Travel: Schrodinger's Date and Other Phenomena That Should Have Stopped In High School [Day XL]

Wherein I take pot shots at my own passivity.  Also cats die.

When Erwin Schrodinger posited a quantum thought experiment wherein the state of a boxed cat could be termed simultaneously ‘alive’ and ‘dead’ as long as it was not visible to the experimenter, I doubt he understood what far-reaching consequences his words would have on the dating tactics of 21^st century dillweeds.

Allow me to explain.

Most dates are defined by their concrete existence.  One asks, receives affirmation that a date is welcome, and then proceeds to go bowling or whatnot.  This is fine – consider this the walking-about version of the cat.

The trouble begins when you accompany a friend to a film/passion play/narwhal dinner theatre and begin to notice that they are behaving… oddly.  Perhaps they’re a new friend you’re just getting to know, or an old one with whom you’ve been out of touch.  Either way, something seems off.  Possible symptoms include: offers to pay for food and/or accoutrements, group outings where six other friends mysteriously fail to show up, and the infamous Long Weird Hug.  You know the one.

Congratulations, you are on a Schrodinger’s Date.  This is a precarious situation.  Acknowledgment of the date-like nature of the evening will force you to confront the problem, effectively killing your Friendship Cat.  But there is a possibility that, if left unexamined by the scientist, the Date Cat will not trigger and you and your companion’s feelings can escape unmolested.

Once you have identified the Schrodinger’s Date, your options are limited.  The simplest solution is to remove the cat from the box posthaste.  Let your companion know in the clearest possible terms the following: the two of you are not on a date.  You will never be on a date.  And if they didn’t want to get their sensitive feelings hurt they should have been more explicit about asking you out so you could have cut their date-like feelings off at the ankles and spared them further pain.

…But who are we kidding.  If you were that sort of person, you would not be trapped in a Schrodinger’s Date in the first place.  They are the exclusive province of the vaguely passive.

So here is your recourse: Do not allow your companion to open Schrodinger’s Box and gas the Friendship Cat.

You are already a master of passivity; crack that nonsense up to eleven.  If you feel that they are reaching for the Box (or putting their lips too close to your face), double down.  Talk about the weather.  Engage deflector shields.  Mix some metaphors too, that should throw them off until you get out of the theatre.  Do not under any circumstances use the word ‘date’ in a sentence.  Avoid calendars and Lebanon.  In fact, just cut them off if they start making a ‘d’ sound.

If, despite all your weasley tactics (that’s weasley, not Weasley – sorry Ron), they manage to posthumously identify your hangout as a date, then it is their fault for not getting your consent before dating you and you can feel free to quietly loathe them while they drive you home because the Los Angeles buses don’t run after 11:00 at night and the 405 is scary as hell.

Watch out for too-long hugs, clueless social navigators of America.  May the Quantum Cat be with you.

Cheers

Julia

Travel: Adventures In Babysitting [Day XXXII]

Wherein the brutality of human nature is revealed.  Also I pretend to be a dinosaur who lives in a piano.

About five years ago, Dana's brother Ben and his girlfriend eloped.  Dana was the only non-priest present the ceremony, which was on a remote beach.  They sent the family pictures after the fact as a wedding announcement.

For a story that starts out so sassy, their family life is pretty normal.  They live about a twenty minute drive from Mary in Pacific Palisades (the Pacific Palisades?  All the names here are slightly weird) with their in-house nanny and two little boys, Nathan and Leo.  I haven't had too much to do with them so far, but today Nathan came over to the house and Mary seemed wiped, so I took us out for a walk.

As it turns out, Nathan is a smart, funny, friendly kid.  We got into dinosaurs pretty quick - it's my safe topic of conversation with four year old boys.  And with them, anything can be a dinosaur, and anyone can be a dinosaur catcher.  We started with a Stegosaurus-box in the house and moved on to garbage cans, the piano, passing dogs, rocks in the creek, and cars.  Every time, we snuck up, 'caught' the dinosaur with the little green nets Mary uses to scoop debris out of her front-yard pond, asked it what we could do to improve its presumably peaceful dinosaur life, and moved on.

I did both the dinosaur voices - Gggh AArghzzzz RRR my throat hurts - and translation.  Nathan was basically Captain Kirk, violating the Prime Dinosaur Directive all over the place.  We transplanted dinosaurs (fallen leaves), fed dinosaurs (the garburator), hid under dinosaurs (the soccer net in the backyard), petted dinosaurs.  Several of the 'dinosaur owners' we encountered (poor unsuspecting folks walking their dogs) found this charming rather than crazy.  It helps to have a four year old along when you're doing this kind of stuff.

Things got weird when we approached a 'sleeping' dinosaur - a big empty black van on the curb.  Nathan said to sneak up on it, so we crawled forward until we were behind the back wheel.  I cautioned Nathan not to actually hit the wheel with his net, and he swiped the air obediently.  "ROOOAR!" went the dinosaur.

I left it up to Nathan.  "Did we catch him?"

Nathan nodded, then dropped the net.  He held his hands up in claw-shapes, and I figured he wanted a turn to be the dinosaur.  "Hello there, dinosaur car," I said.  He shook his head and twisted his hands away from each other.

"I'm not a dinosaur.  I'm killing it by twisting its neck so it can't breathe."

I was stumped, but made appropriate gurgling noises.  "Please let me go!"  I growled.  Nathan made a snap motion with his little hands.  "There, it's dead."  He looked proud.  "Can we go find another one?"

We got up and started to walk back towards the house.  "Was it a bad dinosaur?" I asked.

Nathan looked thoughtful.  "I guess it might have been.  Sometime."

We played for another half-hour, and Nathan killed every dinosaur we met.

Cheers
Julia

Travel: Mix Master [Day XXXI]

Wherein writing is rewriting in music, too.

When pilots get made, the producers don’t have to worry about clearing the soundtracks, since nobody’s officially making money off the show yet.  Once they have a series order, though, the pilot gets sent back through the post process so the mixers can replace the ‘temp music’ with cleared, licensed stuff.

The familiarity of the processes are a strange comfort to me.  I sat in the mix room for four hours with Dana, the director Jake Kasdan (Lawrence Kasdan’s son! Fangirl moment.), and a couple of sound techs as they trudged through every cue.  Maybe it was just hunger, but it gave me flashbacks to four months ago, when we mixed our own infinitely tinier show. 

Sure, there are more people here – the console of blinky lights is slightly larger, and they didn’t have any problems licensing Take On Me for the party scene.  But there’s the same amount of surreptitious eating at the console, the same arguments about whether the levels on the cue should come up five percent or go down ten, the same laughs at the lines that only seem to get funnier the sixth time.  The mix is a slog, but there’s a sense of excitement too – like marathon runners coming into the stadium for the last lap.

They stuck with the composer who did the temp music for the series proper, so he had to rewrite - and slightly tweak - his own compositions for the airing version.  “Do you think it’s too close for comfort?” Jake said as they listened to the temp soundtrack against the one we were using.  Dana didn’t seem too worried.  “It’ll squeak by.”

I asked Randy – the line producer – who had ended up with the rights to the composer’s temp music.  “The Fox conglomerate.  If he so much as tries to demo anything else with one of those tracks, they’ll have a lawyer on him faster than you can say shark.”

“Even if he’s replacing his own music on one of the shows they run?”

“Especially then.”

So not quite like we do it at home, then.

Cheers

Julia

Travel: Cat-and-Tonic [Day XXVII]

Wherein the legal age is still twenty-one.  I think.


The grocery store around the corner from the house is a cornucopia of Weird American Things.  Today I was in there buying more tea - I have drunk poor Mary out of Darjeeling and Chai - and a little boy, maybe six or seven, was running around with light-up shoes on and what I thought was a Cat in the Hat t-shirt.  I paused to quietly envy the blinky sneakers and would have moved on, but he banked sharply and crashed into me.

"Sorry," I said.  He nodded and backed away.  Instead of saying Thing 1, his shirt had Drunk 1 written in the circle on the front.  He was unfazed, and disappeared down the liquor aisle.  (Still not used to that either.)  I wandered down after him - there was a hastily written sign on one of the shelves:

Thanks for your feedback.  The liquor section of the store will now be open from 12 PM - 3 AM.

When I got up to the register with my tea, Drunk 1 was helping his young mom out the door with their groceries.  I wonder if he has a twin who was lucky enough to get Drunk 2.

Notes from a very clean comic shop.

I walked from Sunset Boulevard home yesterday, which probably doesn't mean anything to you and didn't mean anything to me either until I did it.  It is a long walk.  But it was very interesting. I never realized how many famous people's names I actually knew until I was edging my way through the tourist collective checking out the brass stars on the street.

It was interesting to see who wanted their picture taken with which plaque: a twenty-something guy was pointing excitedly at the Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen star; a newlywed couple still in their outfits stood proudly over Marilyn Monroe.  A homeless man was sleeping on Werner Herzog, but I think they'll move him soon.  The homeless man, not Werner.  Damn unclear English syntax.

Cheers
Julia

Travel: Ah-murr-ca [Day XXII]

Wherein we put some holiday in your holiday so you can holiday while you holiday.
Nobody went to the office on the fourth.

In the evening, the sirens were more frequent than usual.  I can only assume people were lighting off crackers and blowing their fingers to shreds in celebration.  Some of the bangs were quite close - Mary and I went out to San Vicente, the boulevard nearest to the house to watch the fireworks.  She says the local country club has a display every year, but it's set so far back into the grounds that only a few of the fireworks make it above the tree-line.  The rest just light up the smoke and make the sky look radioactive.

A few other clusters of people were out watching as well.  Los Angeles is so warm, even at nighttime I was out in my bare feet and a thin shirt, and a few little kids chased each other around with sparklers.  It felt very surreal, like we were in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  The police cars kept passing as the grand finale made a valiant leap and pushed past the tree line for a spectacular red white and blue explosion.

It is a tale.

Told by a country club, full of sound and fury,

Signifying American excess.

Hurr hurr.

As we walked back, one of the family groups passed us.  The heavyset father looked put out.  “Well, that was lame,” he said as he plowed along the sidewalk.  Mary laughed.  “I’m sorry, but it was,” he shot over his shoulder.

Notes from the office.

In Los Angeles, there are televisions on all the buses.  Today on the way to the studio they were playing old reruns of 21 Jump street.

The rest of the office is on lunch break.  "Is it weird that I'm eating turkey, chicken, and salami at the same time?" one of the writers asked.  From the next cubicle over: "Sounds like something I would do."  A thoughtful pause.  "You want to go see Spiderman tomorrow?"

Great minds of our generation, ladies and gentlemen.

Cheers

Julia

Travels: Investment Banker Walks Into A Coffee Shop [Day XV]

Wherein you all meet in a tavern.

[NB. This post is long because it is a reasonably exact transcript of a conversation I had with a man in a coffee shop this evening.  I had my laptop out, ready to write a post, and the only other person in the shop - a man who looks to be in his late fifties, salt and pepper hair, very fancy suit - is chatting to the barista about his radio choices.  Pandora - the Bob Dylan station.

They get going on Woodstock and he says something about Arlo Guthrie and the closing of the New York State Thruway.  I can't help mentioning the live recording of Coming Into Los Angeles, where he refers to the attended masses as 'a lotta freaks'.  Since I already have my laptop out, when he starts telling me his life story, I just type along.  It was a very strange thirty minutes.  I have no idea if this man's willingness to sit there in front of a total stranger as she typed away and nodded politely indicated a deep narcissism or if was just lonely, or what.  I don't even know if he knew I was writing down what he was saying, just that I was typing and I was looking at him, not the keyboard.


I have left the typing mistakes in for posterity.]


/begin transcript

My father is a flag-waving, you know, you would never accuse him of doing anything that was, um, un patriotic and the day before the draft came up he took me aside and he said.

This is a politician's war and I'm not going to have you die for some goddamned politician.  If your number comes up I have a car arranged and I will put you in it and take you across the border - there are people there waiting for you who will take you somewhere even I don't know where until the war is over.  And I said, really Dad?  And he said Really.

This man is wearing a silk shirt and a powder blue tie.

It wasn't so much freedom as the feeling that everyone there had that their life was going to be closed off and people felt they had no control over their lives.  They were trying to create a new society to escape from these -0 The people we've produced that have gone into politics that we've produced I can't believe.  They're a mess.

      This place has glass teapots.

What happened in that time too is that there were a llot of people in that time that were looking for answers is - a lot of those people went straight to drugs.  I did LSD three times and every time it was like -- I'm opeining the door to = -- another place.  And then the third time I tried LSD a being appeared in front of the door and said "you can't keep oepning and closing the door, you have to come into the room"  and when I finished with that trip, I finally said, I have to move into this next dimension of awareness, but I'm not going to seek it through LSD.  So then I had a spiritual epiphany and I lived with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in his ashram for three, four years.  That got deeper because I started to have experiences and spent time there.

      So, if you don't mind my asking - how did you come to be an investment.

Through chinese medication like everyone else.

      I'm not familiar with that trope, no.

I have a doctorate in Chinese Medicine.  I was working in Chinese medicine for three years, then I burnt out.  I was in my twenties at the time, and I met a fellow named Bill Bane, who is Bane Vanderbilt, Oppehauss family - probably the wealthiest people in the world at least in this country.  But through those connections I had met Bill Bane (Bane Capital) Mitt Romney, and he said Hey if you want to change careers you've got the right attitude and ability to do 90% of what we do and since you've learned Chinese medicine you can learn what we do in an afternoon.

Well, it took more than an afternoon, but that was the beginning of my investment banking career.

     That's fascinating.  Do you ever regret it?

No.  I could have healed people, created clinics and things like that.  But moving capital around, in various places, it's very fulfilling.  We finance a lot of technology companies...

     Yeah, well, you have the power now.  You're the man.

We have a whole - something I started, I guess it's more philanthropic than investment - but we support local farming.  Not necessarily a popular position in my circles.  I mean in theory it's great, we can support that.  I think ultimately genetically modified organisms can have useful production... I mean, the way we're raping the land, it's not good.

     That's very admirable.

     He put his hand in his pocket.

Well, it's who we are you know.  Everyone goes through the process of this 'getting' thing.  But it's not a real thing.  It's a disease, it's a neurosis.  There's only so much that you need to get.

     So who decides where, where the line is?

Well I think people know, you know, I have a house, I'm okay, I can stop now.  But we can't stop because it's a mental sickness.  You look at young people these days, the bulimia and the - what's the word - the anorexia.

     Well yes.  They've been around for a while.

Yes, well my ex-wife was anorexic but it's worse.  I need to see me for who I really am and break that spell.  We live in a consumer society that blocks us at every turn.  It's an addiction, like alcoholism.  We're destroying ourselves.

-chatter-

     Where are you from?

I was born in Manhattan and I grew up in Montclair New Jersey.  I went to, spent two years up in Massachussets getting my, what they call your acupuncture license and then spent four years in Manchester England where they have the only English language chinese medicine school in the world and when I came back from Manchester where I went to Newport and set up a practice and met some of the most amazing people in the world.  I went to Northeastern University then and got a degree in finance.  Got married, had my son.

     How old is your son?

He's twenty five.  Getting his degree in finance at Vanderbildt University.  I can't remember when we were talking, but he just said Dad, I'm really interested in Finace!  He's a musician too, he arranged it the music is on the radio.  But then he just decided no, I'm not going to do any  more of that.  And then he got a 720 on his GMAT.

     What is GMAT?

When you want to take a degree in business you gotta take a GMAT.  It's a test that they do, and it scores from like 400-800.  A perfect score - 800 and he had 720.  At Vanderbilt, which is the number one school in the US for master's in finance and, well, he got one of the spots.  And they gave him ten, fifteen thousand dollars as well.  There you go.

I am - well, I just moved here, I got a place up in Hollywood Hills.  Beautiful view of the San Fernando valley.  It's a beautiful 3000 square foot home, beatfil home.

      I guess your son doesn't live with you anymore.

No, no.  He was yougner, playing hockey from the playing 7-13 before he went to play at a hockey prep school.  I was in a hockey rink every weekend, you know, Christmas, holidays, because that's when they play the tournaments.

    - chatter about my work -

Skype: it's the future.  You'll have a tv that you can also use as a computer, I mean they're starting to do that right now.  we finance two companies who are doing that right now.  I do have a need for a personal assistant in a number of areas so this could work out.

We 'exchange' business cards.  He is wearing the fanciest stit I've ever seen.  The cuffs are monogrammed.

/end transcript.

Los Angeles is weird, man.

Notes from a retro booth.


One thing I do like about the flora of Los Angeles is that the big grey trees here are planted so close to the sidewalk that the roots push underneath the concrete and crack the streets apart and nobody seems to mind.  They just amble up and down the little rocky hills in the pavement.

Travels: STEEEEVE! [Day VI]

Wherein I become a much more useful player in Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon.


I'm down here because I Know People.  This is not through any particular skill or exceptional quality of my own; it is merely an accident of birth and subsequent neighbourly mingling.  This was brought home to me rather forcefully when Mary pulled me along to the premiere of Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World, a film written and directed by one of Dana's very good friends both in the industry and in real life, Lorene Scafaria.

As I have long suspected, for those involved above the line a film premiere is a sort of adult Prom, an opportunity to put on a pretty dress and get in a limo with your friends and drink champagne somewhere fancy.  I am frankly surprised they didn't all pack up afterwards to go camping in the Santa Monica Hills and zip their sleeping bags together.  The atmosphere certainly supported it.

Outside the theatre there was a red carpet set up, with a secondary 'lane' for regular film-festival goers whom nobody was interested in photographing.  There was a small river of paparazzi between us and the real stars [including Dana, Lorene, and an extremely pregnant and pretty Diablo Cody, whom I was too nervous to talk to], and a sort of unofficial third lineup across the street.  I thought at first that they were just observing the cacophony, but as soon as the actors appeared they revealed their true colours.  "STEVE!" they bawled.  "KEIRA, KEIRA, I LOVE YOU!"  A chant went up after a few moments: "Sign this, sign this, sign this!"  The actors gave no indication that they heard any of this nonsense, and I don't blame them in the least.  I'm sure they're coached not to cop to this in public, but I imagine the press junket is very few celebrities' favourite part of the job.  The photographers were hardly more polite: some of the writers and less-seasoned red carpet walkers looked downright shellshocked by all the noise.

I could get really cheesy and describe my experiences before and during the afterparty as Seeking A Friend For The End Of The Film, but I won't, because that would be declasse and God knows I am eternally bound to classiness.  After some theatre lobby nervousness, Dana handwaved me in to a very strange bar where the shot glasses had LED lights in them and cater-waiters were swanning around with mysterious looking puffs that turned out to be crab cakes.  Her kind assistant Kate let me stick close to her and gawk surreptitiously at all the finery, but it did strike me that perhaps the function of these parties is less to exclude the unworthy and more to give the people who do have face recognition some time where they can celebrate their achievements in peace.  I imagine there are very few places in urban North America where Keira Knightley can just sit down and have a friendly chat in a restaurant without being semi-consciously interrupted by a stream of well-intentioned admirers.

It was a very surreal experience.  For me, that is.  Not for Miss Knightley.  I suspect she is fairly acclimated to the LED-infused shot glasses.

Notes from an American premiere.

The film itself is a sort of apocalypse-meets-Lost In Translation-meets-Punch Drunk Love-road-trip... thing, and I was pleasantly surprised by it.  Steve Carrell does downtrodden, passive Everyman [an archetype I'm not particularly fond of] with appropriate hangdog aplomb; Keira Knightley is basically playing a quirky Dream Girl [again, something that tweaks a lot of film critics].  That said, they brought a lot of humanity to the characters and they have good onscreen chemistry.  And I'll admit, I did find myself tearing up a bit during Carrell's confrontation with his father, played by Martin Sheen.  The writing can be darkly funny in parts, and I reckon it's worth a watch even though the predictable last act/love story and uneven tone does bring it down somewhat.

Cheers
Julia

Travels: Paying It Forward [DAY II]

Wherein I embark on a long walk on the beach and God goes with me.
OK, I get it now.  I get the long walk on the beach thing.  This is a most momentous occasion.

Santa Monica is its own municipality, and the TAP [Transit Access Pass] I bought doesn't work down there.  The bus driver was very kind about it.  "You mus' be a tap dancer," he said.  "We don't tap dance down here."  The buses are otherwise much the same, but the beach is wildly different.  Broad and flat and sandy - real sand, not the rocky kind we have at home.  Twisty grey trees of indeterminate taxonomy line the edge of a steep cliff with steps carved into it, leading down to the flat plane of the beach.

Once you get down, the enormity of the whole place strikes.  On a Thursday morning the beach was fairly quiet, a few runners trudging along near the strandline.  I took off my flip flops and immediately sank a good three inches; I had thought perhaps my feet would act as small snowshoes, but the sand is so fine and soft any weight just plummets.  Anakin Skywalker would enjoy it.  As I trundled slowly down the beach, a parasailer wafting overhead, one of the few sunbathers caught my eye and I smiled.

"Come here, sweetie," she called, and I could see her front tooth had been replaced with a silver one.  She was wearing a bikini and worn-out running sneakers.  I hurried towards her.  "It's okay to smile!" she said happily.  "You having a good day?"  I nodded and thanked her.  "God bless, God go with you," she said, and I turned away to walk and watch the parasailer.

I hadn't gone more than a couple dozen feet when the voice called me back.  "Sweetie!"  The woman was waving at me; I turned around.  "Do you have any money?" she asked when she got close.

I am fairly used to this at home.  "A little," I said, and reached into my purse.  She had a bag of her own, and was rummaging in it as well.  I paused, curious, and she pulled out a wad of dollar bills, proferring them to me.  "Here, take this.  Take it and go with the Lord."  I politely told her that I had plenty of money to get home.  She shook the bills at me insistently.

"Do you live in the desert?" she asked.


I did not know what to say.  I nodded.

"Only take the money if you need it.  Do you need it?"  I shook my head and closed her hand over the bills.  She smiled, turned to return to her blanket, then ran back towards me, her untied sneakers kicking up sand.

"I just want you to know, that - I didn't, you know, give you that because of anything about you.  The Lord is in me, is all.  He just got up in me and told me to give it to you."  I opened my arms for a hug - she beamed.  "God is good!" she said.  "I love you!"

Nearby, a man in a full-on Ghostbusters jumpsuit was shuffling up and down the beach with a metal detector.

Writing notes from a windy beach.
Too much to see, not enough time to write.  Point form for now.

- Walking down the shore was kind of like playing real-world Where's Waldo.  Lots of weird stuff.
- Four separate mom-and-baby-outdoor yoga classes under the trees on Ocean Avenue.  Everyone appears very fit here.
- Line cooks, still in their kitchen whites, playing soccer in the covered parking lot of a hotel.
- A store with beautiful pottery in the window and no entry door that I could find.
- Three men in beige jumpsuits and yellow plastic rain hats ducking in and out of the surf with metal detectors.
- Huge brown pelicans swooping over the waves at the shore.  One landed a couple of feet away from me near a beach umbrella and eyed it balefully before bobbing its neck and ascending with a weird clumsy grace.  They are really enormous.
- More bird sightings: cowbird, what looked like it might have been a curlew, and mystery tracks in the sand.  The pigeons on the beach struggled to stay on top of the sand just like me, especially a club-footed one that left uneven tracks.  There are also a bewildering assortment of gulls - of the red-billed, mottled, and enormous varieties.
- Los Angeles squirrels are much braver than the ones at home.  They are brown underneath and have smaller, rounder faces.
- A couple dug into the sand like a reclining chair alone on the beach.
- At the Santa Monica Pier Amusement Park, the World's First Wind Powered Boardwalk Game.
- Along the pier itself, two carts side by side, both selling hand-drawn depictions of people's names.  The proprietors were glaring daggers at one another.

There was more, but it is already being whisked away by the fog.  Next time I will bring my camera.

Cheers
Julia