The useless train of thought for the week is: why am I like this, how did I get this way, and is there a name for it?

Yeah, I know that doesn't narrow it down much. Specifically, I'm thinking of time and place.

I've been reading a book called The Global Soul, by Pico Iyer. The premise of the interconnected essays in the book, roughly, is that the world has become ridiculously international and multicultural and, due to the technology of the airplane, small. And so you've got a whole niche of people who are pretty much rootless and (spiritually) homeless, having lived in so many countries and/or been raised in a mix of so many different cultures and/or traveled so much for business that they spend more time in airplanes and airports than anywhere else. The author himself is ethnically Indian, with a British passport and US alien papers, and now he lives in Japan. He has a friend who has special permission to carry two passports at once because he fills them so quickly. It seems there are an awful lot of languages spoken and nationalities represented in Toronto. And so on.

I picked up the book because I thought, "Hey! Maybe that's what I am! There's a name for it!" I believe home is where you are right now, and that I haven't found that capital-H Home that makes people want to buy property and live there until they die, and maybe I never will, and that's fine. My philosophical tangle at the moment is that while I share those feelings of being equally at home anywhere yet never truly at home anywhere, Iyer hasn't described me anywhere in that book. I didn't spend my entire childhood in the same house, on the same block -- the very idea weirds me out -- but my childhood was stable. I spent my first 18 years living within, say, a 2-mile radius in suburban New Jersey. My parents also grew up in New Jersey, both near the town where they raised me. My grandparents? One state up, New York. My entire extended family, without a single exception I can think of, lives in the tri-state area.

So I'm not sure what happened to me. The predominant feeling I remember from high school, aside from Morrissey-esque self-pity, was antsiness. I wanted out of there, not because, looking back, it was a terrible place -- it's a good place, if you like suburbs, which most Americans do -- but because I was bored. My big goal for college was to get out of New Jersey. My horizons were limited then, so I thought it was a big deal that I was making it a whole three-hour drive away, to Connecticut. But I had a feeling when I left that I was never coming back, though my parents would welcome me back with open arms even now. So there goes "nurture" -- I was raised to have a place, but I don't. Was I born with a short attention span, some nomadic gene that skips 5 generations, undiagnosed ADD? I may not be a global soul, but something's weird here.

I was the first person in my social group at college to refer to "going home" and mean going back to the dorm. If we're not home, I argued, where are we? This ain't no vacation.

The summer after my first year of college, I remember arguing with someone at the registrar's office over my right to see my second-semester grades. They said I couldn't have them, but they'd already sent them to my permanent address. Since I'm standing right in front of you in Connecticut, and thus clearly not living in New Jersey permanently or otherwise, wouldn't it make more sense to hand them to me now? Or send them to my campus mailbox? No dice. I was 19, able to vote and all that other good stuff, but I couldn't get my grades because I didn't live at "home" anymore.

I graduated and moved to Boston. Then I moved to Germany. Nineteen fundamentalists flew a plane into a building not far from where I grew up, and it did more to me than it did to people who spent their youth in California or Berlin. But I was still genuinely confounded when people asked me if, due to the tragic events(tm), I'd be "coming home soon." Hey, I *live* here. This is the only apartment I rent. If this isn't home, what kind of empty, transient existence have I been living for the past year?

I came back to Boston six months later, and it was home again, but I felt foreign. My reverse culture shock is done now, but I still have issues with this country that only expats and other former expats understand.

And I have conversations like this in California...
Well-Meaning Stranger: Where are you from?
Jen: I grew up in New Jersey.
WMS: Wow, you moved here from New Jersey, that's a long way!
Jen: Well, actually, I moved here from Boston.
WMS: Oh, Boston, is that where you went to school?
Jen: I went to school in Connecticut.

And then I feel weird and rootless and antsy, even though I'm a multi-generational American raised in one culture, one country, one state, essentially one town, one religion, one language, and an undivorced nuclear family. And I'm not ungrateful: I'm happy I grew up with my grandparents in the same town as me, not having to make new friends every few years at a time when my social skills were, shall we say, not as developed as they are now. But the human brain does like categories so I'm slightly bummed I don't fit into the Global Soul niche Iyer's talking about. It's a little worrisome that I don't even fit in with the other antsy people.

Maybe my brain is just addled from noticing yesterday that my checks bear an address from three moves ago, and that three moves ago was only the year 2000. Pretentious debates aside, I'm glad I'll here in LA until at least 2008.

I realize this post is bizarre and neurotic and a little too personal, perhaps not the best thing to follow up my installation of comments. Be kind.

I went to Goodwill yesterday, where I bought a men's short-sleeved shirt (on sale this week, $2.99!) but did not partake in the "lunchtime special" of 1/2 off pants. The store was rigged to a sound system for such announcements; never before have I heard the phrase "Attention Goodwill shoppers!" The announcements, not surprisingly, were made in both English and Spanish.

By far the most amusing things on sale were the videotapes and CDs of TV-show propaganda labeled "For Your Emmy Consideration." I really should buy one someday just to see what they are: full episodes? Snippets interspersed with commentary? How'd they get there? Some intern was told to dispose of them, and donated the ones that weren't moving on Ebay?

After requests by various readers, I'm trying out comments on a trial basis. This makes me nervous, to be honest. I kind of like the shouting-into-the-well feeling I get from all of this; it keeps things nicely anonymous: when I'm saying something particularly cheeky, I can just pretend no one's listening. We'll see how it goes.

I went to the dentist this morning, for Part II of II in the Saga of the Crown. (Mundane, yes, but a million other blogger monkeys at a million other keyboards are talking about Liberia and Saddam, so why bother?) I have a young, pleasant dentist with an unidentifiable (Eastern?) European accent and the unfortunate name of "Buts." (Pronounced "beauts.") I chose this dental practice based on proximity but it turned out to be a good bet. I paid $200 less than Rick paid for a crown in Boston several years ago, and $100 less than my family pays in New Jersey, and I don't feel like a lab rat like I would at the UCLA Dental School (which offered me a grand additional savings of $75 to be a student project).

The decor of this dentists' office isn't nearly as slick as my old place in Cambridge, and certainly not everyone there has comfy corporate insurance. The walls are wood paneled like something in a suburban den, which goes strangely with the acoustic ceiling with flourescent lights that you'd usually see in schools. I don't know whether to reach for the remote or throw a pencil into the ceiling.

They had the radio on, and both the dentist and the assistant periodically sang along, or hummed along, or did that hum/sing combo you do when you don't quite know all the words.

This city isn't so bad.

I was on Kazaa just now (I know, I know, Trent Lott is going to figure out a way to blow up my computer) and one user in particular was giving me good download times on my Peter Tosh songs. I peeked into his directory, looking for the rest of "Legalize It," and also found a fair bit of music with Hawaiian-sounding names.

My father-in-law lives in Hawaii, and unlike my sister-in-law, I wasn't driven crazy by the local radio station on my last visit, so I thought I'd download a couple of songs. I chose a few at random, and soon, the user in question sent me an instant message. (I'd forgotten you can even do that on Kazaa). I wish I'd copy-pasted it, as it was pretty cool in retrospect...he noted that I was downloading his "local tunez" and wanted to know where I was, if I had any similar music, etc. Well, he may have been slightly bummed that I was investigating on a whim and didn't have any to swap (though I offered him some old blues), but he was very pleasant nonetheless and we had a nice, if brief, chat. He's from Hawaii (duh) but now lives in Las Vegas. He left to make dinner, but wished me happy ripping.

The Aloha Spirit is alive and well in Nevada.

(For once, I'm not being a smart-ass. Hawaiians really are, in my limited experience, more laid-back and friendly than mainlanders. My father-in-law rightly pointed out that cashiers and other service industry people smile at you and seem to mean it -- it's not a great job, no, but the daily grind doesn't seem to *grind* quite as hard. If someone honks their car horn at you in Hawaii, it's a tourist. It's a good culture, one that the other 49 states, particularly the ones on the east coast, could do worse than to cultivate.)

(Final, conscience-induced parenthetical note: I rarely download full albums from Kazaa, unless I already bought them on tape in the early 90s, or I already bought them on CD and the CD was ripped off when I was robbed in 2002. I'll buy the damn Peter Tosh album when I start getting regular paychecks again, promise.)

I've been lurking on an L.A. message board and my oh my, am I starting to get a feel for local hot buttons.

Conversation about going out at night in Hollywood, condensed:
Person 1: I was on the Sunset Strip last night. It sucked. Everyone was fake and trendy, blah.
Person 2: The Strip has sucked for years. I'm less fake and trendy than anyone. Blah blah.
Person 3: Hollywood sucks, except for the places I go, because I'm realer than real. Blah dee blah dee blah.

Advice to a tourist, condensed:
Person 1: Don't go to East LA or South Central, there's nothing to see there and I'd never go myself.
Person 2: You fucking bigot, there's great Mexican food in East LA and every neighborhood has something to offer.
Person 1: Go ahead, get mugged in Compton, see if I care.
Person 2: Enjoy your cows in the suburbs, see if I care.
Tourist: Uh, thanks guys, please don't fight?
Person 3: Hi tourist, take public transit, it's not as bad as everyone says.
Person 4: No, public transit is full of weirdos, you should drive. But do go to East LA.
Person 3: You've obviously never taken the bus, you fucking bigot.
Jen: *bashing her head against the computer monitor*

***

Meanwhile, offline...

Jen: Everyone was complaining about the heat yesterday, despite the fact that it was in the 70s.
Rick: That's okay, it'll be the same temperature tomorrow and they'll complain that it's cold.

So, so true.

In other news, we went to Hollywood Boulevard yesterday. It's full of cheesy tourist traps, but at least the Walk of Fame is free, as is feeling superior to the seriously obese Midwestern sightseers in really bad shorts.

Some women had set up a memorial by Celia Cruz's star: flowers, music, signs. Later, an Asian news crew reported from Bruce Lee's star (30th anniversary of his death). Unemployed actors dressed as Superman, Charlie Chan, and a Stormtrooper posed for photos in exchange for tips. Twenty ounces of soda: $1.75. A movie: $11. Yikes.

Malls are basically the same wherever you go. The same stores, the same food, the same atmosphere that's designed to lull you into a stupor. Some are more upscale than others, some are bigger than others, but a mall is a mall. You've got to be a mall veteran to notice any real difference.

I grew up in New Jersey. I'm a mall veteran.

And my local L.A. mall, the Westside Pavillion, is quite the L.A. mall. It's not particularly froofy -- most of the stores were the usual middle-class offerings you'll find everywhere. But my god, four hair salons and a manicure/waxing spa under one roof? This isn't even a huge mall by American retail standards: about 160 stores. That's a larger percentage of mall real estate than usual dedicated to making bodies look better. There's even a dance studio and a fencing club.

No in-house liposuction, at least.

In further evidence of job-market misery, only one store in the entire place -- an airbrushed-looking cosmetics boutique -- had a Help Wanted sign.

Another culture shock moment: the lack of frivolous adult education classes in Los Angeles. I'm not even in search of a course to teach me how to cook Thai food or play better pool (though those would also be cool), I just want a simple careers skills brush-up like this. Seems the adult ed classes in L.A. focus mainly on things like literacy and the GED. Now I'm embarrassed for even looking. (Echoes of people telling me I'm an idiot for complaining about the whole no job, no mon-ay thing as long as I have a roof over my head and all my limbs.)

The frontrunning Democratic presidential candidates -- including my man Howard Dean, who I like partially because he claims to be down with equal rights for all -- aren't endorsing gay marriage. Disappointing. It's more disappointing that they're probably right not to come out (har har) in favor of it, since more than half of my fellow citizens oppose the idea. Politics, after all, is still politics, and mainstream America, after all, is still dumb.

But it's interesting to see *how* the candidates opposed it:

Kerry: "I do not support (gay) marriage itself because . . . of how I view the world culturally, historically, religiously." (*eyeroll*)

Dean: "Marriage isn't the federal government's business" (cop-out) and "marriage has a long, long history as a religious institution." (True, but Howie, don't get all religious on me in the future or you're gonna lose my vote.)

Lieberman: "I'm not ready to give a snap judgment on this...Marriage has a special status in our culture, our heritage, our history." (*eyeroll* again)

For once, I gotta go with Al Sharpton: "That's like saying you give blacks, or whites, or Latinos the right to shack up -- but not get married...It's like asking 'do I support black marriage or white marriage'...The inference of the question is that gays are not like other human beings."

Word up.

I do wonder if the three candidates who supported gay marriage (Sharpton, Braun, and Kucinich) aren't just playing the politics game themselves, trying to differentiate themselves from the frontrunners. Kucinich opposed gay marriage as a candidate for Congress in 1996, for instance.

I should say that all the candidates I've mentioned at least support civil unions. Edwards and Graham wouldn't even show up to the forum.

I hope sometime in my lifetime this debate will seem as ridiculous as arguing whether women should be allowed to vote.

One of the neighbors in the next building over, whose window faces my bedroom window, has a horrible, throaty mucus problem.

RASP!

HACK!

*massive horking of phlegm*

Just another glamorous day in Tinseltown.

I've deleted some of my ranting about my jobhunt as an offering to the Job Gods. But not all of it. I gotta be me.

I was emailing with a friend about the youthful joy of making up song parodies, and it occurred to me this privilege shouldn't be reserved for 6th graders. As I no longer have mean teachers and bullying classmates to write nasty limericks about, I shall now endeavor to turn my negative thoughts about the job market and the government into Weird Al-level stupidity.

Uh, no, you don't necessarily get to see the results. But we all need hobbies.

I think first I shall rewrite that T. Rex song as "Bang a Gong (Bring 'Em On)."

Bwah ha ha.

1) I got a job interview! Happy thoughts, happy thoughts...

2) Some crazy bastard in a van has been fleeing the police in a high-speed chase around downtown L.A. for the last hour. Crikey.

Jobless Benefit Rolls Hit 20-Year High

And that doesn't count the people who've been unemployed so long they no longer get benefits. Or people like me, who never got benefits in the first place because unemployed freelancers don't count.

Perversely, this makes me feel better. Economy aside, I've been wondering if I'm not getting a job because I suck. No, I'm not getting a job because this is the worst unemployment since Boy George was Top-40, parents trampled each other for Cabbage Patch Kids, and I was a third-greader wearing jelly shoes.

And here's our "president," waging an expensive war and getting people killed ("bring them on," indeed, you hypocritcal AWOL schmuck) based on bullshit evidence.

Damn, I was feeling better...

Careful readers will notice that my L.A. started out as a fascinating paradise of wonderfulness and then became a ridiculous parody of itself where I will never survive without massive plastic surgery. Both views are correct; neither are correct. It's different stages of culture shock, and I remember this from Germany. I'm out of Honeymoon and into Rejection. In Germany, it took me about six months to go through those two, Adjustment, and into Adaptation -- but I also had a language barrier to deal with, and as an overly verbal person, that didn't help.

If you think southern California isn't a foreign country, you're kidding yourself.

Anyway, in the interest of remaining postive (*gritting of teeth* *clenching of fists*) I will note a truly beautiful thing about this area. The neighbors talk to you. One of ours, though maybe 10 minutes of conversation had ever passed between us and we'd forgotten each others' names, invited us to her sister's 4th of July party. Where we met additional pleasant strangers and had a good time.

I've also noticed that in Boston, a new contact will give you her email address. Here, you get a phone number -- sometimes two. In fact, once I get out of Rejection mode, I need to get out from under the remote control, the keyboard, and my pile of library books and instigate some socializing with these collected phone numbers.

But first, a free concert.
There is definitely more free stuff in L.A. than anywhere else I've lived that wasn't a college campus. Maybe that'll help me Adapt.

Yesterday in the dentists' waiting room, I read a disgusting Wall Street Journal article (I'm not subscribed online anymore, so don't ask for a link, or any detail) about that weird stomach-stapling surgery that Carnie Wilson got. American health insurance companies, in their wisdom, won't cover managed weight-loss programs but they will pay for you to have intestines removed and your stomach surgically shrunk if you're 100 pounds or more overweight. People are desperate to get this surgery, so if their doctors tell them they're not overweight enough to qualify, some of them go home and stuff their faces until they meet the guidelines.

That's weird enough. But the article also mentioned these facts:
* Al Roker has had this surgery.
* After having this surgery, a person can only eat small amounts of food at one time, or s/he vomits.

I note that Al Roker has a food show, where he "takes his love of food and his fascination with people across America." Just don't love food more than a little at a time, or you'll puke on the guests.

I was thinking about my bad old days working at a gimmick fast food restaurant and found this site listing each state's minimum wage.

The minimum wage in New Jersey has gone up 10 cents since 1993. It's $5.15, the same as the federal minimum wage and, well, a bunch of less expensive states. Shameful. I also don't understand why some states are allowed to have a state minimum wage less than the federal one.

In California, for the record, it's $6.75, same as Massachusetts. I wonder how long before I'll have to verify this first-hand.

How am I supposed to fit into a goddamn corporate job if my career history doesn't even fit into the boxes and drop-down menus on recruiting websites?

Not that I have any marketable skills anyway. I really wish someone had told me in the late 90s that "witty" and "literate" had never paid anyone's bills before, and would never pay mine again.

And look at the food service ads:
* "Must be experienced and extremely good-looking. Please email your headshots and photos with your contact details."
* "Please send resume or info about yourself w/ a photo if possible."
* "Beautiful Female Bartenders--Model caliber--needed"
...and those are just the ones that say it.

I think I should apply for some of those jobs and send this photo.

There are a lot of normal, unpretentious people in L.A.

Very few of them live in Hollywood.

I had two Hollywood milestones on Sunday: a chili dog at Pinks and my first celebrity sighting. Pinks is a hot dog stand that is frequented by celebrities and always has a ridiculous line in front. The dog was good, but not so godlike as to be worth such a long wait. It's a frickin' hot dog, people. I suspect if famous people didn't occasionally queue up for some reason, or if it were in my neighborhood instead of Hollywood, Pinks wouldn't be so hot. Like so many many people in L.A., it seems to be famous for being famous.

The truly pretentious wanks were congregating on the patio at The Cat & Fiddle. The women all looked alike (same plastic surgeon?) and the men all had arrogant swaggers. Rick noticed Elijah Wood having a beer with two friends, and he wasn't prancing around like the king of the universe, and he actually is a movie star, so can someone explain the attitude on the wanna-bes?

With any luck, I'll get a real job soon and can quit catering. Then I'll only have to deal with "actors" on the rare occasion I feel like drinking in Hollywood. I guess this is what people are talking about when they call L.A. fake and plastic -- the normal humans are all in areas without any tourist draw. Nice place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit here?

PS...I know the archives are hosed. Working on it.