Dear Internet,
Ah, the holidays in Los Angeles! I’d wondered if the Christmas spirit could survive without massive snow drifts and bone-snapping cold to hammer home the cheer. I’m proud to report that LA Yule feels just like everything else in this town: seductively artificial with a savory hint of desperation.
I’m almost four months into my LA residency, and it’s time to reflect on some highlights and lowdarks (new word bonus!)
I just finished an internship running scripts for the local morning news. This means that on Mondays and Wednesdays I got up at 3AM to work on the hourly broadcasts from 4:30am to 10am. My job was to bring the scripts to the anchors just before they read them live. So essentially, when an anchor said "this just in," and grabbed a piece of paper from off camera, I was the one handing it to them. It was a great experience, especially in terms of celebrity sightings: I got to drool creepily in the general direction of Mary Louise Parker, share a bathroom with Mario Lopez, and gape in astonishment at the wildly successful train-wreck that is Antione Dotson. It was great to keep so informed, hearing the breaking news stories develop every hour throughout the morning. At the same time, some days you just don’t want to hear the words "suspected rapist" two dozen times before 9am.
A few other pros and cons of LA living: for my money, this city’s biggest downfall is parking. I don’t mind the driving so much; even being stuck in traffic, there’s something about rocking out to early-nineties hip-hop in my slammin’ Ford Focus that makes me smile (note to my hippie friends: I know I’m killing the planet, I’m sorry, I walked around new York for a decade, isn’t that enough?) HOWEVER, as fun as cars can be, there seem to be more of them on the road here then there are places to put them. Hours of my life have been spent slowly circling my apartment, looking for a space that doesn’t exist…hours that I will never see again…gone now, gone forever.
Other items of note: people are on time here. It’s weird, I didn’t think they would be, but in LA, 9pm actually means 9pm, as opposed to in new York, where it means 11:30.
And lastly…I imagined that moving to LA would leave me stranded in the land of beautiful people; I was half right. Los Angeles is crawling with eye-meltingly gorgeous dudes. That’s right, I say this with as much heterosexuality as I can muster, the dudes here are a collage of chiseled, high-cheekboned perfection. The girls here don’t so much do it for me: too tan, too emaciated. But the dudes…wow, those dudes.
That’s enough reflection and emasculation for one morning. I’m off to decorate my palm tree. Happy holidays to you and yours (and to gorgeous dudes everywhere).