Hugs & Kisses from LA: Part I

Hello from the land of the male pinkie ring!

Hello!
Hey!
How are ya?
Grayt… how are yoo?
Yeah, good. What’s happening?
Ah, yeah, you know. How about you? What’s happening?
Ah, grayt.
Yeah? Grayt.

Okay, phew, now we got that out of the way…

Honestly, Hollywood is growing on me. In a veins on blue cheese kind of way. Makes you hungry for something, but you know it’s not good for you. Still, you’ll enjoy it in small doses.

The past three weeks have been lots of work and little play for the most part. Some exploration, yes, a couple of road trips, but largely I’ve retreated to my house in the hills and squeezed my creativity out onto the walls and documents and presentations and on into my dreams.

Willy: The Team

I start most mornings with a sweaty gym session or an hour of yoga. Then Willy, my creative compadre, arrives at the house somewhere around 10 a.m., and I pretend to set some structure for the day. Then I run around with a marker and throw our ideas onto giant post-it notes while we riff off each other and sometimes fall over into corners laughing.

When we get tired, we exchange music and flip through magazines and the weirdest books we can find in LA’s many eclectic stores.

Around six or seven o’clock I start getting ansy, so I kick Willy out and go for a sunset drive along Mullholland drive, or stroll along another true-to-the-movies boardwalk. Then I go home and work some more or write or read and eventually fall asleep while watching LA’s twinkling lights in the valley below my bed.

Everything was going great. Kind of.

Then a few days ago I woke up agitated and dream-stoned and thought… WHAT the hell are you doing??? Helloooo-ooooo.

what matters in Hollywood

I was overcome with aggravation. I felt isolated, a little lonely, bored of talking about nightclubs, and extremely needy of some diversity, some interaction, a change of scenery, a sincere conversation, and maybe a hug.

I sat around and moped for somewhere between one and two days. Then I announced that the office was moving to Melrose Avenue. There, I found myself a cafe and a cute waiter and some good music, and soon started to feel better surrounded by life and color and possibilities again.

So now, with some newly inserted ingredients my days are more diverse and so sufficiently distracting again. The work is still good, I’m living a healthy life, and true to a casual preference developed on my travels, I haven’t had a drink since I got here.

our target audience

In other news, I am still in touch with a man I met a few months ago in Thailand, and with whom I had a magical affair. I mention this not because it has hopes of some extremely happy ending, but rather because I am learning a lot from this first foray into playful companionship since my separation.

He is wonderful, and we’re wonderful together (as only two people with oceans between them and memories of great intimacy and no sense of obligations can be), but like always there is a risk to every hey-this-is-really-great scenario.

Yes, I needed a gorgeous lover with whom I could feel safe and laugh and who was intellectually stimulating and who helped me move on as an individual. And that’s exactly what I got. But now, three months of long-distance seduction later, I do notice that I feel less alone than I should, and also that I am getting used to this man in an mildly attached and vaguely pre-needy kind of way.

But it’s not so much because I am falling into whatever. It's because I'm allowing this experience to populate places in my mind that I was supposed to leave vacant, so that they could come to rely only on themselves for a sense of fulfillment, or hope, or confidence that I am not really the faded flower I sometimes see when I look in the mirror.

Instead, fantasy now leaks into those spaces and props me up with imaginative daydreams, guaranteeing me an eventual plummet back down to earth when, for whatever reason, I realize that in reality I am alone.

In case it is not coming through here, this is all extremely positive. I am immeasurably blessed to have come as far as I have, and would not change a single thing. My work, my travels, my friends, and my first significant lover are teaching me volumes about my new strengths, my new weaknesses, and how to be a single, open-minded, ambitious, traveling, thirty-something-year-old woman with no real home, a slightly wounded heart, and a chance to rebuild whatever life she wants.

In the ‘recently separated, out of work and feeling guilty’ category, it doesn’t get much better than that.

Mullholland

my terrace with pups