Travel: They Live! [Day L]

Wherein yeah, Los Angeles is a tiny bit creepy.

There is a sheen to some of these people.

It's not immediately visible.  Everyone here carries oil-removing wipes in their purses to prevent any unwanted glimmers.  But it is there in the eyes.  You can see it when they run to catch up in heels and squash torsos together and yip, high-pitched.  You can see it in heads bend over iPhones, thumbs tapping furiously as they wander down the halls.

Talk bounces off them, but they never stop making sounds at each other.  Every time a door opens here, I jump.  My mouth curves up.

Today I feel myself reflected in flat white teeth.

Notes from the last week.

This is all minor nervousness, the kind of thing that usually gets written down on the backs of napkins and then tossed in the trash.  The people here are really nice to me, actually, and I am sure this is all in my head.  I probably just act weird.  Actually, I know I act weird.

Cheers
Julia

Travel: The Apocalypse Amendment [Day XLVIII]

Wherein I am surprised by a friend.


Nerds are really friendly.

This is a broad statement.  It's also kind of true.  When I started to feel a little homesick for my Vancouver cadre, I added two things into my schedule.  Solo movie nights at the Aero Theatre, which shows old and unreleased films; and a weekly event called Friday Night Dice, which is an open group of board-and-tabletop gamers who meet in a church basement.

One of these choices yielded a group of sweet, inclusive, helpful people.  Guess which.

I've been to the Aero a good five or six times, and never spoken to anyone but the ticket taker.  This doesn't preclude a good time (they showed The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly last week!), but it is telling.  At my first Friday Night Dice, I wandered the tables for maybe three minutes before a couple pulled me into a back room where a Settlers of Catan game was set up.  We did awkward introductions with the five guys sitting cross-legged on the floor, and by the end of the night I had an invitation to a Mystery Science Theatre group-watch, a bag of Twizzlers*, and a ride home.

Nerds are really friendly.

Since that night, I've fallen into a little posse made up of some of the regular Friday Night Dicers.  They fall into familiar archetypes for me - a few computer programmers, an elementary school teacher, ex-military model-painters... and this is Los Angeles, so of course there are a few actors.

My favourite of the bunch is a guy in his mid-twenties inexplicably named Kyle Wylie (seriously).  He's a journalist for a local paper, and every time he opens his mouth it feels like I get another piece of the puzzle about his mysterious backstory.  Jason Isaacs used to read Wylie to sleep.  Wylie has been to thirty-three countries, mostly on location scouts.  Wylie grew up on an Indian Reservation with his mom.  He loves Tarkovsky, but doesn't want to be a filmmaker, because his father is 'in film'.

He somehow makes this all sound very matter-of-fact, but I am pretty sure Wylie's father is not just 'in film'.  He lives in a way fancy house - nicest basement I have ever gamed in, not that nerds appreciate full-sized windows in their subterranean domains.  Despite all this nonsense, like the rest of the Friday Night Dice crew, Wylie seems like a smart, down-to-earth guy.

This is a long run-in to the run-in I had with Wylie on Friday when everyone was taking a smoke break outside The Building.  Side-Note to churches: if you don't want to project a menacing image, please don't name your ostensibly all-faiths community centre The Building.  It sounds like you're constructing a Death Star in the attic.

In addition to his mysterious past, Wylie has endeared himself to me by being totally willing to debate at length.  We seem to agree on major issues, so the debates are mostly pop-culture centred and only parodically intense.  I love to argue, so it's nice to have company who does too.

I don't remember how the gun thing came up, but come up it did.  Like many liberals, I have a fairly narrow portrait of what a gun advocate looks like.  Gun nuts are dangerously unstable teenagers raged out on despair, or old guys in the woods with armour-piercing bullets definitely not designed for bears.  Gun nuts live in the south.  They are backwards and terrifying.  They are not my friends - they are not left-wing college graduates who play Dungeons and Dragons.  They are not smart.

But apparently sometimes they are.

My argument with Wylie about gun control went on for two hours, and what his side boiled down to was this: "The founding fathers knew that all governing bodies eventually trend towards chaos and dictatorship, and the only thing preventing that trend in America is that the governing entities know that their population is armed and will not stand for abuse.  Sometime in the next three hundred years, a dictator will arise, and the people will speak against him.  With bullets.  Ergo, it is the responsibility of the current government not to interfere with the arming of the populace because that would be undemocratic."

I... had no idea how to react.  This made so little sense that I couldn't even assemble a response.  And thus, I lost a debate against someone who thinks George Zimmerman had every right to own the gun with which he shot Trayvon Martin.  I've never understood how differential politics can 'wreck' a friendship or marriage, but I did feel weird hugging Wylie goodnight after learning that about him.  Life is complicated and strange.

But this song is not!  I sent it to Wylie as a joke, which he accepted with good humour.

Notes on the California Air-Care laws.


The other surprising element of the Friday Night Dicers is their total embrace of California's medical-marijuana dispensary cards.  "I told them I had an eating disorder, and that the pot would help by giving me the munchies," said Kei, who is skinny in that low-exercise indoor-dweller way.  We were all standing outside in the warm California night air, smoke drifting away as Kei lit his pipe.  "They didn't even ask."  I went around the circle and got the rest of the gang's excuses for their medical cards.

"Back pain."

"Insomnia."

"Social anxiety."

"Post-traumatic stress disorder."

This from Michael, a sweet-faced, heavyset twenty-something who always comes to the gatherings with his fiancee.  He was in the Air Force from eighteen to twenty-four, and spent three years in Iraq.  "It helps with the nightmares," he said quietly.  Like me, Michael doesn't smoke with the rest of the players, but he showed me his card.  "I was waking Danielle up at night.  It was a real problem.  I don't take it unless I can feel something coming on and it's nighttime - the smoking is too gross.  But I'm worried about getting addicted if I take sleeping pills instead.  The pot, I know I won't take unless I really need it."

More sides for the dodecahedron.

Cheers
Julia

* They call them Red Vines here, but trust me.  They are Twizzlers.

Notes: A Few Thoughts On Depression

This is kind of a personal essay.  It's not really funny or insightful.

At seventeen, I became very unhappy for reasons I didn't totally understand.

I was just finishing twelfth grade.  College promised a respite from all the mistakes I'd made in the past four years, particularly social ones.  I should have been looking forward to reinventing myself, and at some level I imagined that I was.  My parents, especially my mom, had found their tribes in freshman year - I pictured a tangle of young people piled onto a dorm room bed or huddled over papers; cramming, chatting away and falling asleep in the library.

People asked me if I was nervous, since it's so unusual for Canadian kids to travel away from home for school.  (Of my advanced placement class - full of people much brighter than me - of a hundred and ten, four left the country and only about fifteen went outside of BC.)  I said no, and I really think I meant it.  High school had become a thick, muggy column of air I had to push my way through.  I regularly fell asleep in class, and my teachers expressed concern about my 'home life'.  I laughed it off.  My home life is perfect.


When my parents organized a trip to Japan to visit my cousin Gay, however, I pled too much schoolwork and spent spring break locked in my room, sleeping through the day and emerging only to brew a fifth, sixth, seven pot of tea or to take another half-hour long shower.  I was accountable to no one, especially not myself.  But, I thought, it wasn't my fault.  It was high school's fault.  As soon as I escaped its toxic fumes I would emerge triumphant as the fun, intelligent person I knew college would extract from me.

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: Assorted Bonbons [Day VII]

Notes from Brentwood Town.

Not much to say today, just a nitpick that I had not anticipated about living in Los Angeles: I am constantly earworming myself with songs about various streets, districts and landmarks in the city.    The primary culprit at the moment is Randy Newman's excellent and cutting I Love L.A., which has the audacity to include a sing-along chorus that does nothing but list the names of local boulevards.  I have found myself humming it every single day.  It is making me insane.

You will share my pain.

Cheers
Julia

Travels: The Magic Kingdom [Day V]

Disneyland: ITSO the great, sadly late, Ray Bradbury. Old Dead Things.

In the centre of the park, a grove of carefully tended flowers surround a statue. The bronze is sun-warm to the touch.

Far away, under the earth, eyes blink.

Steam drifts through vents in a cold dark room, pulling heat from a tube in the centre. The body inside, empty, twitches in the cold as the throat works. Veins that once pumped blood now ooze acids: gel and nitric and mystery magic. The mouth is motionless. In a nearby chamber, a heart ticks with mechanical precision on a bed of ice. The brain was removed long ago - everybody knows it is the heart that really matters.

He waits.

Beat. A little girl holds the hand of the statue.  Beat. Tourists squint in the sun, flash cruel lights in his eyes. He cannot close them.  Beat. Underground, his breath steams silently inside the tube, trapped. His fingers yearn to shade his face. Above, a pigeon passes over the sun and falls, suddenly, into the shadows of ringed palm trees.

An enormous, deformed animal lumbers past the statue, and the man in the tube feels a pang of kinship: the monsters that roam the park are trapped too, marooned in a prison of felt and sweat - their hands foreign white bodies hanging from rubbery wrists. He imagines tongues lolling in the heat, sunken eyes inside the bobbing heads. They glint out at him with empathy.

His knuckle itches. It has always itched.

The room has no clock in it, but they check on him twice a day. The door creaks open; it is Connors. The man in the tube imagines a smile. Connors is the best of them, the gentlest and the brightest. Most days he brings a thin sketchpad into the room with him and draws lying on the floor, thin legs kicking at the air like a boy.

"Good morning, sir," says Connors with respect. "It's a beautiful day out there."

He sits and draws next to the tube for a few minutes, gentle-eyed women in flowing dresses and dragons and shining castles, and speaks casually of the world. He has been away from the facility for several days: "My baby sister, married. What a doozy of a place this old rock of ours is." He shakes his head and looks up. "But you always knew that, I suppose. One day you'll see it again."

Yes! the man wants to shout. He wants to reach out and flip through Connors' book, make the skirts on the women twirl and the fire flick forth from the dragons' mouths. He wants to claw away the fog of the room, clamber up, up, up to the sun and the light and the hurt and see his world, the perfect world he always knew he could make and he did, he did make it better than anyone could have imagined. Too well, perhaps. In a perfect world, there is no room for decay.

Move, mouth! he commands. Gnash, o Teeth! Bend, knees, bend and break and bleed, bleed blue fire! The tube trembles, earth reaching out to him. He wants to sing.

Obey! Obey! Obey!

Connors looks up from his drawings, startled. Above, the nails of the statue shift and bite into bronze. The tick of the heart falters. It slows. Connors rushes out, his sketchbook open on the floor.

In a perfect world, there is no room for old dead things.

Notes from a tired brain.

Still not super happy with this, but part of this exercise is letting go of writing before I stomp it into the ground, so there you have it. I am pretty sure Walt Disney's cryogenically frozen body is in no way attached to the statue of him in the park, which is actually quite charming, but Bradbury is the best at body horror and I couldn't pass up a real-live I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream scenario.

In actual news, Disneyland is definitely cool in its own way, though I'm sure I come to it very differently than I would have as a child. Now it's more food for thought than mindless amusement. Still definitely a worthwhile experience. Also, a thriller/chase sequence set inside the It's A Small World ride would be amazing. I want to shoot that now. Kind of DIVA meets Charade - it's a scary and surreal artifact of bygone times, much like Disney himself.

Cheers
Julia

Travels: A Triple Decker Afternoon [Day IV]

Wherein I am already late and a thick fog of capitalism descends upon the land.

Just under the wire with this one - writing from a hotel in Anaheim.  My good friend Matthew is down here at a voice actor's conference (who knew they had conferences... but doesn't it sound like fun?) and has roped me into Disneyland.  I've evaded it for twenty-two years, but to be honest I'm a little excited for tomorrow.  It's all a bit 'the lady doth protest', especially after Matthew extracted a promise from me that I would not say anything that could be termed snarky while inside park bounds - he thinks I have some sort of inner child that requires release.  As I generally rely on my snark to protect me from the reality of any given situation, I am understandably nervous.

In unrelated news: man, Union Station is really really and truly a beautiful building.

Notes from a beige bedspread.

I think I will resurrect the ITSO tomorrow.  It was an old writing exercise I used to assign myself to practice pastiche, with ITSO standing both for 'in the style of' and inspiring hope that a reader would say "it's so [writer you were emulating]."  I always secretly wished a teacher would assign it as a project and I would have tons of experience and kill it, but no such thing ever occurred.  Life is bleak.

Travels: One's Lot In Life [Day III]

Wherein I take the bus in the wrong direction and Darth Vader presides over Fox.

I often wonder how a studio set functions without occasionally acknowledging the tension of twenty minions politely waiting for their big break... while working for the person whose job they would like.  Bad sentence, but I'll come back to it later.  Point being, at school we all know we're competing, but at least we can kind of do a friendly jostle here and there and there's an understanding that eventually anyone who works hard and has a reasonable balance of good luck to bad will make a stab at it.  Not so at Fox.  I met a good fifteen people today: they would all like to be in the writers' room.  They are not.

I was walking around the lot with Dana's lovely assistant Kate when she circumspectly referred to this weirdness.  I asked her for advice about the summer.  The lot has large murals painted on several of the buildings - the one behind Kate showed a vaguely anemic Luke Skywalker doing battle with Vader.

"Don't be pushy," she said.  "Don't be too smart.  I mean, be smart, but not about the writing.  Make friends who write.  Be smart with them, get your lines out at your dinner parties.  I'm still working on the balance."  We looked up at the mural.  Poor Luke, about to have his hand cut off by the Force.  Stuck up there forever.

"Does Dana ever show her scripts to you, though?  In private."

Kate beamed.  "Dana's really nice with me, actually.  I'm lucky.  One of my jokes made it into the pilot; I called my parents, I was so excited."  I asked her what the joke was, but she wouldn't tell me.  "It'll seem like bragging," she said.  "I don't know you well enough for bragging yet.  Try again next week."

On the way home from the lot, I took the bus in the wrong direction and ended up at the Santa Monica airport.  It's as close as an airfield can get to cozy, with little carts puttering around on the tarmac.  I bet the air traffic controllers there are happy with their jobs - they don't want to eventually get into the cockpit.

Lucky air traffic controllers.

Notes from a stucco workplace.

Any flat surfaces in LA which are not regularly cleaned acquire a thin layer of chalky black dust.  Mary says it is from the big ships that come into the harbour; it makes me feel like the volcanic apocalypse is approaching.

I may come back to this later, but shredding Mary's old patient notes is killing the writer in me.  Every file is a real character - you'd never need to come up with a backstory again!

Cheers

Julia

Travels: Your Bank Of America [DAY I]

Wherein I find five dollars and the Veteran's Act is put on display.

The Bank of America is the devil, says Mary, but it is within walking distance.  Mary has an account there already and she knows a few of the tellers.  Inside, the bank is neutral and clean, with a collection of red chairs near the entrance.  As we sit down, a ragged-looking man in a canvas jacket stands and brushes past us.

Mary beckons over one of the tellers, a youngish man with blue eyes whose nametag announces him as Beau Kasinsky.  I have never met a Beau before.  They exchange pleasantries.  On the ground near my feet is a crumpled bill.  American bills are much less exciting than our Monopoly money, but five dollars is five dollars.  I smooth it out a bit dumbly, then present it to Beau with the appropriate I found this on the floor caveat.  He laughs and calls his supervisor, 'Nick' - no last name on his tag - who nods jovially and presses the bill into my hand.

"I think the person who dropped it left," I say awkwardly.  "Does it belong to the bank now?"

"Nah, you're a winner," says Nick.  "The bank can't take it anyway, and I think I know who lost it.  He won't miss it."  He drifts off.  He had strangely blue eyes too - I wonder if our teller's are contactually enhanced.  They are very bright.

Beau leads us past a counter with an Investing and Accounting sign over it: the jowly man seated at the desk talks to himself and pokes at his iPad.  He promises to pick up the Prius at five - he looks pleased.  I doubletake and Mary taps the side of her head, smiles.  "Bluetooth," she says.

The man who was sitting in the red chair when we arrived hovers around the door of the bank before opening it and drifting past us.  He looks haggard close up, mostly bald.  Mary glances at him.  "Oh, I thought that was Steven.  He's not, of course, but he could be.  Wouldn't that have been fun?"  I nod knowingly.  I cannot remember if we know a Steven.  Perhaps Mary is thinking of someone in Rochester.  At any rate, the tall man wanders into the line for the clerk and Beau nods at him.

"If you want to return that money, he's the guy who lost it.  He lives next door, comes in here all the time.  He'll just withdraw stuff and then toss bills away as he walks out.  We try to keep things civil - he's on VA.  Really messed up, poor guy."

"Veterans are the only minority group that get guaranteed health coverage down here," Mary whispers.  "But it's not always enough."  I look at the man again.  He shuffles in slow increments towards the teller counter, though there is no one in front of him.  To our left, Investing and Accounting is asking about Fannie Mae - he looks totally insane, nodding at thin air and tapping on his pad.

"Um, if you want, I can give back the money for you."  Beau holds out his hand and I pull the bill from my wallet.

"Thanks."

He hurries over to the man, tapping him politely on the shoulder.  The veteran's back is turned to me, but Beau comes back and smiles.  "He says thank you."  We finish up with the account and Beau jokes with me about my Canadian response to finding the bill.  "My roommate would be pissed," he says.  He thinks you guys are all crazy socialists up there.  He's very, um, American.  Not like, racist or anything though."

I smile.  "You should tell him you met a Canadian Communist and she gave her money to a homeless guy."

"Yeah, I think I will."  He laughs, shakes my hand and waves us out.  I look back through the glass doors, and the veteran is still standing in line, rocking back and forth on his toes.  His beard is unkempt, and his ears stick out.  A thought occurs to me.

"Mary, when you said he could have been Steven - you didn't mean Mr. Spielberg?"

"Well of course.  He lives just up the block."

We walk back to the car in silence.


Writing notes from a large city.

Los Angeles is one shade greyer than Vancouver.  Enormous dead palm trees recalling Cousin It line the streets, bolstered by ten-foot high concrete retaining walls, and every house looks arbitrarily planted on its street, with no connection to its neighbours.  The primary colour palette seems to be sand, beige and white, with pops of green scattered randomly through the town.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it looks like David Lynch's colour corrector got to it.  The brightest thing I saw today was a garish billboard for Madagascar 3: THREE DEE THE MOVIE stuck on top of a Trader Joe's.

[Unrelated: Trader Joe's is the best.  Why do we not have them at home?]

Cheers
Julia

Relationships: 'Unconditional Love'

Conversations overheard on the bus tend to spark me.  They don't always light, but a little dialog flint-and-tinder wisps off in my lap when I hear people in front of me chatting.  Today two girls were sitting together and talking love, as we are all wont to do.  And one of them, probably in her early twenties or late teens, turned to her friend and said the following words [Arlo Guthrie style]:

"Real love is unconditional."

This concept is not new to me.  Many people have said and written and shouted it in my space over the years, and I don't generally have a verbal response.  Perhaps this is due to the shameful inner voice that pipes up immediately upon its utterance.

Mine sure isn't.

Gender: Girl Talk

Briefly: I go to film school. Several of my professors are women. Working in a male-dominated industry, most of them are pretty aware of issues of gender, even though they rarely attempt to address this with a class that's seventy-five percent male.

Last week, a (female) professor of mine was doing a general pitch about interviews we were supposed to be conducting with an industry professional of our choice. She gave examples: if you want to go into cinematography, talk to a cinematographer. If you're into set design, try and get an interview with a production designer.  Female student? Try getting a hold of a woman in the industry.