friends

So I live alone (much to my utter vexation), but two weeks ago I welcomed a new member into my household: Boo Radley, my attack cactus (Attacktus!). I found Boo at the farmer's market in Monrovia (a MUST see...seriously. Organic soap, too...most excellent), and picked him because he was the smallest, yet fiercest looking cactus on the cart.

Boo Radley sits on top of my TV, facing the door (it's the best position for serious potential attacking), and we cohabitate together quite nicely.

However.

Lately, I've been noticing that there are a plethora of critters around my apartment without homes. They used to keep their distance, but lately I've noticed them creeping closer and closer to my swanky Junior One Bedroom digs. It seems said creatures think that the Chateau d'Laurel is open for business.

Cases in point.

The fly. I spent the better part of an hour chasing it around my kitchen with my shoe, whacking ceiling tiles and flourescent lights.

The Grasshopper. Two weeks ago, I spied a grasshopper perched above my door for a couple of nights in a row. Interesting...says I, He seems awfully opportunistic for a grasshopper.

Indeed. A few days ago, I noticed the perpetrator sitting on my welcome mat! Welcome? I think not. I shot him the evil eye and slammed the door behind me. Tonight Boo Radley and I were watching TV (Well, I was watching TV; Boo Radley was obediently watching the door), and what did I see?

THAT GRASSHOPPER CAME INSIDE MY JUNIOR ONE BEDROOM! And not only that, when I tried to whack him with my shoe, he jumped across the living room--like a psycho kangaroo! Damn you, grasshopper. You met your demise tonight.

Which brings me to my point: last time I entered my apartment, the most disturbing critter of all was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs.

It was a possum.


Stay tuned.

Sigur Ros, Se Lest

Today it rained.

The sky cracked open last night, incised by lightning. Unable to suture itself in time, the green-gray oblivion bled for the better part of twenty four hours. This morning I navigated from point A to point B and witnessed the first rain of the season. I sputtered down leafy green corridors, swallowed alive by trees, devoured and digested into neighborhoods of quiet contemplation.

Then there was nothing. Everything in the world ceased to exist the way it had before. In the event of this wet phenomenon, life had to rearrange itself and hadn’t the wherewithal to accomplish this task before I witnessed its utter distress. There weren’t other cars, or even other houses. There was only the sound of dripping water and the sight of trees whose branches were drooping under the weight of their color and saturation.

If I could drink it in, I would, but the rain drops made music on my windshield and the trees were intoxicated and stumbling into the street, their leaves and branches drooping under the weight of a million tiny droplets; falling and splashing and dripping and sliding.

The entire world was taking place before me: a new rhythm and a new sound. Time ticked by to the command of rain drops—falling chaos from the sky. There was so much beauty, so much wonder, I could hardly breathe. It was enough to exist and feel that odd humidity mixed with precipitation—moisture in different forms, coexisting peacefully.

The city was finally cleansed of an entire season’s indifference. Of course, the rain had nowhere to go (to the chagrin of the sprinklers, who now have to share the cement with the rain). So it danced, it rose up from everywhere. It celebrated the event of falling, of spattering in a million directions, of reassigning itself in the form of new globules, of invading every crack and crevice in sight. It was pure magic.

studio apartment

A letter to myself, one I wish I’d written a year ago.



Someday you will know loneliness. You will have days when you are a leaky faucet and there isn’t a joke in the world that could make you laugh. Sometimes you will be stuck in traffic, and you will question life. You will question your existence and the existence of all the people in all the cars, all crunched together on anonymous freeways headed north and south. Some days your eyes will register a vacancy and you will realize the meaning of emptiness.

There are times when you will question whether you are sane because you begin to wonder; you begin to doubt and you begin to think about the other side of a possibility. You will feel the viciousness of adulthood, and you will cast a longing glance into your past.

You will long for companionship, for another person who will follow you wherever life may lead. Your soul will long to resonate with another person’s soul, and you will know that specific kind of loneliness when it doesn’t happen. You will feel full and you will feel empty—often in one short day.

Suddenly you will realize how much you hope in things, and you will discover how often you are let down. You will see your expectations of people and of events go unmet. You will feel that sting of disappointment and you will hold your heart in your hands, wondering why you let yourself get let down yet again.

You will stare at yourself in the mirror and not recognize the person staring back at you. There are times that you will catch a glimpse of yourself in your rearview mirror, and your heart may break because the pair of eyes staring back at you are the saddest eyes you’ve ever seen. Other times, you just won’t recognize yourself because somewhere along the way, you lost the little girl inside of you. You’ll want her to come back. You’ll wonder why she left you high and dry.

There are times when you will think your feelings are unwarranted. You will question the validity of your heart and will try to squelch those emotions to appear strong on the outside. Other times, you will pity yourself too much.

In the end, you won’t have conclusions. You will have growth, and you will have progress, but both of those things may be too small to see at times. Most of the time, you will just have to trust that things will work out, and try to keep your head up even when you’re convinced they won’t.

Brokenhearted sky

Fall. Fall elicits an interesting reaction in me when I live somewhere like here. Here where, like the botox’ed brow of an Orange County soccer mom, Fall expresses no emotion whatsoever. It is my fifth LA Fall. There were eighteen Oregon Falls that came before it, and now more than ever, I find myself longing for the one thing I never thought I’d miss.

I miss that glum, messy, tattered Oregon Fall. I miss the inconsistency; the way the weather can turn on a dime—literally turn its back and instead of sunshine there is only surliness and rain. Oh, tormented weather. Brokenhearted sky. Without clouds, the world’s emotions are free to wander, to shoot off into distances too far for emotions to safely travel. But under the protective arm of that expansive wispy cloudcover, emotions can build: There is a lack of color there, but not of feeling.

If I could describe Oregon to you, it would be in two words: green and gray. It exists in a place where there is both a lack of color and a deep, pervading saturation of pigment. Mostly it is seen smeared past moving car windows or melting into a puddle. It is forgotten, overlooked; white noise that converses with consciousness but never interrupts the senses.
But to notice Oregon--to see it, hear it, smell it, taste it, feel it--is to understand the deepest sense of longing.

The clouds are pasted thick across the sky, longing to speak to the ground in whispers, in shouts, in angry hailstones and tiny droplets. The ground, in turn, longs for the sun for which it will blush and flourish the deepest shades of green. There are more colors in the pervasive gray than you can count; subtle gradations which not even Ansel Adams could account for. The trees cannot see the forest for its leaves, as they are mostly long fallen, and long to be hidden from the damning prideful gaze of the evergreens; ever-green, ever-scornful.

Fall in Oregon is a whirlwind gathering of atmospheric conditions, of hot and cold, dry and wet. Fall in Oregon is but to pause. It is an indrawn breath, holding in twilights and dew and burgeoning clouds and possibilities and frothy wet ground. It exhales in 24-hour repetitions, each daybreath consistent and the same as the one that came before it. The sun will rise unnoticed behind a fringe of clouds, the ground will hear a thousand secrets as the clouds spill the gossip they can no longer bear to hold, the trees will stand as silent soldiers against the mist that charges across unproductive fields. And night will slip in, unnoticed, eschewing the days' monotony for blackness that is at once still, damp and wild.

When I am in Oregon, I long to be elsewhere--but when I've seen what L.A. has to offer, a sentence bursting with adjectives, with exclamations, with superfluous semantics, I find myself longing for the thoughtful, calculated response Oregon speaks. Saying, sparely, only what is essential.

And so the California Fall slips in, unnoticed. In the indifferent warm-weather smugness of the season, the leaves fail to transition. There are no oranges or reds, only leaves that are alive, and leaves that are dead. Emotions continue to flitter into the horizon, held back by nothing, and the sky has no one to speak to because the ground is too busy organizing piles of dead leaves to notice.

this city has no face

I am being worked over by a seventeen-year-old girl.

She is unhappy with her senior picture, she wants retakes. She doesn’t want to pay for retakes, though, because she feels she is entitled to any sort of freebie she can milk from us. Her friends cluster behind her, the Lip Gloss Posse. I’d roll my eyes if I knew I wouldn’t get fired, so instead my voice registers in the breathy falsetto designated for unwanted customer service.

Carmen-High-Schooler scrunches up her face and tries to explain why her photos are so retarded. She is antsy and reeks of musky floral perfume. There is only one person on her radar, and it is herself. If only this were an isolated incident.

Often I wonder if this “Me” mentality is somehow intrinsically linked to a life spent growing up in petrie-dish Los Angeles: a city with no distinct narrative other than what it writes for itself every few years as a matter of narcissistic reinvention. We’ve been raised in a culture constantly obsessed with redefining itself.

In preceding generations, it was the 20-somethings who sought to erase their history and rewrite the story of their life: Location, religious affiliation, political leanings, carnivore or vegetarian. Now that insatiable need for reinterpretation has trickled down into this generation’s seventeen-year-olds.

Kids are growing up in a venerable beef stew of cultures and ideas (although perhaps ‘beef stew’ is deemed a bit too passé for the vegan-is-my-religion set). The Melting Pot that often defines the slew of zip codes and zoning infrastructure in which we live is a manmade city. Freeway systems snake through squeaky-clean modernist skyscrapers, punching holes in the smog above—another manmade contribution. The water from which any city derives its livability doesn’t have an address in Los Angeles. One must be reminded of our manmade kingdom by simply noticing its aqueducts. Ours is a city whose identity is contained entirely in the minds of its inhabitants. There is no external truth to the city other than what our postmodern ideals assign to it.

Today I am: 22, toying with the idea of an ancient Eastern religion embraced (if not partially created) by celebrities. I’m organic, and the dense population of whole foods markets embrace this position. I shop at the Buffalo Exchange.

Tomorrow I’ll be: 17. I live in Loz Feliz (which was designated hip spot of the moment a few years back, and continues to thrive as a community adjacent to Silverlake worth name-dropping). I shop at Bebe and pin the bottoms of my stretch jeans so they’re tapered. Tapered is so sexy. Sequins are sexy, too, or any sort of embellishment that catches the weakened rays of the sun and send it bouncing into the eyes of my classmates—who don’t live in Loz Feliz.

Might the constant reinvention that is so brutally au courant take its toll? Today’s generation has no past; only a brief synopsis dreamed up by the schemers and dreamers who came before them. We live manmade lives of creature comforts with You Deserve! Ad campaigns. ‘Sexy’ is a term delineated to mean anything pertaining to right now, and very much desirable. We operate on the grid of a well-planned infrastructure that mainly functions on the voracious consumer consumption of those sexy creature comforts. We are allowed—encouraged!—to reinvent ourselves constantly: erasing our past selves, and drawing up the blueprints for whoever we want to be at the time. It doesn’t help that everything’s acceptable—thought, politics, religion, things that are true, things that are false; morality.

Have we created a monster out of ourselves? An intelligent, thinking beast whose thoughts are wiped out and upgraded every new season based on the thoughts of media conglomerates? Do we derive our pleasures, our pains, or very identities from a city who has no narrative? A city without a face; made up to be whatever we want it to be. We are floaters; drifters. Like walking ghosts who pass through concrete walls because we have no physical presence to keep us grounded in physics. An entire generation of ghosts, with no past and a future left entirely up to them. No wonder the lines dividing right from wrong are so blurred.

We live in a culture where celebrities are embraced based upon who they project themselves to be right now. Remember when Madonna was a home-wrecking enemy of the Southern Baptist preacher whose sexiness and sex-crazedness caused a country to gasp in fascination and horror? Probably not, because Madonna has reinvented herself. She is now a home-maker, deeply religious, performing and writing music—a musician and an artist, thank-you-very-much.

We bomb ourselves to smithereens, leaving nothing but the ashy shell of what used to be. Now we have a blank canvas. Now we have a clean slate. Now we can rebuild our infrastructure and rewrite our history as though it started today, right now. A roamer. Free from the confines of ever putting down roots in anything. Free to do whatever I want, or whatever I think I’m entitled to.

At the studio, Carmen-High-Schooler is still bitching about her photo. “I look retarded, you guys!” She insists in a nasally whine no doubt acquired through the continual erosion of her parents’ giving in to her every whining whim. “I look 80’s, or something. Like 1985.”

I realize that she wasn’t even alive in 1985.

I notice that she has Rod Stewart hair, tapered jeans, and slip-ons.

I realize that she probably has no idea that she is the poster child for 80’s revival chic.

I realize the only thought going through her mind when she bought those pants was,

Tapered is so sexy.
I want to be sexy.