In spite of myself.

As it happens, the East Coast doesn't have full custody of all things awesome. I'm slowly starting to find the Boston in this place, and at the risk of getting ahead of myself...I think California is growing on me. Sort of like mold. California Mold.

I live for the moments that remind me why I'm here, that help me remember how powerful stories are and how positively bitchin' it would be to actually get paid to tell them. I love it when the senses of ambition and inspiration and passion overpower the pollution in the air and I realize how lucky and grateful I am for this experience. I love stumbling upon people and places that make sense to me in this city full of crazy strangers and I love the LA cupcake fad way too much.

Of course, this is all coming off of a particularly lovely past few days filled with dancing and good conversation and people watching and sunshine and The American Girl Place (for crying out loud). None of this takes away from the fact that I may or may not slowly be going insane from spending so much time isolated in my poor, abused car and that my heart's still strewn about various parts of Massachusetts. Just to clarify. I haven't converted or anything.

It's just nice to find nice, is all.

Really? Really.

When you're a kid who loves writing stories and watching movies you can't help but think about the possibility that every day you live and everything you do is just part of some greater story that someone or something much larger than you is watching or writing. Your inner monologue becomes a narration of everything you do and every moment or conversation gets filed away for possible later use, because you know, you never know when you'll need them. This is when it starts to become difficult to separate real life from movies and for awhile, you think that maybe it's a problem, that there's supposed to be this definite line that separates what happens in real life from what can only occur on screen or in your imagination.

Until of course you get to Los Angeles, where you learn that (SURPRISE) you were right all along. There is no line and everything that "only happens in movies" can and does happen, at least in Los Angeles if not in actual Real Life.

Oh, Los Angeles.

Doing things is what I like to do.

Medical dramas have taught me everything I know about heart transplants. For the record, I know a fair amount. I feel like it's probably the next best thing to actually going to medical school, but anyway. Heart transplants. They're a little more complicated than they sound. You don't just take the heart out of a cooler, throw it in the recipient's chest cavity, get everything all attached, close up, and send the person on his way. I mean sure, you do all of that stuff, but then the patient needs to take a ton of pills to make sure that the heart isn't rejected by it's new environment. Most people don't know about this potential for the transplant complications, only doctors and avid Grey's Anatomy viewers are in tune to these minute details, but the point is...L.A. is not the easiest environment to get transplanted into. 

A couple days ago I knocked my driver's side mirror off of my car trying to avoid hitting some cholo in a parking garage, so for a day I couldn't see what was behind me while driving. For a day, I couldn't look backwards and it was scary beyond all reason, but it forced me to look forward. I don't know what forward entails at the moment, but it's definitely better than behind. Behind bums me out.

Stop, Look and Listen.

Being an East Coast transplant in Los Angeles is a lot like being a social anthropologist. Or at least a lot like how I think a social anthropologist must feel. I've decided that's how I will approach my time here: as an observer of the bizarre. As in, no sir, I do not want to do cocaine on the roof of this bar, but thanks anyway. 

At the same time, I feel like I'm often on the other side of the spectrum, as in, people must watch me try to go about my business here and think I'm absolutely out of my gourd. This is mainly due to the fact that I have yet to get used to being completely dependent on and responsible for a car.

I'm not even going to pretend that I'm a good driver. I'm a lucky driver. I'm a dangerously cautious driver due to a day spent in a Defensive Driving course when I was sixteen where I did things like drive through slaloms and gun it down an airplane runway at 100 mph and throw on my anti-lock brakes all in the name of safety, but I wouldn't call myself good and I definitely wouldn't call myself aggressive.  Aggressive is what you need to be around here, so I'm learning.

I'm also learning to remember the fact that I drive places and park places and therefore have to be responsible for those parking spaces, i.e. refilling parking meters. I forgot about refilling parking meters which warranted a nice forced $47.00 donation to the city of Santa Monica. Lesson learned. Speaking of lessons, I'm finally, at the age of nearly 22, gaining a more solid grasp than ever on the differences between Right and Left. This is due in large part to my Widget, which incidentally, I am completely and totally dependent on. As in, if it breaks or suddenly malfunctions, I will need to either get a replacement Widget ASAP (which would be a task, because how I would find the nearest Best Buy without one is beyond me) or just move back to Massachusetts (which would also be problematic for the same reason). I should probably stock up on compasses and maps just in case, but we all know what a useless exercise that would be. I'd be better off finding the nearest forest and searching for the side of the tree trunk with the moss on it to find North.

But learn and get learned. Every morning I get up, brush the smog off of my windshield and mirrors and set out to merge and make those scary left turns and throw the puppy into reverse when possible and bang U-ies all over this city, trying to figure it all out and not mow down too many pedestrians or cyclists in the process. For the record I despise cyclists. They weave in and out of traffic like it ain't no thing, but it is, it is a thing, and that thing is IRRITATING. At least jaywalking isn't an issue. Pretty much the only thing the LAPD cracks down on is jaywalking. Fine, do your hard drugs in public, but if you cross the street without a crosswalk, we're slapping you with a $350.00 fine. It's effective, there's pretty much 0% jaywalking. It's kind of like how there's 0% crime in Dubai because they'll just cut your hands off if you do anything wrong.

Anyway. This city has given me so much to observe over the past few days, the least I can do is give a little something back, and I'd rather it be audience to my awkwardly effective driving than in the form of parking violations.

End of the Road: LA?

Los Angeles is every bit as strange and sunny as everyone says it is. It also happens to look exactly the same in real life as it does in photos and films, which I always tend to expect from everything, but this is one of the few places that has actually followed through. Turns out, when things are exactly the same in real life as they are on film, it's weird.

I think the fact that I definitely was not in Kansas (Massachusetts) anymore really started to set in immediately upon arrival at our hotel, whose age (81 years old) was a major bragging point for everyone and where all of the employees were ridiculously good looking. After Liz informed them that we were from Boston and that she had cereal older than 81 we ascended to our room where we were greeted with the World's Scariest Hotel Art plastered boldly across the main section of wall, between the beds. We later learned from the bellman that it was a photo of two David Bowie superfans taken at one of his concerts and that all of the rooms had similar photos but ours was by far the scariest. We dealt with this by throwing a sweater over the photo, which was of two bawling women with 'B's carved into their chest and weird welts on their foreheads and managed to fall asleep despite their presence.

Anyway, I've been in L.A. for 48 hours and I think I've caught that strange form of exhaustion that everyone here gets hospitalized for. In an effort to save precious energy, I'm just going to convey my immediate, pre-Oakwoods L.A. observations in list form.

1. The "characters" that saunter around Grauman's Chinese Theater are, in a word, whack. Initially I assumed that they were actors set up there by, I don't know, the city or the theater or SOMETHING, but no. Apparently they are just self employed and earn their livings independently by pretending to be random people/superheroes. Strange as this is, it kind of makes sense because the quality of their outfits is way inconsistent. Some of them are significantly better than others and all of this came together when we saw a really haggard looking man in Spiderman pajamas trudge across the street towards the theater to start working.

2. Equally whack is the illustrious California Freeway, whose name, I'm assuming, derives from the complete and utter freedom as far as speed limits are concerned. That is to say, there are none. Huh. My defensive driving answer to the freeway is to just close my eyes and scream as I merge and hope to God that everyone will avoid me. It seems to be working. I have yet to sit in real traffic, but I can only imagine what a treat that will be. I'm going to have to find something to multitask the idle sitting with so that I don't go completely nuts with all of the time wasting.

3. The sheer volume of name dropping that I have observed in the last couple of days is staggering. People REALLY love it. "Oh, buy this Hello Kitty luggage, Heidi Klum just bought one." Natalie did end up buying the suitcase, but that's beside the point. This morning we were getting the car at our hotel and some guy walked in, completely off all of our radar, and the valet came over to us and said, out of nowhere "That's not Lenny Kravitz." Um...neat. Nobody said ANYTHING about Lenny Kraviz, valet. I'm not Jessica Simpson either, in case you were wondering. As far as actual celebrity sighting, we're really not very good at it, but we have seen some broad who didn't NOT look like Paris Hilton and then we got in an elevator with some dude from Gossip Girl, whose chops immediately got busted by Natalie.

4. The variety of landscapes is also really impressive. We drove through some serious Hills, practically 90 degree angles with huge houses perched precariously on cliffs with really sharp turns throughout the neighborhoods. We also went to the Santa Monica pier because I promised Jack Dawson that I would right before he sank into the Northern Atlantic abyss and I had to follow through. People are also seem exceedingly friendly, and while I'm skeptical, I figure it's just easier to accept it, fake or not.

All in all, everything is rather lovely, if not completely foreign. Honestly, I felt like less of a tourista in France, but I think it's going to work out. Hopefully. Knock on wood.

Road Trip to L.A.: Days Seven and Eight

Las Vegas

What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas, but in this case it also gets blogged about so that we can try to remember all of the stuff that we left in Vegas. We're just so lucky. 

My first experiences in a city located in Pacific Standard Time were, in a word, whack. I can't really decide if I want this to continue on to be a reoccurring theme in my life on the West Coast or not, but either way, it is the most different and I am finding out exactly how "East Coast" I actually am. Regardless, after five days of being cooped up in a Civic, out of the urban element that we've all gotten used to, we were really jazzed to be back in an environment loaded with restaurants and a variety of people. It's especially fun to see Patriots paraphernalia out here, because initially it just seems like the norm but then I remember we're a few hundred miles short of being 3,000 miles away from New England and Patriots country. I've also discovered what a conversation starter a Red Sox hat is and I love it.

After arriving at the hotel in our newly washed hermit crab shell of a Honda Civic (it's gotten to the point that now, after two days of not traveling, we all have a Shawshank Redemption-like need to get back in the car and can't handle a normal life anymore.) We got settled and prepared to get 4+ months of going out together crammed into one night of absurd Vegas F-U-N. We also decided to cumulatively celebrate our 21st birthdays a year late, since last year, when they actually happened, we were all over the place. So we partied like rock stars alongside porn stars (Who stumbles into Las Vegas just in time for the annual Adult Video Convention? We do, so if possible, this town was even more littered with surgically enhanced lovelies than normal) which started off an on going emotional pattern of Love Vegas, Hate Vegas. 

To clarify, our first night we Really Loved Vegas. A lot. The next day started off completely Hate Vegas. Because this is has turned out to be a positively cinematic road trip, we should have been prepared for the typical medical detour, but alas we were not, so when Natalie woke up violently ill beyond all reason we entouraged her to a Vegas hospital. She and Liz ended up staying for the entire day getting CAT scanned by hot doctors to find out that she has a hole in her intestine and was stricken with diverticulitis, which can often be aggravated by copious consumption of nuts (she's had a can of mixed nuts in her purse since Leominster), seeds (we haven't walked into a gas station without buying Corn Nuts), dried fruit (Eleanor's brought enough dried fruit on this trip to feed a dried army), alcohol (tequila) and caffeine (Red Bull). So that ended up making a ton of sense and instead of dying in the ER of a Vegas hospital like she expected, she was released with a new lease on life and a folder full of lovely slides of her innards, all in time to get mindfreaked by O at 7:30. Then we returned to Really Loving Vegas.

The weird thing about all of this was how much the hotel seemed to know about our health issue. The management was all voluntarily accommodating, which leads me to believe that all that business about hotel staff knowing everything that happens in their hotel via hidden cameras in Ocean's Eleven is absolutely true. I think that's kind of nice, especially since Vegas is a city with zip for laws. There are maybe three crosswalks in the entire city, people treat red lights like suggestions, hookers are peddled every ten feet and people wander around drinking flagrantly, all of which definitely help to keep things interesting, but it's good to know that all of the illegality is being carefully supervised. 

After we checked out, we let the hotel babysit our luggage while we tried to cram all of the daytime Vegas fun that was traded in for hospital fun the day before into one afternoon. Our various attachments to Paris have given us an innate nose for patisseries, so we found one located right our hotel complete with chocolate fountains that poured out of the ceiling. Love Vegas. Then we headed to Caesar's Palace to obtain glorious Celine Dion merchandise only to find that the management wasted no time in clearing out her gift shop immediately after the close of her show at her Colosseum. All that remained in the darkened store were several empty shelves and a few half lit portraits of the diva herself. No beautiful t-shirt with Celine's head floating on the front for me, no posters, no magnets, nothing. Hate Vegas. After this disappointment we went to find some gelato to take the edge off only to be tricked into spending 20+ dollars on individual cups of mediocre gelato. Hate Vegas again, but then we remembered how awesome the fancy French Cirque was and how sparkly Judith Leiber crystal clutches are and how lovely the glass flowers in the ceiling of our lobby are and went back to Loving Vegas. 

When we were as ready as possible (because I'll never be actually ready for this trip to come to a close) to set out on our last stretch of highway to LA this little guy brought our luggage out to the car and did an abysmal job of trying to piece together the puzzle that cramming our stuff into the tiny trunk has become. It really wasn't his fault, it's not easy and we've become experts by now so we sent him on his way, manned up and did it ourselves. I think stuff has grown though, because it definitely has gotten more difficult. 

To sum it up: we left Las Vegas a little poorer, slightly worldier and devoid of any awesome Celine Dion merchandise but plus one stunning set of CAT scan slides and a memory stick full of Really Awesome Photos. 

Road Trip to L.A.: Day Six

Flagstaff, AZ to Las Vegas NV

After leaving our unexpectedly ski lodge-esque Flagstaff version of the Comfort Inn we headed out into the snowy, snowy desert toward the Grand Canyon, which was everything you expect it to be, except the scope of it is incomprehensible. We rolled into Grand Canyon National Park where we saw our first sign that we actually were in Arizona - a cactus buried in snow. Then Eleanor took photos of Park Ranger Sam as if he were a character in Disney World and then he sent us on our way.  Obviously there was a ton of snow at the Grand Canyon as well, and by a ton I mean a ton more than we expected, and what we expected was none. Anyway, despite the fact that half of us were wearing wildly inappropriate footwear for traipsing around a snowy Canyon, the snow turned out to be amusing and Natalie hurled several snowballs into the hole. 

After we'd experienced enough grandeur we set off for our projected favorite stop on the road to Los Angeles: Vegas. Baby. We also quickly learned that the Widget, though immensely helpful most of the time, (I don't know how people would find their way anywhere without one) has absolutely no idea what he's talking about in terms of Grand Canyon Village. So it was back to basics as we found our way back to our beloved I-40 W, stopping briefly chez Wendy's to make friends with some more Grand Canyon natives. Then we drove and drove and drove (all of a sudden four hours has become almost nothing in terms of a commute) straight through to the Hoover Dam, where we were determined to be non threatening by the Hoover Dam Terrorist police. Since the Hoover Dam is sandwiched between The Grand Canyon and Las Vegas it's kind of got a tough break in terms of garnering excitement but at the very least it prompted us to make dam puns for the next forty five minutes. One of the many themes of this road trip happens to be Pun Always Intended. We love puns. One of my greatest disappointments in life is the fact that not everyone finds puns as side splitting as I do.

In Nevada we stopped to clean up our acts and the car because the image of pulling into our hotel in a car covered in five days worth of American soil and filled with stray corn nuts, empty water bottles and shoes was a little embarrassing, but probably would have been funny, if it ended up being anything like how I imagine it to be. So we washed the car, threw out the trash and tried to consolidate all of our road trip entertainment into the Speeding Ticket Compartment. Then we stopped at a CVS, where we learned that every place in Nevada that sells food also sells alcohol. We got a confirmation of this from the checkout girl, who was literally baffled that there are places in the world where, if you want to purchase alcohol, you need to go to a specific store where only alcohol is sold. 

Go figure.