Mid-life crisis?

Today I bought a sports car.

Stalking

I was thinking about staying in for the night -- it's been kind of a long day -- but then decided to dash out and take an evening walk to Trader Joe's for some supplies, both to take advantage of the balmy night air and full moon, and to get some spray cleaner for the (utterly filthy) mirrors I just hung up (and you can see from the t-shirt posting below that my bathroom mirror is in dire need of cleaning as well). It's 10 blocks away, give or take, and en route I was thinking my thoughts when out of the corner of my eye I spotted a large bamboo stalk, leaves attached, left on the side of the road as trash. "Huh, bamboo," I thought, and continued walking. And thinking about the bamboo all during my shopping. Such that I made sure to take the same route back home (I was going to do all four legs of the rectangle instead of the same two back and forth) and stopped to see if I could break off the branches and facilitate its transport home. It looks like it was pretty recently cut, and is still quite green, so the branches wouldn't snap off, even when I twisted them around and around, which felt a little torturous somehow. But even with the branches on, the stalk was pretty light, being bamboo and all, and so I slung it over my shoulder and traipsed on home with it. There were a decent number of Russkis out for their evening constitutionals (an almost neighbor of mine said that before he figured it out, it had felt like Night of the Living Dead to him), and they all seemed delighted to respond to my "good evening"s. I think I might have looked a little bit funny. It was really easy to carry, though I had to duck in for passing cars all the time, and the hardest part was maneuvering it around the bend in the outdoor staircase and then backing it up along the second-floor walkway so it could get in the front door. It's in my living room now, or rather, it is my living room now, 16 full feet from top to bottom,
and has become a kitty playground to boot. They've been dashing about and munching leaves like little pandas for a full 20 minutes now -- I suspect I'll be falling asleep to the surprisingly noisy crunching of bamboo leaves in tiny cat mouths.
The whole plan is to cure the stalk, remove the branches, sand off the major bumps, and turn it into a curtain rod for my big front window. But even if that fails, it'll have been at least an evening's entertainment for several of my neighbors and the boychiki.

Wearing your heart on your sleeve (or chest)

So, in this morning's bout of yard saling I didn't manage to find any of the things I'm looking for, but I did buy a second overly snug entertaining identity politics-related t-shirt in green (because one surely not enough), to wit:
The small print, presumably not legible in the above picture, reads "A Real American Hebrew."

Maybe this is about supporting the troops? At least the Semitic ones. Anyway, a happy find for the new year.

Yoga with the stars

I just did yoga behind a hobbit. For 90 minutes. He was wearing two watches -- a trend in the making?

Almost

Well, it is almost three weeks since I moved to this town, and there is much to report, with a lot of it being almosts. I finally have a real internet connection, and a comfortable desk and chair and table lamp, so I am *almost* in shape to tell it all, except for the being really busy pouring energy into setting up my life (nearly from scratch) (in the material sense) and syllabus (not quite from scratch, but somehow completely impossible to finish -- why so difficult? The grad seminar should be easiest of all classes to teach). In almost three weeks I have furnished almost my entire apartment (remaining: kitchen table, dining room chairs, nightstand, and also I should make curtains, because in direct opposition to my Spookytown postage stamp where you could do whatever and no one could see into any window, here there is no window that is not a fabulous display of "my life" for some nearby potentially interested personage, some of whom live just a few feet away across a charming concrete alley). Oh, and I've almost bought a car several times now, except that I have come to the sad realization that in my price range (it is low! since I prefer to buy cars outright with cash and then just own them) I simply am not going to be able to buy a car that is both a convertible and nice to drive, so I'm going to have to go with boringly reliable and almost certainly without gold hubcaps, which is if not an actual crying shame, still a bit of a bummer.

So, in lieu of an almost coherent narrative, some bullet pointed micro-anecdotes and observations into life here in our nation's media capital.

• In most cities where I've lived, there's a weekly "alternative newspaper" with arts listings, local profiles, and pseudo-outraged pseudo-investigative journalism (e.g., "the police can be bad and sometimes beat people up!" (which is really news in places like Oakland and Chicago and Spookytown)). This town is no exception, and the journalism and arts listings are just what you might expect, but the advertising is really, um, remarkable. Usually it's for restaurants and bars and clubs and futon/furniture stores and clothing emporia etc. etc. But here page after page after page after page is devoted to the surgical or near-surgical enhancement of appearance. There are processes or listed chemical injections that I don't even know what they are! There's "aesthetic and implant dentistry" (with IV sleep sedation available) in which "general dentistry" is the sad, lone bullet at the end of a long list of cosmetic things, "aesthetic plastic surgery" with arm and leg lifts, "total body lifts", and more. There's a world of lipsocution, laser hair removal specials for all body parts, but also eyebrow transplants (?). Not to mention the vaginal rejuvenation special for just $2500 (lots of "before" and "after" photos for the surgical procedures, but none for this one). In my "hey, you just moved here, let's give you some coupons!" package that arrived last week, in addition to deals for hardware stores and bottled water suppliers was a coupon for a fall plastic surgery special -- "Come in now!", it told me.
  
  Despite the seeming homogenization of this country, there's always been a bit of culture shock each time I've moved somewhere new, and the eyes eventually adjust to what seemed unusual or shocking upon your arrival (like in the Bay Area I stopped noticing piercings, or the sheen of dirt so many had, or the ubiquity of street people). I was out with the Stik the other day, who took me to a boutique-laden street frequented by the star(let)s, where one shirt that I randomly picked up cost more than I will spend to furnish my entire apartment (including couch and new mattress), and while my eyebrows went up at the super-tan anorectic young woman with artfully tousled hair, a shirt functioning as mini-dress, knee-length fringe suede boots in 93-degree weather, and a tiny fluffy white dog under her arm, chatting with a behatted tight-jeaned hipster boy with remarkably good highlights, he didn't notice at all. At what point will all of this insanity simply not register? Hard to imagine the day will come...
• I'm walking home from my car the other day around dusk (there's a glitch with my off-street parking; given the popularity of my neighborhood, it's kind of a pain) and this woman in the next building, which is low and pink and square, was vigorously misting a large green plant that was balanced on the long railing in front of her building. Except the plant squawked, and spread its brightly colored wings, and moved down the railing because it was in fact not a plant but rather a large parrot. That she was vigorously misting. At dusk in front of her house.
  
• There are colonics places almost everywhere you go. My favorite juxtaposition is in Burbank (en route to the Ikea) where what may turn out to be my new favorite restaurant, the Wok of Fame ("Taste the Difference!" it says on its marquee) is adjacent to Healing Waters Colonics. Which, thankfully, has a different motto, but one that I can't recall at this time.
• Yoga here is kicking my ass. Almost literally. There's this great studio on my corner, and they even do one half-price "community" class each day for those of us who live nearby, and it's all great, except they don't separate their classes into levels like 1, 1-2, 2, 3, the way the studio in HippyDippyville did, it's just "basics" and "mixed." I went to a basics class the other day, to remind myself of foundational stuff, but since then the mixed classes have been more convenient, timewise. Yesterday on a whim I headed out at 3:54 for the 4:00 class (and got there early!), which was filled with skinny yoga chicks who all apparently can put their feet behind their heads. I thought that that was just a yoga joke from people who never do it, where they think you put your foot behind your head, but no, the teacher (who was really excellent but my god the things he wanted us to do) talked us through putting a foot behind the head (let's just say I did not make it into the full realization of the posture) and the tiny lithe woman to my left not only could do it but then hoisted herself into a standing position. With her foot behind her head. The entire time. After class I collapsed like a little wet noodle onto the couch and lay there for like 20 minutes. I think I'm going to have to find a less challenging class.
• One of my favorite things about my neighborhood, or really the neighborhoods just to the south and to the west, is the stark juxtaposition of super-Jewish and super-hip. I mean, at the very extreme ends of both of these respective spectra, such that a glatt-kosher restaurant (that's like the ultimate in kosher) is adjacent to a store whose only wares on display are a wall of shrink-wrapped brightly colored sneakers. The right one only. Or how Von Dutch, which is popular with Britney and Justin and the like, is adjancent to a yeshiva so sectarian that there isn't even English lettering on the building and whose denizens wore for the new year giant fur hats wider than their slender scholars' shoulders and knee-length coats with knickers and white stockings and I must say looked a wee bit out of place walking under palm trees and the blue-yet-smoggy sky.
• Yard saling is different here. The Avis woman gave me a Jeep Wrangler when I asked for a four-door to move furniture, so I found myself tooling around town on a sunny Saturday in a too-snug ringer t-shirt that says "Kiss Me, I'm 1/12 Uzbekistanian" and listening to top 40 and going to Hollywood yard sales. At the first one I bought a table that used to belong to an 80's television prime-time soap star, and before that was apparently owned by the guy her second husband used to be the opening act for. Oddly enough, I already had a candelabra I'd bought the previous week, so I'm all set!
  

So much to see! And think about! And hopefully soon document with my camera, which is somewhere around here...

Break on through

Well, you can plan down to every last detail for the transportation of yourself, two parents, three cats, and 250+ lbs of luggage (not to mention the shipping of 5 boxes of books and 8 boxes of necessary objets and also one heavy bicycle) across the country, with airport sedans, parking, multiple rental cars, and perfectly timed appointments with rental agents all coming together just as hoped, but what you can't plan for is arriving during a massive heat wave at the end of the summer and the beginning of a holiday weekend at a point when most stores are sold out of fans and your apartment does not have air conditioning as you so foolishly thought it did and everything you shlepped for thousands of miles needs to be transported up the stairs and into the new place. It was 106 degrees here yesterday! And 100 the day before that! Sleeping on plasticky air mattresses did not help matters, but wearing a fur coat seems to have been much worse -- some of us only recently uncurled from emergency positions adjacent to the bottom of the toilet. I'm so tired I don't even have the energy to check my voicemail, even though it is filled with messages from people I want to talk to. I'm just glad we made it through alive, really.

Also, it is very, very weird here. Not Spookytown weird, but entirely different. For example, after dropping off the folks at the airport I headed to the beach for 4 hours of rest time (good for the soul; bad for the back of the legs which apparently *do* need sunblock in the middle of the day in Southern California) and fell asleep after my swim and woke up to find myself literally surrounded by cast and crew of some reality show for some network or other. One of the "stars" was chatting with two vain surfers to my left, one of whom had been extensively examining his (admittedly quite nice) abs for quite some time as I was falling asleep, and exclaimed, "Dude, I hope I'm still out there on my board when I'm as old as you. 40. Wow." Meanwhile, his co-star was repeatedly skipping towards the camera as yet another co-star repeatedly tossed a small blue frisbee just behind her head. They were all maybe 19, and trendy/tacky and scantily clad (well, the boys wearing trucker caps but very tight jeans), while the crew had a surprising number of large, rather dykey Hispanic women, and the director had plopped down right next to me and was murmuring directions into her headset even though everyone was maybe five feet away at most. And they kept on spraying sand on my legs as they ran about. I'm not sure, but I think my dorsal zone made it into some of the shots while I was sleeping. God, I hope not...