three monthiversary

It’ll be three months tomorrow since I drove down I-5 into Los Angeles. Three months and a lifetime. When I first got here, I wanted it to be three months in the future so I’d be settled, know my way around the city, and have made friends. And it turns out, life is better than I could have expected it to be, three months in. I’m starting to feel like I have enough time in the city to justify saying, I belong here.

Saturday’s New Part Of Los Angeles was the Fashion District and Santee Alley. I took my guests there. It’s a little bit of third world here in L.A. – fake designer purses, $10 jeans, $8 watches. And, of course, the DVD vendors. They’ve got more bootleg movies than a Chinese K-Mart**, and vendors standing over them yelling “DVDDVDDVDDVDDVDDVDDVDDVDDVDDVD! FIIIIIIIVE DOLLAHS!” with unidentifiable accents. Of course, there are vendors screaming everywhere – for colored contacts, $5 bags, and live turtles in boxes that made violentmedusa sad.

From there, I took the Tour Route back through Hollywood, down Highland, along Melrose and La Brea back to I-10, with a quick stop at El Pollo Loco, where we made fun of El Caliente and his “unusually expressive eyebrow”. It was noted that every time I take violentmedusa around a new city, elements are always common: burritos and roots of evil. In Seattle, it was the original Starbucks and burritos as big as one’s head; in L.A., it was the site of the original McD’s, and fast food burritos that were less daunting.

We did visit the beach, so that I could ramp up on gossip with the girls for a few minutes while the UBC contingent splashed in the waves and worsened their sunburns. I then took them to LAX, dropped them, still damp and sandy, at their terminal, and started making the phone calls to figure out what, exactly, were the social plans for the night. Because I was heartbroken to see members of my old urban tribe leave, I attempted to immerse myself in my new one.

It worked, except that it entailed being out at a BBQ at a certain house in Silverlake that I really didn’t need to be at. Which is why we moved on to a more typical L.A. party later in the evening, on the WeHo/Fairfax border, off the Melrose shopping zone, in one of the neighborhoods I wouldn’t mind living in. We walked into the party, and there was a DJ spinning in the middle of clouds of marijuana smoke.

“Oh look!” I said. “It’s just like Vancouver!”

Migration out to the back yard, however, made us realize that we were at a slasher party. That is to say, we had wandered into a party where the bulk of the population were people who have a “slash” in their self-definition. Actress/waitress/pet sitter. Actor/valet attendant. Actor/comedian/fry cook. My friend D went on a rant about how she hates those types, and how she missed our usual Alternative America (my term, not hers) crowd of artists and musicians from Venice and Silverlake. I concurred. Especially since the slasher girls are complete and total cats when it comes to other girls – and give all females everywhere a bad name.

I got home around three in the morning, and crashed as quickly as possible. I still don’t think I got enough broken sleep. Which is why today was a slow day. Three of us spent two hours at the beach, tanning and gossiping, and then watched Maria Full Of Grace in a big group at a friend’s house in Playa. The movie was very, very intense. It’s wonderful. And horrifying in parts, if hopeful in the end.

I’m exhausted now, partly from not enough sleep, partly because it took me forty five minutes to make the ten minute drive to Playa Vista for the movie. I got lost trying to shortcut through Marina del Rey, caught in gridlock due to accident, trapped in circles, and finally ended up going further than I needed to in order to double back onto the right road. I was twitchy by the time I got there. Few things upset me more than getting lost. Except perhaps slashers. I’m finding quite a bit of fault with Los Angeles today, it seems.