starbucks history

yesterday i randomly pulled over to pop into a starbucks i'd never been in before and ended up spending two hours talking to two men there. one had been an officer in the US Army, stationed in korea right after the korean war, and the other was a man from ethiopia who had just moved to LA from africa during the rodney king riots. the latter lived in koreatown on ardmore, just one street over from where i used to live. 

forest spirits

Uggg I'm going to try to make a comeback from my recent period of silence. The uncertainty of my life has been feeling sort of demotivating. I recently discovered that the key to enjoying the weekend is to do as little as possible. When you spend most of it lying around, it feels like it lasted a hearty length of time. If you go galavanting around, it feels like it never happened at all.

This morning I woke up unnecessarily early, so I visited the nature preserve by my house for the first time. It was really serene walking on a flat, easy trail guarded on both sides by saw palmetto. With every step I scared away unseen animals in the bushes, sent scrabbling with terror at the sound of my approach. I could never see them; I could only hear their violent thrashing and it felt like I was in a Miyazaki forest.

A person I know took this delightful photo of a perhaps perfect weekend spent on a platform boat in Venice, CA

brooklyn in the summer

Every time I come back to LA it's the same question - do I still know how to drive? Muscle memory does not disappoint yet because I'm slightly groggy in the Starbucks on Melrose Ave. Last night, Rothy, Yotam, and I flew out of JFK and were bored for five hours as we traveled a great distance with little effort. The highlight of the journey was three, solidly funny episodes of Portlandia to foreshadow and foresatire my trip to Portland next week with my parents. The day leading up to the night flight was awful, as always. Every time I pack is a sepulchral affair. Categorizing my objects according to their necessity somehow pokes at my sense of mortality and makes me feel like I'm at my own funeral. Meanwhile my petulant side refuses to believe that any other place could be as great/awesome/wonderful as my current place and I want to have a tantrum.

Granted, the time leading up to the departure was particularly vibrant and New Yorky in the best ways. Youjin, Fangyu, Kang, and I had fancy BBQ and then ate ice cream from Duane Reade on the waterfront at night in front of the Manhattan skyline. Mrs. Tuckersman and I went to the Ai Weiwei exhibit and then sat in the park and then ate burgers. Cerrito, Kelsa, Caroline, Jill, and I went to jazz club in the West Village that's been standing since the 1930s and listened to dixieland jazz performing by old men who'd been playing that timeslot for the past 30 years. I had ramen with my Texan cousin and her Tennessean boyfriend in the East Village and then went to a Bushwick loft rooftop 40th birthday bash that was broken up by the cops. Cerrito and I went to a Belgian beer bar that looks like a monastery and forces all patrons to speak at a whisper, and then we went to another Belgian beer bar, and then we went to a dive bar and played skeeball and almost the entire Lana del Rey Born to Die album on the jukebox. Aijia, Oscar, subletter Lenka, and Jed's bff Nate and I had vegan Ethiopean food in the neighborhood and it was delicious. I didn't expect that. Buca, Mrs. Tuckersman, and I went to a very fancy Williamsburg rooftop bar and then Yotam had a birthday at another Williamsburg bar where we ended up having the most amazing conversation with a group of young, secretly liberal Hasidic men who said that their lives had been changed by the internet, and then went home and basked in the ethereal light of laser stars as they danced across faces.  

lina from la

I went to open level vinyasa class at noon today and there was this unbelievable goddess-like girl who was exotically beautiful and incredibly good at yoga. She had the best body with a narrow waist and long long legs like some kind of albatross winging through the air effortlessly and mercilessly while the rest of us clunked and quivered in place.
She talked to me! after class and it turns out she's Lina and she's from LA too.

keepies

Now that the Christmas and New Year's holidays are over, I've been trying to catch up with all of my home friends. I'm happy that I've kept the best people I could find from every experience I've had.

1/4 : Downtown Disney with my best friends from high school, Lc, Lmo, Kat. We had dinner at Rainforest Cafe because I insisted on it, and the food was terrible. We had drinks at Trader Sam's and Lmo had a gigantic spear of rosemary in her Mele kaliki-mocha.

 1/5: Breakfast pancakes with Rhi, the only lifeguard that I still keep in touch with. We went on a road trip to Solvang and Hearst Castle together a few years ago. These are her first chocolate chip pancakes ever and they look very epic. I had buttermilk pancakes and eggs benedict.

 1/5: Khenkel (circa college, freshman year) texted to say that he had a big surprise for me. I assumed he was going to tell me he had gotten engaged, so I brought over a bottle of Moscato. It turned out that the surprise was that he had gotten the guinea pig painting I made professionally framed and had put it up in his living room, and was not engaged. So we drank the bottle of Moscato ourselves and went dancing at Rasputin in WeHo (my first time there - finally).  

1/6: KBBQ with old housemates Miss Tomb, her man, and The Eternal Bachelor in K-town. LOTS of Hite and brisket were had. Miss Thum informs me that donating stem cells would be very painful.

1/8: Delicious Thai food in West LA with my favorite people, Evy and Lili, from my talent agency job. Apparently, working conditions there have not improved.

1/9: Sushi and shabu shabu with steph and cathy, my Expo friends and soon-to-be New Orleans trip friends, at Lotus, a strange sushi/shabu shabu/hookah place, near USC. The first of my birthday celebrations :) I had a Forrest Gump roll. Reason for the name undetermined. 

And lots and lots of time with my mama, of course.

happy christmas

So many new stores on Melrose Boulevard. I'm at Starbucks, waiting for Bagel to get off of work so we can celebrate Christmas tonight with mexican food at La Barca and exchange gifts before he leaves for TX. I really like the gifties I got him and want to steal them for myself.

I've been a real crab for the past few days but things are somewhat better put into perspective after receiving this e-mail today:

I will be undertaking a blood test next Wednesday to see if I can be a match for this man. The Be the Match website says that there's about a 1/12 chance of being a good match after the test results are analyzed. If you are the best match for the person, the doctor decides whether you need to undergo PBSC or bone marrow donation. PBSC donation is when they inject you with a drug called filgrastim for five days straight and then filter your blood coming out of one arm and going back in through the other arm  for six hours. Bone marrow donation would involve full anesthesia and surgically drawing bone marrow out of your pelvic bone. I'm really hoping that I can do it.

many places

 i like these maps

back in la

back in la. i should have brought some fucking sunglasses.

modern poetry flows from lana del rey's lips

If it's rush hour, why does everybody drive so slow? As if we're headed somewhere ritually overwhelming and underwhelming. In the morning, I feel like a slug that can drive a car. I make few discoveries throughout the course of the day, but during one commute when I was particularly sharp I made the stunning realization that the last lyric in this stanza of Lana del Rey's "This Is What Makes Us Girls":

Yo we used to go break in / To the hotel pool, glimmering we’d swim / Runnin' from the cops in our black bikini tops /

was actually

Screaming, "Get us while we're hot. Get us while we're hot"

and not

Screaming, "God is why we're hot, God is why we're hot."

I always think my version of things is better. Two months ago I turned down fall admission to Parsons, "one of the most prestigious art and design universities in the world," seeing more potential in staying in my brainless current job, which is sort of a wild, rude circus of celebrity, big money, entertainment muckymucks and their starry-eyed Hollywood assistants. However, the winds have shifted and it looks like I may be blowing east. I'm dying of anxiety and terror at the thought of saying goodbye to my most favoritest Los Angeles and the flawless nest I've built here for myself but it's most important for me to start feeling stimulated and becoming a someone.

Dear Valerie,

Welcome to the Tisch School of the Arts!

Thank you

carroll avenue

Let me tell you about last week.

On Wednesday I had one of the most delicious things I've ever eaten. Candy and I had drinks at Big Bar prior to dining at The Alcove. I had the Chaton de Mer, a precious looking cocktail with St. Germain and Sailor Jerry's and some other nonsense. It may have tasted a little soapy but I can't remember anymore. The memorable part was the Pig Dates a Goat, which were dates, stuffed with goat cheese and wrapped in bacon and skewered on little toothpicks. I don't enjoy eating dates alone because they're so sweet, but I would enjoy them sweet and savory, stuffed with soft warm goat cheese and wrapped in crispetty bacon, all day long.

On Thursday I dined with Mr. Thum, The Eternal Bachelor, and associated pals at a truly hole-in-the-wall Filipino Barbecue restaurant on Temple, near the old secret speakeasy that used to serve alcohol into the wee morning hours until it became the worst-kept secret in town and was shut down. After stuffing ourselves with coconut beef and sausages and sugar-crusted cornbread we walked to a beer place, half bar, half store, run by a friend of theirs. We walked the scenic route through a part of Angeleno Heights that I never knew existed. It's a historic district on Carroll Avenue, populated by a collection of august old Victorians manors from the eighteenth century. The streets were lit by antique, period-appropriate streetlamps. When we had wandered out of the neighborhood, the area became familiar and we had arrived on a raggedy stretch of Sunset Boulevard, lo and behold, across from The Short Stop, the mangy little bar that I have the most tenderest feelings for. But we didn't go to Short Stop, we went to the beer place, where we tasted every beer the taps had to offer.

in the day:

i cycle la

you may remember that i attended cicLAvia last october. well it's that time of year again. yesterday bagel and i attended the first ciclavia of 2012. whereas last fall we drove to downtown with the bikes strapped to the car and started from there, this year we biked from bagel's house in culver city to the mcarthur park hub, then to downtown and over the fourth street bridge to boyle heights/east LA, where this time we ate indian food out of a food truck. naturally near the end of the day i lost bagel in the throng and ended up biking the eight miles back by myself and i lived to tell the tale.

About 100,000 cyclists and pedestrians participate in Ciclavia

i liked the community feel

idyllic land

thin mints

i'm pretty sure my office is the last one still eating girl scout cookies. i just opened a box of thin mints that i was gifted this afternoon. my boss has two big cardboard cartons of gs cookie boxes left and i think we'll be eating them until the end of time. his two little daughters came into the office and sold them up and down the talent agency hallways and i can't think of a more LA childhood.

hemingway's and roxbury

we went out in hollywood last night, where the women are such towering makeup'ed glamazons that they seem to be a new breed of human or drag queen. see-through shirts and visible bras are in.
we did everything in excess and by one am were telling one another just how much we loved each other and why. at two there was widespread panic and hysteria because everyone was fighting for taxis in mild rain. by three (my twentieth hour of wakefulness) we were at an after-party in an unfamiliar hollywood apartment. probably by three-thirty i was asleep on the bachelor pad leather couch with my face smushed into a pillow while everyone kept partying, whatever that means. by five we were back in studio city at john's, outside trying to catch the cats, mary and jane, who'd gotten loose when the door hadn't been closed. after they were captured i cozied on the brown couch under a brown blanket while катя fed me focaccia with goat cheese and john  made me (heated me) a small pepperoni pizza. john's cousin natalia sat on the floor and ranted about her hatred of goat cheese and childhood summer camp bicycling trips to a goat cheese farm. by five-thirty in the morning i was dead to the world and i dreamt that all of my lower teeth were horrifying, broken and jagged white coral. when i closed my mouth all the corals would fold backwards into my mouthspace. in the later morning i woke up and it was raining. hard. 

comeback kid

they were playing sleigh bells at fred 62 tonight, where i was with che and flossie, eating Chicken Fried Chicken Steak and sippin' the coca-cola. it was rabidly delicious. guess who's back in la, babies

whoa

last night after the restorative yoga class my hippie yoga teacher was in the studio's kitchen making "raw" sushi. imagine an incredibly muscular, sort of masculine woman in her 40s wearing a knitted black peruvian hat with the danglies on either side of the head along with an extremely housewifey orange floral patterned apron. she was ladling out portions of a drink she'd concocted - it was like a mysterious brew in a plastic bucket with whole plants and sticks floating around inside. it tasted like toothpaste. meanwhile, she was ranting about what the rest of downtown LA at rush hour looks like from inside her yoga studio. "I just want to stand outside with a sign that says, 'W...H...O...A. WHOA. SLOW THE FUCK DOWN. We're on a planet. WE'RE NOT GOING ANYWHERE.'" she then talked about how, while living in Bali, she chucked her cell phone in a rice paddy because she realized, with her phone constantly ringing and her experiencing road rage and worrying about arriving places on time, that she had become too LA.  

piano bar

so last night bagel and i went to piano bar in hollywood and right in front of it we passed a tall beautiful youth with curly dark hair standing at a taco truck. he seemed so familiar and i was trying not to look at him while trying to figure out whether i knew him from real life or from my entertainment life. bagel saw him too and he nudged me, so now i knew he was phamus. i started seeing visions of him half-naked in these really sexual scenes and then i realized this was that kid ben from Big Love. we walked into the bar and bagel asked me, did you see Ben?

plane's-eye-view

it's impossible to properly capture how glorious flying into la at night is

all happiness

update: i'm going everywhere in these

boo

 happy halloween, faraway friends. i'm skipping conversational russian tonight (sadly) in favor of the West Hollywood halloween parade (bagel and i are going to bike there from hollywood), so here's a little book learning to try to make up for denying myself education:

i have mussels

on sunday brandy and i volunteered at a transitional house for LA women and their children. we organized the basement, cleaned the playhouse, and stocked the pantry. it was  A LOT easier than the last time we did volunteer work, almost a year ago for Habitat for Humanity in shanghai.

same day, bagel and i had dinner at The Hungry Cat in gollyvood and we had half a dozen oysters, a carafe of white wine, and bagel had a delicious fish and i had the steamed mussels, pork belly, xo sauce, bok choy and jicama. it was the best. disclaimer - this picture is not of them it's just something i randomly google imaged.