Los Angeles

Los Angeles--practice blog post. 

John’s-Friend Greg said it: Los Angeles is a shit hole. I’m sorry, California friends, I am sorry if I offend you (I’m not sorry at all, actually. Zero Regret),  but there are many problems with Los Angeles.

1.       The smog.

2.       The people (I am talking mostly about their clothing, which I’ll get to eventually)

3.       The sheer amount of things in such a small place

4.       The confusion

Many of these items exist in other places. I don’t hate New York City for numbers 1, 2, 3 or 4, for instance.
 

                I flew out of the Minneapolis airport (where they had ipads set up on tables so you could just order food right from the ipad, like you were ordering books, except it was food. You could theoretically get online from these ipads, but I couldn’t remember my facebook password). I ordered fancy sushi from one of those ipads. I talked to a woman from Houston. She has five dogs. She wants to go to culinary school. Her husband is a professor of anatomy and kinetics, and he says she doesn’t need to do anything, but of course she does. Etc.

        I expected a hop skip and jump over to LA, but actually it was a slow crawl with two screaming, shrieking children in the seats nearby.

                At one point I looked out the window (I, of course, had called ahead to request a window seat, although the plane was fairly empty and I could have commandeered any window seat I wanted) at the pale darkness below, with only a thin curving string of lights through the darkness, across it. I thought, “just like the salt flats,” because Sarah Burke, Pat Burke, Megan White and I had driven across the Salt Flats of Utah this past summer in our cross country road trip to California (CALIFORNIA) and in that case there had just been one road across a great flat expanse of salt, which glowed blue at twilight.

                And then as the plane crept across, the single string of lights wound its way across from pale darkness to inky darkness, and then bloomed into a grid of lights in the inky darkness with many square boxes of light, lots of light, lots of boxes, big squares, some of which seemed to be at an angle, some going up or down, and the lights were harsh and yellow and florescent.  

                And I realized—yes, this is the Nevada/Utah border, I did just go over the salt flats, those are the casinos set into the mountains, that was the salt flats, and these are the very very bright casinos that greet you upon arrival into Nevada, only this time I’m above them, not driving through them. And this time I’m not going to try to sleep in the 20 degree cold wind at an insanely high elevation of the Nevada Desert because soon after I saw that we were coasting in over LA, we were flying over the millions, billions of lights of LA, and I was comparing the map I had of LA in my head to what I was seeing down below but the scale wasn’t right, and it was taking us like, twenty minutes, from the first sight of LA, flying in a straight line, to get to the airport, which is a lot of people, a lot of space.

                And I was thinking, “My god, I’ll never find Christ Colfer or Darren Criss in all that.”

                I had already booked a hotel for the night because my layover in LA was 22 hours. So I got myself to the hotel. They didn’t have cable, or outrageous porn options, or outrageous room service options. In fact, I felt very conservative and minimalist.

                The next morning I hyperventilated about whether I could afford to be late by a half hour  (eventually deciding that, yes, I could) and then managed to, eventually, get myself to a car rental place (I had to take a shuttle to the airport, then wait for a shuttle to the car rental place. Very confusing).

                I had decided not to make life difficult and just went to Santa Monica rather than attempt any other sightseeing. Driving through Venice and Los Angeles was a bizarre experience, filled with lots of loud signs, cracked concrete and a wide road that still felt like the buildings were too close on either side. And people everywhere, even at nine in the morning. People with shorts and sandals, people with long hair, people with scarves and hoodies despite it being seventy degrees out, people with tough, wrinkled skin, people with high heels that looked very uncomfortable, people who looked like they just barely fit into their skin, people who looked like their skin was way too loose. People with uniforms and pulled back hair and dyed hair and scraggly hair and shaved heads.

                I parked and walked along a couple side streets and ran into a community garden, where it looked like plots had been cordoned off, maybe ten by ten each, and at that time of morning only a couple people were up and working.

               

                The farmer’s market of Santa Monica was small, but was filled with all the things Iowa is not filled with, mainly: strawberries, kiwis, dates and dried, preservative free peaches and nectarines. I had grits with poached eggs and kale for breakfast, which seemed soft and easy on the stomach.

Yes, this is a Christmas tree made of shopping carts.

                 The last couple weeks of the semester (for those of you who have not been the ones holding me together with glue, tape and bits of string at various bus stops and hallways) have been difficult because my general end of semester neurosis has been kicked up several notches:

1.     --  This fall I applied to the University of Oregon’s Ph.D program

2.      -- I finished the second mega draft of my novel last Thursday, three days before I left the country.

3.       --Normal end of semester grading of 46 students

4.       --Packing and planning and general freaking out in preparation for this trip

The novel was really what worried me the most because I care about it the most; I feel like I have a good idea, good characters, a good plot, but if I don’t have the time or energy to spend making it live up to its own promise then what use is it? And I’ve felt so rushed, lately, with getting everything done and packed and finished that I’ve really felt like I was letting my own work down, which was frustrating. Part of that is just the drafting process, but part of that is the rushing process. I will have time next semester to spend smoothing it out, rewriting, revising, so all is not lost, but it was hard (neigh, impossible) to convince my brain’s neurotransmitters to start producing more serotonin and let me sleep, eat and feel normal again, because pretty much all I was doing was working, waking up early, forgetting to eat and then bursting into tears at every opportunity.

                So the grits and kale and eggs were easy on the stomach and I was quite excited to find something that wasn’t fried or wrapped in spicy pig’s feet. Much as I love adventurous food, and much as I love being as carnivorous as possible, my friendship with Megan White has somehow turned me into an incidental vegetarian. What I mean is that before my friendship with Megan White I would have looked at this bowl of grits and kale and eggs and passed it over. But since being friends with Megan White I now can see—aha! Food with no meat in it! Still enjoyable!

Here is a picture of Megan White. In this picture she’s dressed up like my housemate, John, who is dressed up like Liberty Hyde Bailey, who is dressed like himself (He’s the father of modern horticulture, and a big name in our house). Then there is a regular picture of Megan White, so that you can see that she is not normally dressed up like John Linstrom.(That last picture was taken in Arches National Park, in a nook)

Anyway, after the farmer’s market, where I bought strawberries and kiwis and dates and trailmix for the plane, I wandered back to the Los Angeles beach and I walked along it. There was the amusement park in the distance, which I swear I’ve seen in about a billion movies, most of them romantic comedies, and here I was in my rolled up jeans and my layover and if I didn’t meet a long lost friend or handsome stranger or something in the next thirty seconds I was going to be very disappointed.

                The beach wasn’t too crowded, although there were several volleyball and Frisbee tournaments going on that I had to pass through before I could get to the water. The water was cold but not too cold, and while I didn’t enthusiastically greet the water the way I am generally wont to do, because I was on the phone with my mother at the time, I did say hello anyway, and that was good because I the next time I’d see the Pacific it would be from the other end.

                Flying into LA was scary, watching grid on grid on grid go by, wondering what I was looking at, wondering what that building was, etc. You could lose someone so easily here, not to mention yourself in all this mess. Add to that the fact that so much of this has been filmed and put into music and just documented so thoroughly—how do the people living here know what is themselves versus what’s been created about the place they live? I expect it’s not so dramatic as all that. I expect they don’t think about it, or they live in a between place, or they get used to seeing celebrities, or not seeing them, and they learn to become the type of person that fits into this city the way every person in every city does—the socialite intellectual from DC or the down to earth farmer socialite in Des Moines, or whatever. 

                I forget what it’s like to feel lost in a city, because in a small town or in the country your body or yourself is big enough to fill up as much space as you need it to fill up. I could be lost on a back road between two corn fields, 550th ave and 560th ave, but since I’m the only one there, my sense of self would fill the space and somehow I would feel in charge of it. In a city your sense of self has to shrink much smaller, so small, because everyone is shouting, clamoring for the same amount of attention, and so you have less control over your surroundings, you only have control over yourself.

                It’s a shock to have your sense of self suddenly need to shrink that small, and I found myself talking aloud to myself much of the day, although I don’t think the good people of LA thought that was so strange. I thought it was strange that they were wearing sweaters and scarves and boots with shorts or short skirts or thin tops or whatever. They want it to be winter, December, but it was still seventy degrees.

                In short, I didn’t see much of anything, and what I did see was exactly what I expected to see: I expected to see the wealthy people of Santa Monica taking advantage of their wealth with things like farmer’s markets and communal gardens. I expected to see the amusement park and the beach and the people looking like they do. I also expected to see Chris Colfer, star of the hit show Glee, but then, I didn’t go to La Brea tar pits, where he was sure to be hanging out and waiting for me, so I guess I missed my chance there.  

Next up: Sydney, Australia, Christchurch, Dunedin, and Invercargill, New Zealand! (all of those places were a whirlwind of lack of sleep and travel craziness, so I'm lumping them all together).