, smoothed my hair, and looked at my cell phone. I was a few minutes early, so I sat on a bench and let the sun do it's thing. I felt calm and confident. Pretty easy; yes.

I looked around the platform and spotted a man and a woman that looked like they might be my contacts. I walked my bike over by them.

"Are you Daniel?" I said when the man met my eyes.

"Yes!" he said, very friendly, big smile.

"Ah, great! I'm Maddy," I said, shaking his hand.

"Hi Maddy, and this is Lara," he said, introducing me to the pretty blond woman he'd told me he was bringing, whose picture I'd found on IMDB, another writer on the show he executive produces. "Did you bike here?" he asked.

"No, no, I just biked to the train, and took the train here."

"Wait, so... you took the bike on the train?" Lara asked, obviously not ever having had a reason to consider how this might work.

"Yeah, I biked to the red line, in Echo Park, put the bike on the train, and then took that to the gold line, where I also put my bike on the train."

"Wow, so you went to Union Station!" Daniel said.

"Yeah," I said, not sure why that was noteworthy.

"Impressive," Lara said.

"I mean it's not hard," I said, laughing a little.

"Well even so," Daniel said.

I told them how I'd gotten rid of my car in Chicago, a couple years ago, and how I was a somewhat rabid environmentalist, and how LA was proving quite bikeable, so far. We agreed on Thai food, and walked a block or two to a very cute little place on a corner.

"I'm just going to lock up," I said. "I'll meet you inside."

I struggled with my sticky lock for an irritating minute, and then made my way inside, lugging my pannier with me. I stashed it to the side, and took the chair next to Lara, across from Daniel, but tried to pull it out to the side a bit, so I could face both of them.

"So, welcome to LA!" Daniel said. He looked to be in his early 40's, graying a bit, just a bit of a belly, over-sized sweater and jeans. Very approachable, unlike the screenwriter I'd met with, who'd had the little diamond earing and an unnerving gaze and the just-so-perfectly-toussled hair and the designer jeans with a hole in one knee. "How long have you been here?" he asked.

"About 3 weeks, now. Three and a half."

"So tell me everything, I know nothing," he said.

"Like, my work experience, or writing, or?"

"Yeah, yeah, all of it," he said unassumingly.

So I described my relationship with writing as having been cemented at the end of high school, how all the heavy duty math and science I'd done had given me a very precise, logical sense of structure and plot, how I'd studied playwriting in college, and how I'd finally landed on TV writing as the form that made most sense for my dialog-centric, character-centric writing.

He listened well, and then Lara piped in: "I actually Googled you, and I saw you had a play produced."

"Oh! Nice! That's cool that that came up. I should Google myself!" I said. I actually had, but it seemed more charming to let it be her sneaky discovery. So I talked about what a great experience that had been, how fascinating it had been to see what happened when people actually memorized what I'd written, how much I'd learned from the actors about my characters.

And Daniel then started talking about what it was like to write for TV -- the frustrations and rewards of writing in a group, the juggling of network execs and time constraints, hiring practices.

I took out my notebook early on, jotting down notes and occasionally taking bites of the pad kee mao I'd ordered.

"I'm going to write this down, too," Lara said, taking out her notebook.

"What? You don't need to write this down," he said, a little embarassed, a little flattered, genuinely letting her know he thought of her as a pro.

"No, no, it's good stuff to remember," she said. Her IMDB entry had made it seem like she was definitely a TV professional, but still in the early stages, perhaps. I liked that she didn't have too much ego to admit she still could learn from someone experienced as Daniel.

They talked about being pigeonholed into a particular type of writing, and how that could be frustrating.

"Yeah, I handed my agent a spec script for My Name is Earl, and he was like 'Well what the hell am I supposed to do with this??' because he thinks of me as a procedural writer," Lara said.

"Procedural writing is a sort of format you use for mysteries, or crime shows," Daniel explained. I nodded.

"Yeah, like you have to have your hangers at the first scene box, and your twists at the second scene box," she said.

"Sorry, what's a scene box?" I asked.

"Ohhhh, Maddy," she said, laughing and reaching out to pat my shoulder. "So much to learn," she said, looking at Daniel, half friendly, half condescending.

"Well I figured I'd ask," I said, annoyed but not thrown. No point in feeling stupid for not knowing the jargon.

"It's the end of an act, before a commercial, and in procedural writing, you have to hit certain plot elements, and..." and I realized as she was talking that she had actually said "scene breaks," not "box," but the conversation had changed course, and I didn't get to clarify that of course I knew what a scene break was.

Daniel talked some more about how he'd managed to get out of his pigeonhole a bit, and about getting into writing by getting a writers' assistant gig, about learning how to balance your ambition to write with needing to take a back-back-back seat, in that job. About the boys' club aspect of the business, how it might be good to approach women writers for help, he thought. About spec scripts, and how he chooses staff, and personality versus talent, and the social aspects. When he had wound down, I turned to Lara, who, aside from her explanation of scene boxes, had been mostly quiet.

"Is there anything you would add, anything that you feel you had a different experience with?" I asked her.

"Well, I think Daniel's creating a bit of a rosy picture," she said. "I mean, I spent six years as an assistant. It can be really hard to break in. It takes a lot of hard work, and a lot of asking people to do you favors, and doing favors for them, so they get you meetings."

She continued to tell me in vague terms about the difficulties.

"So when you ask people for favors, what do you offer in return?" I asked.

"Well, I was an assistant for a pretty big director for a while, so I would offer to get them meetings with him..."

"So, for someone like me, with no connections, I mean..."

"Well, you can offer to read scripts, or any of the things that you would normally do as favors for people, you know?"

I frowned, just not sure what that would be, in a town where I don't know my way around, have no sense of direction, have very few friends, have no car, and have no income.

"But I mean, Daniel is an incredible connection," she said, seeing that I was feeling a bit confused.

And Daniel jumped in, saying he would get in touch with this person and that person on my behalf, see if he could get me some meetings with other people who could help me out. Lara "wow"ed at some of the names he mentioned he would try to get me in touch with, and I realized that yes indeed, this was a great, great contact.

When the check came, Daniel graciously paid for both of us, and then walked me to the nearest bookstore to help me find a book on showrunning they'd both agreed was useful. He asked an employee where the TV section was, scanned the books with me, and then asked for directions on my behalf, for the bus to Arcadia, over my weak protestations that it was okay, I could ask.

He was clearly someone who likes to be helpful.

We parted ways with a friendly handshake.

"I'll talk to you soon," he said, with a reassuring smile.

"Thank you sooo much for your help already, this has been incredibly informative," I said, and boy did I mean it.

I hopped on my bike and headed for the bus stop.

When it arrived, I loaded my bike onto the front rack. I found a seat, and was soon joined by a guy about my age, as the bus quickly filled to capacity.

"I hate this bus," he said to me.

"Oh yeah?" I said, on guard a bit. He seemed angry, and angry is something to avoid when confined on a crowded bus.

"Yeah, it's always crowded like this. Always."

"Ah, yeah, it does seem like buses in LA are pretty crowded, generally," I said.

"Mm hm," he nodded. "They do it on purpose, cuz they want people to take the train. They want you to be forced to take the train."

"Huh," I said, unconvinced.

"I done some research," he said, turning to give me a brief knowing look. "Just because I'm curious like that, and there used to be all sorts of trains and electric trolley and stuff, but they tore them all down, the oil and the rubber companies. They just tore them down," he said. It was a story I'd heard before -- just an hour before, actually, from Daniel, as we'd walked to the restaurant.

"Yeah, used to be one of the best train systems around, right?" I said.

"Yup," he said. And he told me about how he'd grown up in LA, and how he'd seen it get more and more crowded, more and more people, all fighting to use the same buses, with not enough train lines to make up for it. "Too many damn people," he said. "I hate it. I wanna get out of here, and I'm going to, as soon as I finish my degree. I got a friend in Atlanta that said he can get me a real nice job, not quite what I studied, but it's a good job. But anyway I'm on my way right now to meet up with my brother and go to a book signing for 'The Secret.'"

"Oh, nice! I've heard about that book," I said. Molly had told me about it, and she was finding it helpful. It seemed to be about positive thinking and achieving your ambitions.

"Yeah, some Christians are saying it's bad, that it's not good for Christians, but I like to think for myself, I like to look at things myself, and then I can decide for myself you know? I can see if something is good or if it's not, well then I won't get involved with it."

"Yeah, you have to trust your own sensibilities," I said.

"Right, right, exactly."

And we chatted some more, and he told me when we were about to get to my stop, and as I was getting up he said "Well you are a very fine young woman, you are real fine," he said. I smiled and thanked him, got off the bus, grabbed my bike, and made my way to the botanical garden to the environmental fair. I walked through dense greenery peppered with peacocks that wandered among the trees, calling to one another with screaming squawks.

Peering ahead at a group of white canopies, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. Before I could turn, I was attacked by an airborn young man who looked even hairier and darker than usual.

"Yay!!" I said, hugging him tight. He downright giggled, hugging me tight back.

Paul showed me to where his coworkers were sprawled, relaxing in the shade. They were all very well-sunned, sipping from their Camelpaks, their cheeks decorated with face paint from the fair.

Introductions were made, and I forgot their names immediately, but they seemed like nice kids. They put my bike and bag in their truck, and tucked me into the backseat of the very full bus-like SUV they used to get around. We hit the road with the Rolling Stones' You Can't Always Get What You Want on the stereo, and I thought about how I'd loved that song when I was 19, too. I still think it's a great song, but I wondered whether there was something especially relevant about it at that almost fully adult age.

We drove most of the way to the ocean, and made it to the campground after dark. Paul's crew went about setting up camp and making dinner like a well-oiled machine, illustrating clearly that they'd been working together like this for months. Several of them went for quick runs before dinner. There was no booze, no smoking, no weed, and their food was all vegetarian. I was impressed.

Paul and I set up a tent, even though it was only supposed to get down to 60 degrees that night, and he usually just sleeps on a tarp.

He set his alarm for 6:15am, enough time to snooze once, get up, break down the tent, pack up, eat, and be ready to go by 7am, when we were all supposed to go play at the beach for a few hours before they had to go back to the fair.

We chatted and giggled in our sleeping bags for a while. I'd had a cold for the last few days, but I'd been too distracted to notice it much, that day. But as I lay in the tent without pillows to prop my head up, as my head filled to solid with snot, I started to notice. I breathed through my mouth, tried to shove my fleece into more of a pillow, and found myself feeling more and more sick.

We fell silent, and I could hear from his breathing that Paul was asleep. I thought about "scene boxes," and was irritated that I hadn't had a chance to clear up that I know what a damn scene break is. The embarrassing misunderstanding stirred anxiety in my congested chest, and I coughed rawly in the cold night air.

I wiggled around in my sleeping bag, trying to get it to stay put while I flipped over onto my stomach. I took a few deep breaths, and started doing a relaxation exercise I'd learned years ago.

I imagined my body as a series of knots, and started at my feet, visualizing the knots unraveling in my arches, my ankles, my calves, my knees, my thighs, my hips.... And as usual, before I got up to my head I was asleep.

****

Some unclear amount of time later, I started to wake up, my bladder complaining about all the water I'd had with dinner. I struggled to stay asleep for a while, but soon had to brave the cold night to visit the bathroom.

By the time I got back, I was fully awake, my throat sore and irritated. I lay in my sleeping bag, staring sleeplessly at the gray nylon tent. Paul flipped over and smooshed me into the side of the tent. I gave him a feeble elbow, but when he didn't stir, I just pushed him till he slid in his nylon sleeping bag. It must be a family trait, I thought, remembering similar experiences in beds with my sisters.

I sighed, wondering what time it was. I thought again about fucking scene boxes, and Lara patting my goddamn shoulder.

The alarm on Paul's phone went off! Hallelujiah! Saved by the bell.

He groaned and fumbled around to find the off button while his phone made manic barking sounds.

"What the hell, Paul?" I said cheerfully.

He giggled. "I know, but it works," he said.

We packed up our sleeping bags and broke down the tent in the dark.

"Why isn't anyone else up?" I said.

"Bums," Paul said. "Oh, actually, you know what," he stopped stuffing the rolled up rain fly into its bag for a moment. "I bet it's daylight savings. My phone is probably an hour behind."

"Oh, is that tonight?" I said.

"Yeah."

"Oh well," I said. We finished packing up. "Wanna go for a walk while we wait for them to get up?"

"Sure," he said, and we tossed the tent and bags by the truck and took off down the road. "Well this isn't very scenic," he said, commenting on the brightly lit bathrooms.

"Oooo! Look!" I said, in an Australian accent, stopping suddenly and crouching. "A wild recreational vehicle!" I pointed at the fat RV near us.

Paul laughed heartily, much more heartily than the stupid joke had rightly deserved, but we were both glad to be with family.

We bantered in the same sleepy slap-happy tone our dad always used on the way to school in the morning, our giggles getting more and more raucous the more idiotic our jokes were.

After a while we turned back toward camp. Paul took his phone out to check the time.

"What the hell?" he said, stopping.

I turned to look at him. "What?" I said.

"One-thirty??" he said.

"What? How can that be?"

"My phone's been kind of broken," he said.

"I'm sorry, kind of broken?" I said. He giggled. "But I mean, that's the sun rising over there, isn't it?" I pointed to the light coming over the mountains, in the distance.

"I think that might just be LA," he said.

We stopped and asked someone who was awake with a fire (a bad sign) what time it was. 2:30, she said, or 1:30, depending on daylight savings. We thanked her and continued back toward camp.

"Dagnabbit," I said. "I was already awake -- I was so glad it was morning; I totally couldn't sleep."

"I knew it looked dark!" Paul said.

"Aw, man, we already broke down the tent," I said.

"Ugh."

"Well, I guess we could just use the tarp, right?"

"Yeah, that's what I usually do. And I think we've already passed the dewiest part of the night," he said.

So when we got back to the camp, we set out the tarp and took our sleeping bags back out. We snuggled in, laughing at our stupidity, and then pulled the hoods down over our faces. The little hike had burned some energy out of me, and I fell asleep without too much difficulty. I woke occasionally to adjust my hood, or to scoot back onto my sleeping pad, away from the cold ground, but mostly I slept.

When the alarm went off again in the morning, it was light out. I poked my head out of my sleeping bag, and found that I was covered in frozen dew. So much for a low of 60 degrees. Paul emerged from his bag and shook his head like a wet dog.

"Dewiest part of the night my ass!" I squeaked in a harsh rasp, my throat raw and phlegmy.

"What??" he said, laughing at me.

"Dewiest part of the night my ass!" I said again, throwing bits of ice at him from my bag.

"Hahahahahahaha!" he laughed loud.

We packed up once again, had breakfast with his crew, and made our way to the beach.

It was sunny and warm, and we laid our bags out to dry. He got out one of his many frisbees, and we played catch for a couple hours, sometimes with crewmates, but mostly just us. He showed me how to throw backhands and inside-outs, performed his favorite trick throws for me, and generally displayed the boundless energy of a healthy 19 year old.

The sun and exercise pumped me full of endorphins, and my cold became irrelevant as I ran around after the white disk, still wearing my dress pants, rolled up above my knees.

Around 11:00, we loaded into their vehicles again and drove back through town. I thought about how good my bed would feel, and hot tea, and a change of clothes. They dropped me at my house on their way to the fair, and a few of them came in to use the bathroom. I hugged my brother, knowing he'd be back the next weekend, on break, and thanked his friends for having me as their guest. I could see them hesitate, waiting to see if I was going to hug them, too. But I just smiled, too exhausted, and let them leave.

And I took a hot shower and drank some tea and got under my blankets, nice and warm and dry, and I slept and slept, and didn't wake up until just before Mark got home from work at 4:30pm.

"Hey, baby, how're you feeling?" he asked, sitting on the edge of the bed.

"I'm okay," I croaked feebly, sitting up to hug him, and I laughed because even though my throat stung, my head was filled with glue, my joints ached, and I couldn't breathe through my nose, everything felt just fine.

2007-02-25T22:51:00.000-08:00

[a couple more pics to be uploaded when my internet gets its panties untwisted]

February 24-25, 2007

I looked in the mirror while I waited for the shower to warm up. My nose and cheekbones were darker, and when I peered closer I saw tiny little freckles. I used to just brown, when my skin was a little younger.

I'd worn 30 spf sunscreen every day since my arrival, but even in winter, the sun in LA is not to be bested.

Steam started creeping around the fish-patterned shower curtain, so I got in gingerly and fiddled with the knob for a while before committing to getting fully under the stream.

I washed the salt off of my face that had accumulated while we walked to the Chinese New Year parade, about 2 1/2 miles each way. The route I'd planned through Elysian Park had proved unfindable, but after clambering up a couple steep, crumbly hills, we'd finally given up on hiking paths, and wound our way around Dodger Stadium on main roads.

China Town seemed to be made up, primarily, of little import shops, rather than restaurants, like in Chicago or New York. I resisted buying lovely blue cherry-blossomed ceramic bowls that I knew I didn't need while I had my roommates' bowls to use, and while I had no income, and while I didn't especially want to carry them back with me. And I prefer to buy used, anyway.

I thought about the bowls while I shampooed my hair, and comforted myself with the idea that I could go back and buy them, later. Abstract delayed-gratification retail therapy. Not as satisfying as you might think.

I got out of the shower and dried off as quickly as I could -- the charming little house has no heat -- and at night, it drops into the 50's. I put on the one semi-dressy outfit I'd packed, put on some make-up for the first time in maybe a month, put my hair up, and decided I was presentable to the public.

"You ready to go, the girl?" Mark asked.

"Yeah, just about," I said, putting on my one pair of dressier shoes. "Do these go?"

"Uhhh, I think you have too much bare skin showing on your feet. It's not balanced," Mark said.

"Um, okay, well, it's these or Tevas," I said, irritated that Mark didn't automatically know that I was just looking for approval.

"Well, I mean, they're fine, I don't think anyone will be staring at your feet anyway," he said to comfort me. Also not as satisfying as you might think.

"Do I look alright?" I tried greater directness.

"Yeah, you look fine," he said, distractedly.

Sigh. He must be uncomfortable too, I thought. It was Tom's birthday party, after all, Tom being Mark's only friend out here.

"Okay, let's go, then," I said. We suited up with helmets and bright jackets and blinking lights, and rolled down down down our hill and along the minimally-hilled path we'd charted for ourselves using Google Maps Pedometer.

We found the house without too much ado, locked our bikes to a railing, took off our helmets, did a hair check, and headed in.

"Girl's sporting the pimp look now, huh?" Mark said as I was about to open the front door.

"Huh? Oh," I said, and bent over to unroll my pant leg.

We walked in and were half-greeted by some very loud frat-guy types who were sitting at the kitchen table. They gave us directions to a bedroom to drop off our stuff, and then Mark ran out with Tom to pick up some party supplies. I tried not to trail after Tom's girlfriend, Katherine, like a lost puppy, but the house was still mostly empty, brightly lit, and sober.

She and I liberally poured ourselves some of the vodka I'd brought, and added a bunch of Rose's lime juice to make it drinkable. The apartment was enormous, with a huge porch big enough for a ping-pong table, a café table, 4 chairs, and a bunch of empty space. The living room had a television set as big as a twin bed, which was displaying Empire Records on mute. A couple people were standing around making conversation about the movie, but I'd never seen it. I drank some more vodka.

People started trickling in, Tom and Mark came back with a fancy multi-colored disco light contraption, and I refilled my drink.

I went out to the porch, wandered slowly around, looking at the ping-pong table, the lattice work overhead, the view, and listening to the conversations around me.

"Aw, man, then the producer decided he wanted to reshoot the whole damn thing, at like five o'clock," an actor-looking, very industry-standard attractive guy standing near me said to his friend. They were standing at right angles to one another, invitingly.

"You're kidding," his less clean-cut, more California-looking friend said. I positioned myself in front of them, looking out at the hills, at a large, well-lit building perched atop one, in the distance.

"Yeah, my shoulder was killing," the first guy said. Their conversation lulled to quiet for a moment. I turned my body toward them a bit.

"Do you know what that lit up building up there in the hills is?" I asked them, gesturing at it with my drink.

"Uh, yeah, I'm pretty sure that's the Griffith Park observatory. You mean that one?" the clean-cut one said, and took a step closer.

"Yeah, with all the white lights," I said.

"Yeah, that's the observatory. It's pretty cool."

"Ah, okay, I hiked up near that the other day, but I didn't go in. You've been?" I asked.

"Yeah, it's really nice. They spent a bunch of cash to redo it, recently."

"Cool. I'm Maddy, by the way," I said, sticking my hand out.

"Hey Maddy, I'm Mike," he said, and shook my hand.

"I'm Dan," his friend said.

"Hey, Dan, I'm Maddy," I said, shaking his hand, too. "So where are you guys from?"

"Wisconsin," Mike said.

"Michigan, but I've been out here for 8 years," Dan said.

"Midwesterners! I'm from Chicago. What do you guys do?" I said.

"I do IT stuff for production companies," Dan said.

"And I'm a camera man and a writer," Mike said.

Dan was standing a foot further from me, and seemed a little shy. Normally that might have motivated me to talk him up, get him more comfortable, but, well Mike was a writer.

"Oh cool!" I said. "I'm a writer, too."

"Well, I mean, I haven't sold anything yet, just sending scripts out, so I guess I can't really call myself a writer yet."

"Well, do you write?" I asked

"Yeah, yeah, but--"

"Then you're a writer!" I encouraged.

He explained that he had a writing partner, and a bunch of contacts that were interested in his stuff, that he'd submitted a script that wasn't quite what someone had wanted, but they'd asked him to write something else because they liked his style. I tried to balance curiosity, a desire to network, friendliness, and my vodka, with decent success, I thought.

"How do you recommend getting started and connected out here," I asked him.

"Just meet people, you know, like you're doing right now, at parties like this," he said. I nodded.

Right then another guy came out onto the porch and turned to Mike, his back partly to me, separating me from the two guys.

"Have you seen Jared around, man?" I heard him say.

Mike started to reply, and I used the opportunity to slip off of the porch. I wanted to network, but I didn't feel comfortable asking for some sort of connection when I had none to offer. But then how was I going to get anywhere? As I wandered through the party, I berated myself a little for not being slightly more forward, and later overcompensated with a woman I was talking to, asking her if I could give her some of my massage therapy business cards, to give to her friends.

"Oh, uh, um--" she stumbled. Damn.

"Or I mean if you don't have any use for them," I started to backpedal.

"No, I could take like half a dozen, sure, yeah," she said.

"Cool, right on," I said, counting them out and handing them over. I made a mental note to talk to her at least once more, about something else, that evening. I really did like her, and I didn't want her to feel used or... uncomfortable, or... like she didn't like me anymore, said my vodka.

I wandered around again, looking for Mark, the only person there with any real sense of context for me. He was pretty drunk, too.

"Hey baby!" he said, and put an arm around me. I tuned out and let myself just be his arm candy for a little while, while he talked energetically with some musicians.

The night continued like that -- in spurts of social effort and retreats to under Mark's arm, with more vodka, with some great music from Tom's 12 hour iTunes playlist, and then some dancing, and some more retreating, and then more dancing again.

At around 2:00, we agreed we were sated, and that we should start sobering up for the ride home. But at 2:15, Tom pulled me back out to the dance floor, and I danced out the last of my anxiety, every lingering jumpy twitchy ansty feeling coming out easy in 4/4 time.

And by the time I got back to Mark, he was working on another beer.

"I thought we were sobering up," I said.

"I thought we were leaving," he said.

"We are, we are, I just was dancing a little bit. I thought we were going to hang out until we were a little less drunk."

Mark looked exhausted by the idea of continuing the line of logic.

"Okay, okay, let's go," I said.

"Okay," he said, and put the half-drunk beer down.

We gathered our stuff and gave Tom and Katherine hugs.

"Hey, uh, he's kinda swaying there, Maddy," Tom said, tilting his chin at Mark.

"Yeah, I know. We're going to walk for a while."

"Good, good," he said.

We said goodbye to anyone whom we happened to pass, on our way to the door, helmets and jackets on, fully bike-geeked out.

We unlocked our bikes and I glanced over at Mark. He was swayingly attempting to mount his ride.

"Hey, baby, can we just walk for a bit?" I asked. "I think I'm a little too drunk to ride, right now."

"Okay," he said, refocusing his energy toward walking with his bike.

We walked down the street in the chilly night air, my shoes click-clacking on the sidewalk, and I didn't much mind the cold, or my uncomfortable shoes, or much of anything.

"That was a great scene," I said.

"Yeah, totally. That was awesome."

"It seemed like everyone there was from the Midwest. I met this girl who I actually might've gone to acquatics camp with, in Evanston."

"Really."

"Yeah, we both looked familiar to each other," I said, and thought vaguely about "both" vs. "each."

"I could really go for some tacos right now," Mark said.

"Yeah, good idea. We can stop if we see somewhere open."

"Can we bike now?"

I looked at Mark's only moderately improved gait, and then looked down the long, steep hill in front of us.

"Can we get to the bottom of this hill, first?"

"Yeah, okay," he said grumpily.

The streets were almost entirely empty, and the sidewalks were wide, so we got on our bikes and pedaled down the sidewalk until we got to a taco place that was brightly lit and full of other drunk people. They didn't have anything vegetarian listed, but they more or less seemed to understand that we didn't want meat on our tacos and burrito. (Mark isn't vegetarian, but he stopped eating non-organic meat & dairy after seeing The Corporation.)

I could feel people looking at our bright jackets and our helmets as we chowed down, and I felt both uncomfortable and proud.

The next day I was hung over, and paranoid that I'd made a fool of myself; that I'd given the wrong impression by getting so drunk; that as a massage therapist, a healer, I was supposed to be a model of health; that I'd overstepped social bounds and been too much, too crazy with my dancing, too forward, too blah blah blah.

I tried try to tell myself that I only worried because I know these people have no context for me, and that it was a party, that I had certainly been fine, and probably even charming. But nonetheless, the next couple days were uncomfortable and even mildly depressive. I called my parents, signed on to my instant messaging program, and tried to tug my Chicago self out to LA.

Molly: how's the left side?

Me: oh mollers
so happy to see you
the left side is feelin pretty weird right now

Molly: uh oh

Me: im like wiat a minute wait a minute who am i???

Molly: ah

Me: there is just no one here to define me except mark, which is huge, but my god
and the weather is all unreal

Molly: i've been toying with the idea that rooting yourself has something more to do with defining yourself by activities and interests than people originally
the people will follow

Me: ...yeah, that makes sense
i was having trouble doing activities today

Molly: probably cuz you've been Action Maddy

Me: yeah... but i also felt like i didnt know what i was supposed to do
and i've been wearing the same jeans for a month

Molly: with your free time?

Me: yeah

Molly: did you try the usually maddy grabbers?
like writing, scrap booking your trip, yoga, making healthy food

And she started to list the things she knows make me feel better, and just the fact that she knew the list by heart made me feel better. So I went to my closet and changed into the tee shirt we'd made together, a few days before I'd left. One of the few articles of clothings I'd packed with me. And I snuggled under Mark's arm, and tried to let Molly and Mark hold on to who I am, for a couple hours.

2007-02-23T08:59:00.000-08:00

February 16, 2007

I scoured our laminated fold-out map, the LA bike map pdf, and google maps, comparing back and forth, trying to choose our route carefully.

Mark glanced at it, said "Let's just take Rampart to 8th and take it all the way west," and seemed satisfied.

I took another five minutes or so to decide that, yeah, okay, that was probably fine. But I came up with a couple alternate routes, before Mark finally badgered me into puting on my helmet and shoes and reattaching the pedals to our bikes (they have to be taken off to ship them with Amtrak).

We rolled our bikes out the front door of our charming little house on a hill, carried them down the few steps, and then learned that we were going to go through brake pads a lot faster here, as we squeezed the brakes all the way down, down, down the windy road, down from our hill.

Sunset Boulevard, which we live right off of, has a bike lane, so it was a gentle start.

We pedaled with no drama, up and down the little bits of hill, in the sunshine. We looked for Rampart, and looked and looked, and finally I yelled to Mark "Hey! Can we stop a minute?"

"What?" he asked, irritated.

"Well I think we might've passed it."

"I don't think so," he said, in the same tone he'd used to badger me into putting on my shoes and helmet.

"Well let me just take a sec to look," I said, pulling out the map and trying to get myself oriented. I could feel which way the water was, but I so badly wanted that to be east. I told myself No, the water is west, Maddy; West. That means that, over there, that's North." But as soon as I was done telling myself that, my sub-brain flipped right back to Water=East.

"Okay," I said to Mark, "look, we passed it by quite a bit. It's back here," I pointed. "And we're here," I pointed again.

"Oh, I see. Yeah, okay, it's only on one side of the street," he said, calming down now that I was delaying us to save us time.

So we turned around, and we found it pretty easily. It was a steep climb, but doable, and when we got to the top, WHEEEEEEEEEEE!!!! all the way down!

Adrenalin, lactic acid, and endorphins, oh my!

We rerouted to get across the expressway, and found our way without drama to 8th Street. 8th Street then dead-ended at a neighborhood that was rich enough, apparently, to block off street access to riff-raff like us. A rent-a-cop car drove by while I stood looking at my map, next to the hedge-and-gate barrier. He lingered while we decided which way to go, clearly having nothing better to do.

We cut north a bit, to a bigger through-street, and then split off at La Brea, Mark going to check in with work, me continuing on to the Apple store, to see if they could do anything for my poor departed lappy.

They could not, so I resigned myself to shelling out the money for a new one, and I met Mark at a nearby Trader Joe's he'd found while waiting for me to be done. We bought familiar items and packed them into my pannier, along with my dead computer.

And we biked back, easily rolling along the wide lanes of Los Angeles (even with my heavy bag), no honking, no one threatening to side-swipe us, over the hills and far away, biking in California with no aching in my heart*. (*credit to Led Zeppelin) What a nice surprise. A 16- or 17-mile round trip with no drama.

The hill up to our house was the hardest part, but we managed to bike up the whole way without stopping to rest. We got home feeling exhilarated and triumphant, and sat down to make some serious sandwiches.

2007-02-20T14:56:00.000-08:00

February 14, 2007

We finally arrived in Los Angeles 12 hours after our scheduled arrival. The train had to turn around and go back to Tucson because of a freight derailment, further along, and we'd been put on a bus to LA, around the time that the train had intended to arrive.

"I HATE Amtrak!" the woman sitting in front of us spat in regular intervals. "What if I was gettin' married? What if I was the bride for a $30,000 wedding?" she invected to no one in particular.

I thanked my lucky stars that such a wedding wasn't happening, and that I was not her groom.

"I HATE AMTRAK!" she yelled.

Mark rolled his eyes at me.

"I mean, if you're in a hurry, you don't take the train," I said to Mark, sotto voce. He nodded. We watched the desert hills roll by, covered in windmills and peppered with a few houses and the occasional gas station.

The sun was descending by the time we got to the outskirts of LA, the stretching suburbs of suburbs of suburbs. The light shone through a layer of orange air that stirred a little anxiety in my chest. Smog.

Ten minutes from the station a skyscraper came into view with its lights turned on to create a heart, for Valentines' Day.

"That's the Metro building," said the LA native sitting behind us, his sausage-smelling breath wafting up with his words. A few people scrambled to the windows to try to take pictures.

The bus driver fumbled around the Amtrak station, not sure where to let us out. The natives finally sorted him out, and we disembarked into the cool night air. We went to the baggage claim and picked up our bikes and my massage table, where they'd been waiting for 12 days.

"You owe us a lot of money for these things," the shipping employee told me, leafing through a shipment log.

"What do you mean?" I said.

"You gotta hand over a lot of cash before I can give these to you," he said. "They been here for like two weeks!"

"Oh, you mean $2 per item per day, right?"

"Oh," he said. "Well if you're not gonna argue with me, then I'm not gonna charge you." He closed the shipment log.

"Really?" I said, confused.

"Yeah, don't worry about it," he said cheerfully.

"Uh, wow, okay, thanks!" I said, probably sounding more disoriented than grateful. "He's not charging us," I said to Mark.

"That's awesome!"

"Yeah don't worry about it," the employee said again, enjoying himself.

Mark and I hauled the stuff outside and waited for Tom to come pick us up in his pick-up truck.

Mark went in search of water to refill the Nalgene, while I used my pocket knife to make salsa with the last of our tomatoes, some soy sauce, cilantro, a packet of onion condiment, and wasabi for spice. It was surprisingly tasty.

We took a picture of MooBoo, our travel mascot, against the heart of the Metro building. I wished my computer hadn't given up the ghost, the previous night. It would be nice to watch an episode of Boston Legal while we waited. But eventually Tom arrived, and all our stuff fit in the truck, and he drove us to our new home without incident.

It was a lot higher up the hill than GoogleEarth had said.

And by the way,

Wow, Hills.

In a daze, we dragged our belongings inside and met our old skateboarder dude roommates. They offered us peanut butter and jelly, helped carry a few things, and introduced us to the 13 year old Chocolate Lab that lives here part time.

Tom used the bathroom and then ran back to finish his Valentines' Day date with his girlfriend.

"See you soon, darlin," he said, kissing me on the cheek. "Later, buddy," he said to Mark, giving him a good looking hug.

Mark and I sat, dazed, for a little while, talking with our new roommates about the train and bus snafus, the grand journey-ness of it all, just trying to make sense. But after not too long we gave up on sense and opted for sleep on the double mattress left behind by the last occupant.

We laid out a sheet across the bed, and used our sleeping bags as blankets. Mike, one of the roommates, had lent us a couple pillows, which felt like pure luxury. It'd been a full month since we'd slept on a real bed.

And boy did we sleep.

2007-02-16T10:04:00.000-08:00

February 11, 2007

I’d spent two days sneezing on the train, and still hadn’t shaken the nose tickles by the time we finally arrived at the Catalina State Park campgrounds.

The train had arrived at the station in Tucson at 1 in the morning, and I sneezed may way through an uncomfortable sleep on the Amtrak station bench, while we waited for the 6:05am bus. I sneezed my way through the bus ride, and kept right on sneezing during the cab ride and the walk from the park entrance to the ranger station, heaving chest loaded down with a backpacking backpack on my back and a smaller backpack on my front.

We waited until 8:30am for a spot to open up in the non-electric sites, and then walked the last half mile to our new home. We set up our tent and I sneezily crawled in, the sun starting to saturate the cloudy skies to a brighter gray, as we lay down for some real rest.

We woke up at around 1pm. We made food, taking in the Catalina Mountains right there behind us, eating open-face peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I only sneezed a couple times; it seemed to be subsiding with the fresh air.

I looked at my phone to check the time, and saw that there was a missed call from Tava, at 8am. Apparently my phone had called her (buttons pushed while it was crammed between me and my bags, probably), and she’d called right back.

I told myself I really should taker her off of my speed dial list.

Tava and I lived together for 7 years, if you count the first year in the dorms where we lived in rooms two doors down from one another. It had been a very romantic, intimate relationship, for a long time, but in the last year, since we’d stopped living together, and maybe a little even before that, it had just, well, sort of dissolved.

I stopped returning her phone calls, because every time I saw her she made it clear that she had no interest in listening to anything I had to say, anything I felt or thought. My intensity and insight used to be something that had drawn Tava to me, but of late, it seemed like she maintained the friendship only out of a sense that she should; that she didn’t want to let it go, but with no interest in anything beyond superficial conversation. I’m not very good at superficial conversation.

Or at least, not with Tava. I’d spent too much time lying next to her in my tiny dorm bed, talking about philosophy or love or art or anything, anything so long as it was substantial.

While Mark went to wash our dishes, I played her voice message, snuggled back into my sleeping bag in the tent, with the door open.

“Hey, Maddy. I just saw that you called. I just got up, but I’m awake now, so you can call me back anytime. Okay bye!” she said, in a familiar, friendly, sleepy tone.

“End of message. Press 7 to delete this message, or 9 to save it in the archives,” said the phone machine lady.

I stared off into the yellow grasses surrounding our tent.

“Are you still there?” said the phone machine lady.

I took the phone from my ear and hit the end button, refusing to choose between 7 and 9. And then I sneezed a few times. I decided it must be something from the train, some sort of cleaning product maybe, that was now all over my sweater and fleece, which I was using as pillows.

Mark got back from washing dishes and sat down next to me, half in the tent. I played the message for him.

“Well. That was pretty charming,” he said grudgingly, understanding that it was confusing for me. “But, I mean, you don’t have to do anything about it right now. It’s opening up a whole can of worms you didn’t intend to open. I mean, you could call her and say you hadn’t meant to call, but she clearly wanted you to be calling her, so that might not be the easiest way to start a conversation.”

“Yeah, she did sounds like she wanted me to call,” I said. I sighed. I thought about Molly, and how I'd left Chicago with our friendship on a strained note, too.

I felt my eyes well up, thinking about all the ties that had been stretched 1500 miles thin, so far, and were only getting further. How do you resolve a conflict when you're across the country, can't get together to make sushi and watch Sex in the City, to make up?

I thought about calling Tava back, this time thinking she might be a good person to commiserate with about Molly.

But it was just too loaded.

So I called a different friend, instead -- Ruby. Ruby is an easy friend. Our relationship is based on mutual intellectual stimulation, and not on a ton of complicated emotional and historical dependencies. We do have emotional ties, but they're driven by our ability to enjoy one another's minds. We have separate social networks and living situations, and always have.

Ruby talked to me about both of them, let me cry out a little frustration and fear, while Mark played guitar and worked on his songs, at the picnic table.

I felt a bit better after getting off the phone, or at least a little vented. I got out of the tent and looked around at the gray skies and the desert mountains and tried to take a deep breath. My chest ached with the effort. I felt like I'd been crying for hours, my muscles exhausted from sobbing.

But there had been no sobbing. Just sneezing and a little light crying. No thunderstoms, just drizzle.

Even so, the physical sensation was the same.

I looked at the yellow grasses.

"Are we gonna go on that hike?" I said.

"Yeah, let's do it."

We started walking out of the campgrounds.

"You know what?" I said to Mark.

"What's that?" he said, arm around me, concerned and caring, wanting me to feel better.

"I feel heartbroken. I haven't felt this way in... God, for a long time."

He stroked my back gently and sighed.

"Since my second year of college, after Gregory. I feel like I felt this one night with Tava, after Gregory and I crashed and burned. We had dinner in this little studio apartment she'd rented, which she hated. It was the middle of winter and it was far from campus and lonely, so I came over, and she made this stir-fry that impressed the hell out of me, at the time. With peas and carrots and ginger. You know, cuz I didn't really know how to cook yet."

"Mm," Mark said, as we walked down the road to the trail head.

"And we listened to Bjork, and then we went to bed, and we were lying there on the futon, staring at the ceiling and talking about our broken hearts. Did I tell you her ex was named Gregory, too?"

"Yeah, I think so," Mark said.

"Yeah, so, both of us just felt confused and broken. And we lay in bed on our backs, trying to use talk and, you know, our friendship, to mortar up the cracks."

"Mm."

"That's how I feel. Like I did then," I said, looking off into the distance, maybe east, toward home; I wasn't sure. But whatever direction I looked, there were mountains betweeen me and whatever lay beyond.

"Just like that," I said. And Mark put his arms around me and squeezed my aching chest tight.

2007-02-04T21:34:00.000-08:00

There’s a check traveling across the country in the mail, right now – or maybe it’s already arrived – while we mosey our way down through Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas on the train. We eat oatmeal from a thermos we set up the night before, using our electric kettle and the bathroom outlets and water from the little sink in the observation car. Oh, and oats brought from Whole Foods in Chicago. Which were probably shipped from a processing plant in Pennsylvania. Which probably got the raw oats from Iowa.

The check is made out to our future roommate, whose voice we know only through IM. We staggered back and forth between our two options – did we want to live with 3 guys, or with one girl? The guys are in their late 20s/early 30s: a musician and two self-proclaimed ‘old skateboarder dudes.’ The girl is 23, vegetarian, on top of her shit, has a dog with separation anxiety, and sounds a little uptight. The guys, well, they’re 3 guys. Sharing one shower.

Back and forth, pros and cons, discussion after discussion, first feeling committed to one, mapping out routes to groceries, and then making whole new maps and plans the next day, from the other address.

The girl ran around to different housing options, trying to find something with our price range in mind, something without carpeting for her dog to tear up, with no shared walls for her dog’s barks to pierce when no one is home. She found a house with bamboo floors and crown moldings, a mile from the train, less than a mile from Trader Joe’s. Uphill, said GoogleEarth, all the way to Trader Joe’s, but downhill with the groceries all the way back.

“Hola!” she says in her email, giving us the details of this house she thinks is just so cute, and that is even a little below our upper price limit.

“Holla back!” I say, in my response, having misread her greeting. I catch it a few days later when I go back to reference her email.

Oops. Californians say ‘Hola;’ Chicagoans say “Holla.”

We reread her description of the house, her description of herself, look at our maps, and think “Yeah, okay, yes.”

“Sounds like a plan then,” I email. Let’s send in that rental application, that credit check. We bundle up and leave Molly’s house with the form in hand, squinting against the cold wind on our way to Kinko’s.

But then the skateboarder dude, Luke, who runs a surf and board shop, mentions that they have a yard with a small garden and a porch and that they’re set back behind another house, so there’s no traffic noise. And they compost. And have bike hooks and a workbench in the basement.

They compost!

The check is half our deposit. Luke will get the other half on arrival.

Holla back, y’all.

Note: Posted via the wireless connection at our campgrounds in San Antonio. What is the world coming to.

2007-01-25T20:59:00.000-08:00

I went to West Town Bikes, tonight, and fixed up my bikes real nice for their debut in LA. I installed fancy new shifters for all those hills, unearthed plastic bag bits from the derailleur, tightened cables, de-salted, lubed, and trued.

I hugged the mechanic-teachers, undeveloped friends, goodbye. Laura, who is often awkard -- in that way that really smart, quirky people are often awkward -- hugged me fully, hugged me like a sibling.

"So, I'm staying on the cyclesisters listserve," I said while still hugging.

"Aww," Laura said.

"I hope I'll see you when I come back to visit," I said as we let go. She nodded and didn't say anything, and I felt awkward at not being able to express that, even though we only know each other in this one arena, she means something significant to me, and I really really like her. That I'll miss being in the same city with her. How do you express these things to a casual friend who's awkward enough not to see, or at least acknowledge, the body language that's saying it?

I went to hug her boyfriend, the other mechanic-teacher. Josh is a bear, warm and easy-going and powerful. He hugged me like a sibling, too.

"Thank you," I said, and was so glad to hear it sound as heartfelt as I meant it.

"You're welcome," he said, in the same timbre.

We hugged a moment more.

"I hope I'll see you guys," I said as we parted.

"Definitely," he said, definitely.

I took a deep breath and felt relief. Mark was on his cell phone, lingering, and I stood antsily, waiting for him to finish, wanting to escape.

"Mark, can we go? I said goodbye already, I want to go," I whined a little.

And we rolled our happy happy bikes through the shop, with good luck wishes shouted after us, and we pedaled with ease the 5 miles back through the cold night toward home, or Molly's home, anyway.

Mark turned off to go meet up with friends for a last boys' night out, and I arrived soon after to an empty house. I sat down at my computer and felt tears coming on for the millionth time in the last 48 hours, since finishing the bulk of preparation for the move.

I love Chicago. I love my bike community. I love my friends, my acquaintances, my bike routes, my ability to withstand the cold.

And I took a deep breath, and looked up the Bicycle Kitchen, LA's version of West Town Bikes. I looked for the address, and then asked Google to plot out the route from my most likely apartment possibility, not having any idea where the address was.

And what do you know.

2007-01-22T21:40:00.000-08:00

We packed our belongings in neatly labelled and weighed boxes, we swept and sponged and vacuumed the apartment, we loaded the boxes in my parents' minivan, we carted them off to the garage, and then we carted ourselves off to Molly's apartment for the two week interim between moving out of our old place and leaving on a train for our new place.

Well, our new city.

We don't have a new place yet.

My head is spinning with GoogleEarth's 2.5 dimensional renditions of craigslist's housing possibilities (is that hill too steep to bike home on, with a trailer full of groceries? where ARE the groceries?).

Molly is irritated by our presence tonight. She went to bed without saying goodnight and didn't respond to my IM apologies for talking during her TV show.

I am starting to feel guilty about the possible reprocussions of every squeak of the floorboards, every moved item, every inch of space Mark and I gobble.

I want to say it's too much, the stress of planning a move for two financially separate people, living without privacy in Molly's living room, still working my job, apartment hunting, itinerary creating, reservation making, biking in the slush, living out of my backpack, worrying about my nebulous future as an aspiring TV writer, saying see you later to 26 years' worth of friends, to my family.

But it's necessary. It's just moving.

Forward motion; mush mush.

2006-11-16T14:02:00.000-08:00

August 25-31st, 2006 - Three Introductions: Part III, continued (and finished)

The next morning we rolled out of Tom's bed, took our time making coffee, showering, getting dressed. I did a little yoga in the slats of light that snuck between the kitchen blinds, casting all the way to the living room floor of the little studio.

I left a thank you note for Tom on the bed stand, and we headed out to find the breakfast place he'd recommended.

Our first move was to wait for the bus that ran down the nearest big cross street. We stood at the stop for about 15 minutes, slathering on cheap sunscreen from the gas station, and watched our bus pass right by us. It stopped across the intersection and then moved on before we realized that the plexiglass shelter with a bench, by which we waited, was not actually a bus stop. It was just the remnants of one, now being used as a bed by a gentleman of few means.

We crossed the street and found the real stop, with a sign and everything. I felt exposed and self-conscious, standing on the sunny corner of the huge intersection while SUVs zoomed past me and the only other pedestrians were of a similar character to our sleeping friend.

"Do I still have any sunscreen streaks on my face?" I asked Mark.

He squinted and peered carefully.

"No, I think you're good. Do I?"

I squint-peered back, and found a smudge by his ear to rub in, wondering if we looked as out of place as I felt.

The bus finally arrived, and when I asked how much the fare was, the driver just waved me away, indicating I should sit down and not worry about it.

"No wonder the public transportation sucks," I said to Mark. "I mean if they don't even bother to collect fares, at least to keep track of how many people are riding, they're not going to get any funding."

We bounced up the street, watching for Sunset Boulevard. The bus seemed impossibly noisy and bumpy, like someone had forgotten to put in any rubber bits, had just bolted together a clanking pile of metal.

I saw Sunset coming up, but the bus veered off to the left before crossing it. I made my way up to the bus driver.

"I'm trying to get to Sunset -- does the bus wrap back around, or..."

"No, you should get off here."

"Oh, okay, thanks--" I waved Mark over, and we hopped out. "Sunset is over there, right?" I asked the driver.

"Yep, just cross that way and you'll be there," she said cheerfully.

"Thank you!" I said. Cheer is about the last thing you get from Chicago bus drivers.

We crossed a confusing set of bending intersections, but found Sunset. Now the question was which way we needed to go. We discussed what direction we were facing, which way Sunset went, whether the numbers could be counted on to be continuous, which way they were going, and finally decided we knew what we were doing. We started walking, feeling fairly confident.

We kept walking, and kept walking, and kept walking, and started getting a little cranky about walking. We finally stopped inside a music store to ask directions to our cross-street. We were assured we were going the right way, but that it was another fifteen minutes walk, at least.

We looked out for a bus, but didn't see one until we'd already been walking for about 10 minutes, at which point it seemed silly. Some pleasant-looking old men dressed in pastels assured us that we were almost there, and finally, an hour and fifteen minutes since we'd left, we arrived at our destination.

The restaurant was a cute retro diner-type place, with a U-shaped counter, little booths, and pleasant indie music.

The hipster server gave us advice on ordering and was very pleasant, but I couldn't shake the feeling that he was staring at me. In fact, I felt like there were a number of people looking at me, at any given moment. I wished I was wearing something I liked more than a couple of cotton tanks and cargo-type capris. But since I didn't look that interesting, I came to the conclusion that I wasn't being stared at for anything in particular about me, but just for the sake of staring. That it must be a cultural difference.

In Chicago, a server takes your order without looking at you unless you're looking at them. Like, when you're hesitating on your order, looking at the menu, they look at their pad, pen poised, or at your menu -- not at you. Not so in LA, it seemed. People spend more thought on appearances and presentation, I think, and so spend more time observing them.

We consumed enormous pancakes and some sort of futuristic organic mimosa thing that cost more than our food.

When we finished, we decided to go explore Echo Park, which we'd heard was a cool neighborhood, and maybe affordable. We took the Sunset bus for maybe 20 minutes, asking the bus driver (who let us pay, this time) where to get off for Echo Park. He seemed uncertain, but gave us a general idea.

We got out and went into a gas station (again) to buy a map and a big jug of water (since I'd forgotten my Nalgene at Tom's). We figured out where we were, and headed for Echo Park itself. On the way, we crossed a street about 15 feet from the intersection -- very Chicago standard.

"What the fuck are you doing?" a woman yelled out of a beat-up white sports car.

"Jesus," I said to Mark. He didn't say anything. He looked uncomfortable.

We made our way through a neighborhood that I couldn't quite interpret -- it was sort of cute, but sort of run down, but sort of colorful, but sort of shady. It just didn't translate to my urban sensors. I got the feeling it wasn't the greatest neighborhood, but at least during the day, it wasn't dangerous, either.

The park was peppered with homeless people. We only saw one pair of people that looked like they were enjoying being outside by choice rather than by necessity.

We sat down by the pond, which was a scummy brown, in order to drink some of our water.

"Well this is pretty," Mark said.

"You think? I dunno. There are so many homeless people, and these palm trees are just so tall it doesn't feel very protected or cozy, you know?"

"I think it's nice," Mark said, sounding irritated. I wondered if he just appreciated the aesthetic on some level that I didn't get, yet, since he'd been in Southern Cali to visit his folks many times.

There were a few disreputable looking ducks floating around, including James B. Duck, whose existence I documented with my phone's camera.

James B. Duck? Brown, baby.

I wasn't sure whether I felt more amused or disturbed.

Mark and I took turns feebly trying to buck the other up. We pored over the map and chose a street that looked like it was close enough to a main drag to be convenient, and far enough to be appealing.

We walked down the length of the park, and headed across the main street, not jaywalking this time.

I was walking fast. Mark complained that he had a headache. I tried to slow down. We were walking uphill in the sun, past little bungalows and two-flats.

"God, the streets are so wide, even on a little side street like this," I said.

"Mm hm." Mark said.

"And the sun is so direct, it just, I feel so exposed. There just aren't trees like in Chicago, you know?"

"I guess."

"What?" I said, annoyed by his lack of response.

"What do you want me to say? You just seem determined to not like LA," he said.

I stopped walking.

"I don't want to dislike it, I just... I don't think that's true. I do want to like it." No response. "Can you just talk to me?" I said.

"I'd rather not," he said.

"Mark, come on, I'm sorry I'm being negative. This is just kinda freaking me out, how far apart everything is, and, just, I don't know. Trying to imagine living here."

"Yeah, moving will be really hard. Really, really hard."

I sighed. "Can we sit here for a minute, in the shade?" I said. There was a small scrubby tree on the corner. He sat down, not looking at me. I sat next to him and used a twig to play with the ants on the sidewalk. I took a deep breath.

"This is a pretty cute area, though, don't you think?" I tried.

"Yeah," the resentful answer came.

"Could you imagine living here?"

"I guess, I don't know. If I'd known we were going to be doing this for the day, I wouldn't have agreed to it."

"I thought you wanted to check out a neighborhood, too...?" A car pulled up to a house nearby, and the driver (a preppy white guy) got out and looked at us suspiciously, as he walked inside. I was close to tears.

"Not really."

"Okay, well, I didn't understand that. I'm sorry." Silence. "So what should we do?"

"I just want to relax. This is my vacation," he said.

"Okay, well, we're here, so I mean. Should we just walk around a bit, see what there is to see?"
No response. "I'll try not to be so negative; I'm sorry."

"It's okay," he said, and put an arm around me.

"Do you want some water?" I said.

"Yeah."

And so we got back up and started walking more slowly. We decided we should smoke the little bit of weed I had with me. We kept our eyes open for a concealed spot.

We came across a house that was under construction, its yard raised from the sidewalk, gated in, and surrounded by trees.

"Oh wow," I breathed, peering through the wrought iron gate.

"That's awesome," Mark said.

"Yeah. Wow. I wonder what the deal is." Construction materials littered the yard, under a tree that was strung with Chinese lanterns, across the flagstone area in front of the entrance, on the shaded grass. "Why don't we smoke here? Doesn't look like anyone's home."

"Yeah, okay."

The steps were set a good 10 feet back from the sidewalk, with a wall on either side, and trees shading us from above. We poked a hole in the water bottle, made a bowl out of aluminum foil, and congratulated ourselves on our cleverness.

Moods altered, we decided to walk on, discussing the virtues of living on a hill versus the difficulty of biking uphill, the idea of renting our own little bungalow, the fact that there must be other quirky little spots in LA that were appealing, as evidenced by this house.

I opened the water to take a swig and realized we had not been so clever, after all.

"Oh my god this is almost as bad as bongwater," I said.

"Oh no!"

"Oh god, and I have such cottonmouth," I said, handing him the water. He took a swig.

"Bongtastic," he said.

"Blech."

And we walked on, using our map to head us toward downtown LA, where we could grab the train back to Orange County. Our through-street turned out to be under construction, and also in the middle of a distinctly less friendly neighborhood. A few people stared at us from their houses as we walked by. It was clearly not a place meant for walking.

We stopped to ask directions from guys in a van that looked like a news crew. They looked to be Latino, and I wasn't sure if they would necessarily speak English, so I spoke clearly and slowly, and was immediately embarrassed when the guy responded with unaccented perfect English.

They said that it was a very long walk to downtown, and didn't know what way to recommend, clearly confused by the very idea of navigating on foot, so we said thanks anyway, and just chose another route from the map.

We walked for maybe another hour and a half, backtracking a bit in order to cross expressways.

"This is like that Super Mario level where everything is huge, you know?" I said to Mark.

"Ha, totally," he said, taking in the enormous concrete expressway girders, the office complex set way back from the street, surrounded by a huge parking lot, the palm trees looming way way way overhead.

"God, I'm so thirsty, but I just don't know if I can drink anymore of this," I said.

"Oh no way," Mark said.

And so we learned that LA, as a whole, is not walkable. And also not to use your water bottle to smoke your weed.

2006-10-17T09:38:00.000-07:00

August 25-31st, 2006 - Three Introductions: Part IIIa

My most recent trip to LA was by far the most surreal--felt the most like exploring a foreign country where you might speak the language, but the systems of motion, the customs, the buildings, the foliage, the air, all feel alien.

I was visiting my special friend Mark's parents in Orange county. They are quite religious. Mark is an atheist, and I don't know what I am, but I'm definitely not into organized religion, and especially not Christianity. I know some wonderful Christians, but for me they don't outweigh the number of Christians that use their faith like a weapon.

We were given separate bedrooms, and we said grace before each meal, and we all went to church on Sunday morning. Mark's father gave the sermon and his mother gave the children's ministry. I had trouble deciding whether I should just stand politely while they all listlessly sang "Oh God you are so nice" songs, or if I should mouth the words shown on the enormous television screens on either side of the organ.

Mark was singing, which I found confusing. He does like to sing, but he's also very vocally anti-Christianity. Later, when I asked him about it, he said he was showing off for me, which clarified nothing.

After hanging out with Mark's parents for 3 or 4 days, we headed for LA to meet up with Mark's friend, Tom, whom I'd met two or three times before.

Tom moved from Chicago to LA about three years ago, to pursue directing. He's starting to get regular work, but he's still broke, at the beginning of things. Mark's parents dropped us off by a giant neon hand that was the identifying landmark for Tom's apartment.

Tom wasn't home yet, walked around the neighborhood, looking for a public bathroom. Tom lived on a main drag, an enormous 4-lane LA standard. The Subway Sandwiches had no bathroom, and the hardware store, paint store, and others of that ilk didn't look promising, so we ventured away from the street.

There was a quiet little side street with a series of bungalows and two-flats running parallel to Tom's street.

"I could see living someplace like this," I said.

"Mm hm," Mark noncommitted.

I wondered how much more expensive these places were, as opposed to those on the main street. Everything feels expensive compared to Chicago, where you can live in a centrally located 1-bedroom on a beautiful tree-lined street, walking distance from the lake and the train, for $850. Or, if you're willing to live a little further from the lake and train, you can do it for $600 and get a separate dining room thrown in.

We found an alley to pee in, playing look-out for one another. Mark and I had already decided we were going to move out together, in February. To me, then, this trip was half-vacation and three-quarters scouting.

We eventually met up with Tom, who looked tired. He was wearing a grungy undershirt and black pants sloppily rolled up, showing mismatched socks.

"I was shooting all day," he said, hauling his box fan out of the closet and into the open front doorway. "Stuffy in here. And they haven't paid me yet for the last two weeks."

"Woah. Are they going to?" Mark asked.

"We'll see," Tom said, collapsing in a 1970's brown overstuffed chair.

His studio was painted an awful sort of taupe, and got very little light or air. Maybe mostly because he'd put egg crate foam over the main window to block the street noise and light so he could sleep at night.

Tom got up to make coffee while we waited for his girlfriend, Katherine, to arrive. He rifled around in his kitchen and came back with a bit of newspaper.

"This is for you," he said, handing it to me. "It's about this woman who blogs about getting into writing for television. I think it's probably pretty useful."

"Wow, awesome, thank you," I said, flattered that Tom had thought of me.

When Katherine arrived, we took off in separate cars to get some beer, run by Katherine's for a smoke and to drop Tom's truck off, and then head for the ocean. I automatically followed Mark to Tom's truck. Tom's cell rang.

"Yeah. Ok, sure," he hung up. "Maddy, Katherine says you should ride with her."

"Oh, okay," I said, and trotted off to Katherine's sedan. We chatted easily on the way to our various errands. She turned out to be from Ohio. We all stopped into her apartment in Santa Monica to smoke. It was a "bachelor," which meant it had no kitchen, just a microwave and a little stove top and a small fridge. In a place that's supposed to be a gastronomical wasteland, as Tom claimed, I had trouble understanding the phenomenon of the bachelor apartment.

Moods significantly altered, we drove out away from city lights, and found a spot on the sand to sit and stare at the stars and waves. The couples curled up against the breeze, and we passed around a couple kinds of gourmet beer.

"So it seems like LA has enough people of substance to be socially sustainable, you know?" I said, my head spinning in activity, trying to predict my future. "I mean, there's the whole image industry, but there are non-imaginary people around, too, and I think with some time everything will drop itself into a matrix that makes sense. I mean that takes time anywhere you live, and if you're somewhere with other people with similar goals, I would think it would be a help," I spewed. There was no response. How long had I been talking? I was too high.

I kept trying to shut up, paranoid that I was talking too much, but I kept finding myself chattering away again.

"Do you guys go camping much?" I asked.

"Not enough," Mark said. "But when you guys come out, we can go whenever. For weekends and stuff."

They'd hit my fantasy for LA: besides writing work, the one thing LA has over Chicago, to me, is an abundance of beautiful places nearby. "That would be awesome," I said. "We won't have a car, but...."

"We don't mind driving" Katherine said.

"Yeah," Tom agreed.

"That's awesome," I said. "And I would totally be happy to pay for the gas or whatever, to make it fair." No response. Crap, that was probably tacky, bringing up money. Even Mark was silent.

But even with both feet crammed in my mouth and my mouth still running in spite of myself, it was clear that Tom really wanted us to move out to LA. He and Katherine like Midwesterners, and wanted more of them to play with. And Tom especially wants Mark to come out. They are good friends.

Tom stayed with Katherine for the night, so that Mark and I could use his bed. When I saw his apartment at night, I understood the appeal: it was a cozy, private little cave for relaxing and sleeping. We slept well, snuggled up together in Tom's bed.

(to be continued) (dot dot dot)

2006-10-05T17:10:00.000-07:00

March 2006 - Three Introductions: Part II

My second visit to LA was far longer than planned due to travelanche.

I was on a Southern California camping trip with my friend, Morgan. We met at the LA airport -- she coming from NY, I from Chicago. Despite delayed flights, we giddily bounded for the car rental office, eager to embark on our heat-seeking mission.

The pebbles started skittering down the travelslope when the car lacked a cigarette lighter (for the road-essential iPod). The pebbles got heavier with a decided lack of heat at our campground in Joshua Tree National Park.

I woke up in the night to pee, and there was something weighing down the rainfly. I groggily considered: Is there a creature leaning on the fly? I poked tentatively and it slid. My disoriented brain gears went clunk: A creature's crap, then?

I pushed the flap out a little and saw white. There were four or five inches of snow crunching soggilly under my half-on sneakers as I crept out of the tent and a few feet away to pee.

I crawled back inside, fat flakes melting on my face, and snuggled back into my squishy warm sleeping bag.

"It's snowing out there," I said.

"You're kidding," Morgan said sleepily, just her nose poking out of a tiny opening in the hood of her bag. She giggled.

I smiled. "Southern California, huh?" I said, and cinched my own hood tightly closed.

The next day we watched the snow evaporate, leaving behind a still-dry desert ground, before we headed out to Plan B: Death Valley.

It had to be warm in the hottest place on Earth.

And it was, but so was I -- by the time we got there, I was feverish with a bad urinary tract infection, due to some negligence in hydration and to exhaustion from sleeping in the cold.

We got directions and left immediately for the nearest town with a hospital, which was through the mountains, in a snowstorm, at night, 90 white-knuckled miles away. The pharmacy was closed by the time we arrived, so I got some over-the-counter meds and we rented a motel room.

I neglected, however, to read the instructions carefully, and took the meds on an empty stomach. I then mistook the mild nausea for hunger, and went ahead and ate the guacamole and black bean tortillas we'd made for dinner.

I spent the rest of the evening tossing tacos into the toilet.

But in the morning I got some antibiotics and some ice cream, and we were back on the road to Death Valley.

We opted for backcountry camping. We got a topo map, packed our food, water, and shelter on our backs, and hiked out three hours on a rocky wash before we decided we had no idea where we were supposed to go. The path was not marked, the map was not clear, the sun was intense, there was no shelter, and my feet were badly blistered from sliding around in sneakers on lots of little rocks. (Morgan had forgotten to bring her extra pair of hiking boots.)

So we hiked all the way back in, got caught in a windstorm, couldn't find the car, and generally felt a notable lack of love emanating from Death Valley.

When we did find the car, Morgan felt she'd had enough.

"Dude, let's just bail ship. I don't want to push this any more," she said.

"How do you bail ship in the desert?" I thought about dumping the sand out of my shoes.

"Let's just head toward LA. We can find somewhere to chill out for the night on the way, and be there by tomorrow night."

I paused for a second, not sure if I was not sure or just exhausted. I listened to the wind whip around the little car.

"I mean, because, we tried, you know? We had a map, directions, equipment, and it just didn't work out," Morgan said, taking out the bag of chocolate chips. They looked pretty good.

"Tally ho," I said, and started the engine before reaching for the chocolate.

We spent one night, on the way, at a cute little campground called Red Rock. It was sheltered, sunny, warm, and pleasant. We took it as a sign that we were finally headed the right direction.

When we did get to LA, in the evening, we were greeted warmly by Morgan's friend, Bianca. Bianca was in the middle of a cinematography graduate course at the American Film Institute. I'd met her once before, on a visit to New York. I'd felt impressed and intimidated when she'd said she was applying to AFI for cinematography.

We settled into her beautiful old ranch-style apartment with homemade Japanese udon and spinach salad, and watched a film she'd just finished shooting for class. It was a cute plot, and nicely shot, but really, the writing was mediocre. The script for her next film was worse. I thought to myself:

I could definitely do better.

Morgan had been telling me I'd be a good screenwriter for years -- basically since she'd met me, our first year of college, 9 years prior. I liked the idea, but had always found the culture of film too intimidating. I am not a shy person, or an unambitious person, or even a socially awkward person. But I have never considered myself to be the kind of flashy or cool or slick person that seemed synonymous with film.

But there I was, in LA, seeing that some of the people who get into AFI for screenwriting are, at best, mediocre -- that I was better than someone who felt him or herself to be sufficiently talented to pursue this career, and was accepted into a respected school.

Well, damn.

My mood lifted for the first time of the trip. I had felt consistently tired and beat-up for the whole week, but suddenly I was bouncing around Bianca's apartment, telling jokes, fetching food, and talking a mile-a-minute.

The next morning, we went for brunch at a charming place nearby with outdoor seating and a line out the door.

"Maddy??" I heard someone say as I sat down at a table. I looked up. There was Lindy, one of two people I know who lives in LA.

"Lindy!" I said, and jumped up to hug her. She was working as an actor, and I hadn't seen her in at least a couple of years. We chatted through brunch and caught up a bit. She seemed basically the same as when I'd known her in college -- maybe a little thinner, her style a little more outspoken, but still the sharp-minded, analytically critical, thoughtful woman I'd known at the University of Chicago. LA had not dulled her senses or lulled her into a sunny, fashionable haze.

Morgan and I spent the remainder of our days in LA experimenting with their public transportation, which was shiny and huge, though it didn't seem to go much of anywhere. We went downtown and saw the St. Patrick's Day Parade go by -- a St. Patty's parade filled with shiny-black-haired Latinos instead of ruddy-faced, red-headed Chicago Irish.

We felt like ants, trying to negotiate our way to the modern art museum on foot, among enormous parking structures and highway overpasses.

Another friend of Morgan's saved us from our plight, picking us up in his car. We went together to Silver Lake, and bought cheap silly stuff at a thrift store, and then went for rosewater flavored ice cream.

LA was seeming like it was not a bad place.

Later, I parted with Morgan to meet up with my aunt and uncle, who live in Santa Monica. They picked me up in his enormous, white 1970's Cadillac, which, he boasts, gets 9 miles to the gallon.

"You can see the gas gauge go down when we go uphill," he gloated.

"Yeah, Anna told me," I said. My sister had already reported back, from a previous trip, on the environmental terror that was my uncle.

I cringed inwardly as they very generously drove me around to their favorite spots. They took me out for dinner at their favorite Indian place (nothing like Devon Avenue, but still good), took me to Amoeba Records (okay that's pretty awesome), and the next day carted me over to the Universal Studios Theme Park, where I bit my tongue and tried to find nice things to say about the broad array of colored sugar and plastic crap for sale.

My other sister, Carrie, came out to LA for her spring break, and met up with us. We all went out for lunch, and my uncle and I got into a long political debate about free trade, environmentalism, and social security. I tried to just ask questions, to understand why my uncle feels the way he does. I tried not to judge, even though he had been poking at my beliefs. (In the bedroom, for example, next to the bed, he'd put a picture of himself shaking hands with George Bush, knowing full well my feelings about Bush.)

Eventually it became clear to me that, actually, he didn't have any real animosity toward me or my beliefs -- that he was just insecure, and expressed that via disconcerting aggressiveness.

The relief of this realization, and the exhaustion of two days' worth of being polite and silent (while being driven around in my second-worst anxiety-causing transportation nightmare -- the only thing worse being a Hummer) caught up to me. I relaxed enough that the floodgates came down, and I had a somewhat embarrassing public release of tension.

My uncle took it all wrong, and thought that my crying indicated that I was hurt by what he'd been arguing with me -- my aunt took me aside to try to explain her husband and smooth things over, and I tried to explain that no, I was expressing myself because I finally felt safe to do so, that actually I felt much better now that I understood where he was coming from.

They are not people who talk much about their emotions, I think. And I can be pretty intense. It was hard to explain. But they are very kind, generous, loving people, and they both really did want me to have a good time.

So I left LA, this time, with two separate experiences of it:
1. A feeling of uplifting possibility for a future of writing, and of the social okayness that seemed to exist with my peers who were already there, and
2. A feeling that LA's consumer-centric, bling-centric, driving culture would present a heavy challenge to my notions of responsible environmentalist living.

I am not religious, but I do believe in the meaningfulness of coincidences and events. So on this trip, I also left feeling that I had been steered to LA, in order to see both the exciting and the daunting challenges that were there for me.

I went back to Chicago buzzing with the idea that my next step might be moving to LA.

2006-09-27T12:29:00.000-07:00

May 2002 - Three Introductions: Part I

The first time I was in LA I came by car, in the dark. My ten months in Portland, Oregon had been a lonely adventure. So I packed my belongings (in orange milk crates) into a recently purchased 1984 Honda Accord hatchback (dark red with a red interior) and rolled into a solo roadtrip back to Sweet Home Chicago.

After brief stays in Palo Alto and San Francisco, I stayed with a very recently graduated Reed student, Valentina, someone I'd met in Portland. She was living with her mom in Huntington Beach until she figured out what to do next. I was not at all charmed by the rows of identical housing complexes, or the large smoggy highways along the water, or the neon-saturated shopping district nearby. But I was impressed by the cheap taco stands with fresh avocado and tomato in their veggie tacos, and by Thousand Steps Beach, a magically tucked-away spot where Valentina and I burnt ourselves purple.

After lazing around for a few days at the beach, in the apartment complex's pool, at taco stands, I was feeling pretty positive on LA. Going out for Indian with the ex-boyfriend of a college friend, in Silverlake, cemented my impression of LA as a city where vegetarian hippie-types could live comfortably. Sure, there were huge billboards advertising plastic surgeons, and sure, that Hollywood sign loomed whitely in the hills, but it was a big city. It felt like there was room for people who had no interest whatsoever in trafficking image.

I liked it.

After that first visit, I actually liked it better than San Francisco: It seemed less pretentious. In LA they made no bones about the fact that image is a huge industry there--but in San Francisco, everyone pretends they're naturally beautiful. Like their washboard stomachs come from superior genetics, and their pastel houses paint themselves. LA felt less snooty by dint of being more blatant--and by dint of being a bigger city, a world-class city, a city with many industries and many faces.

In my journal, I wrote "It has more grit; feels more approachable/less intimidating than SF to me. I could imagine living here more than SF, I think."

I left LA by car, in the dark. With a belly full of Indian food, I drove through the night into the desert, in my little red car, in search of the Grand Canyon.