Cleaning in Cali with one Crusty Cat...Oh My!!!

So I'm sitting on not-my-bed about to be picked up to go to a run about 30 miles away.  (My bed comes in 2 days, THANK GOD!) Being in California (do I call it California? LA? Venice? I'm in Venice) has been like slowly waking up in an unfamiliar place and the time between becoming conscious and actually realizing where you are after a groggy couple of minutes.  You kind of have to make the decision to confront where you are, and until then you are totally lost.

I feel like I have to physically let go of something before I can feel at home here.  Let go of what,  I'm not sure.  But I forced myself to walk around today and yesterday and they were significantly better than my first two days here, which I spent cooped up in our apartment which somehow, impressively, neither I nor my roommate realized was a decrepit level of disgusting neither of us could deal with.  I pinpointed the problem immediately.  The woman living here is at that point where she thinks she can still clean the place herself, but is too blind/oblivious to realize that there are bits of food on everything, dust everywhere, and a layer of dirt on all surfaces.  So off to CVS we went.

Armed with latex and a vat of bleach, we tackled the bathroom and kitchen first, and then Swiffered the crap out of our rooms so we could be in them without getting an allergy attack.  Now that everything is cleaned, I feel about 10000X better about being here.  My next mission is to find a way around Mitzy, the 17-year-old crust queen in residence that lounges on the otherwise lovely couches we have on the patio, rendering them unsuitable for human use.  Another fun nuance of dealing with old people--pathological lying.  Apparently, "The upstairs neighbors will take care of her" means "You will be responsible for feeding this abysmal creature while I'm gone."

But flea-infested felines aside, as I was biking around the beach I witnessed an eclectic dynamic that not even New York can quite match.  You have your wealthy authors and directors, celebrities and well-to-do looking artist/media types mingling with vagrants of every sort.  Kind of surreal but also comforting in a strange way.

Maybe I'm scared to admit that I can see myself loving this place.  I start my job on Wednesday and I know that will bring twists and turns, hopefully in the right direction.  I guess all I can do right now is to NOT anticipate...so far I think I'm doing a good job. 

More to come soon...

It never rains in California...

Except for on Friday, when I'm getting there.  But that's ok because here it's cold and rainy a lot more than that.

Do you remember that lazy summer feeling when things were just good? You'd wake up and look outside and there was nothing to really weigh you down--no previous judgments or things you said or did to have to compensate for that day.  I'm not sure if it's an age thing or a location thing, or a phase of life thing--but I haven't had that feeling in a long time and I got a wave of it the other day.  I was walking down Avenue A and I passed that grungy ass bar that I've never actually gone into, but that smells like every other grungy ass bar I used to frequent, and the scent of cigarette smoke, wet wooden tabletops and sexy sweaty musicians' unwashed hair was arresting.  For a split second I panicked.  How can I leave this for LA? But then I remembered, Cisco Adler is in LA.

Last summer was very different than any other summer I'd experienced.  I kind of thought I was in a relationship and I kind of acted accordingly.  Ok I'm bordering on the inappropriate internet sharing that I always rag people for.  So that's that.  I had fun, I lost about 15 pounds without really trying and I learned to love fresh food and nix processed garbage, much to my family's dismay.  Afterwards, going back to living at home with a growing 18-year-old boy, was far from conducive to keeping up the new lifestyle, so needless to say, I was less than thrilled with those results.

But I actually am pretty proud of how well I kept up my habits for as long as I did.  It was only when it got really shitty out and I got really sick of the commute, that I pretty much stopped working out.

But back to Cisco Adler, even though his music is kind of poppy and not as gangsta as him and Shwayze think, it reminds me of LA and they represent everything I love about it.  They aren't shy about admitting that it's the simple things in life that make them happy, like little shorts, tight pants (both on them) and long hair (again, them).

Ahhh the boys of summer.  I'll be there soon.