What I did in 2003:
* Froze my ass in Boston for almost five full months.
* Attended a baby shower for the first time.
* Bought my first car (I'm one of two names on the car loan, anyway).
* Learned to drive again.
* Got in two minor car accidents, including my first one as a driver (not my fault).
* Traveled cross-country, Atlantic to Pacific. Set foot in Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon for the first time.
* Moved out of Boston. Again.
* Relocated 3000 miles. Again.
* Got an extreme crash course in LA and the west coast in general.
* Enriched a local dentist by getting my first crown.
* Celebrated my five-year wedding anniversary.
* Brewed beer at home for the first time and stewarded my first beer competition.
* Wrote a sucktastic novel.
* Started my new job as a reading tutor, thus launching my third career (writing, catering, education) before age 30.
* Took my first standardized test since the SAT in 199* (and passed).


To do in 2004:
* Further enrich my dentist by getting three cavities filled.
* Admit I'm not as young as I used to be and get my eyes examined.
* Get the eff out of the catering business for good before I start brutally murdering the lazy, incompetent "actors" I work with.
* Brew more, better beer and steward at least one more competition.
* Consider editing my sucktastic novel down to a merely mediocre short story; consider writing a second sucktastic novel.
* Do an RSS feed for the blog and redesign this site in general.
* Go to Vegas, and to Joshua Tree (should be easy, as I plan to do both in January!) then mellow out with the travel for a while and learn to love LA.
* Continue/start my LA quests for a jazz club as good as Wally's, a Thai restaurant as good as Brown Sugar, and a bar, any bar, with no TV.
* [super secret possible career aspiration]
* Fewer milestones, more relaxation, much more income, please please please.

And watch out for those crafty thesaurus-users, too.

Thought of the day:

LA: It beats moving.

Think I could sell it to the chamber of commerce?

Sorry, just bitter today because of some particularly bad doses of LA traffic lately, much of which can be blamed on the outlying suburbs (bluch!) rather than the actual incorporated city of Los Angeles.

Someone told me this week that the LA suburbs were all cities, because there weren't any cows. Uh huh. She also said I just needed to get out of LA and into the suburbs and I'd like it much better there. Right, since the things keeping me sane in the land of smog and nuts (fruits are fine with me) are non-mainstream things the suburbs completely lack, like seedy ethnic restaurants full of food I can't identify and people speaking languages I don't understand.

So almost 7 months later, what about LA have I decided I really dislike, rather than simply needing to get used to it?
1) The need to drive to so many places, either because time is money (hmm, three hour bus ride or twenty minute drive?) or because you honestly, truly Can't Get There From Here on public transit.
2) The traffic resulting from point #1.
3) "Actors" taking all the odd jobs away from the rest of us.
4) The city's emphasis on beauty and youth (see point #3), resulting in pages and pages of plastic surgery ads even in the "alternative" newspaper.
5) That points 1, 2, and 4 are true, thus making LA much closer to its stereotype than I'm comfortable with. I hate it when people/things conform to type.
6) Segregation, gerrymandering, the gap between public and private schools, and various other social policy/urban planning ills I don't have the time/space/full understanding to get into just now.
7) I've met more people I don't want to know than I have since...high school.

Okay, so why does anyone live here?
1) Duh, the climate: 50F is "freezing cold," it never snows, it rarely rains, it's usually sunny. The smog isn't much of a factor on my side of LA. Plus, you can't feel most of the earthquakes.
2) Unlike many LA gringos, I like the Mexican influence and the fact that there's no 50%+ ethnic majority. It gives the city an interesting flavor I've seen nowhere else, not to mention dirt-cheap burritos.
3) Since the traumas of the early 90s, I believe that even inner-city LA is on the rise, not declining. The city in general feels positive in a way that Boston and San Francisco certainly don't.
4) I live five miles from the Pacific Ocean.
5) The regional travel opportunities are amazing. A few hours' drive to San Diego, Mexico, Las Vegas, the gorgeous central coast, and a whole slew of deserts, mountains, and national parks. Short, cheap Southwest flights to places like San Francisco and Phoenix.
7) It's cheaper than anywhere I've lived since central Connecticut.
8) Look, it's the second biggest city in America. It's like someone threw New York on the kitchen table and squooshed it with a rolling pin: somewhere in the sprawl, you'll be able to get anything you could possibly want at any hour of the day or night.
9) With 9 million people in LA county, I'm bound to make a friend or two eventually.

Rick and I agree: after he's got his PhD, we're outta here. Until then, it'll be an interesting five or six years -- and no moving.

I'm not eligible to give blood in the United States. Not for any interesting, naughty reason, but because I've spent more than six months in Germany. "In some parts of the world, cattle can get an infectious, fatal brain disease called Mad Cow Disease," says the Red Cross site, "In these same locations, humans have started to get a new disease called variant Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease (vCJD) which is also a fatal brain disease." So, residents and former residents of practically the entire continent of Europe are deemed tainted, never mind that the Red Cross in those countries somehow gets by, passing all that tainted blood around.

What's the Red Cross gonna do now? Be consistent and ban all Americans? Or stop being so freakin' xenophobic about things it doesn't understand? (Likely answer: neither.)

More interestingly, are we going to get a full-fledged BSE panic here? It would be fun to watch McDonalds freak out, like it did in Germany, frantically coming up with new porkburgers. More likely there'll be a giant gloss-over and cover-up. We've already been reassured that it's not terrorism, as if that thought would even cross the mind of any sane person.

Revisit this classic Net joke on your way out.

The Death of Horatio Alger: The other day I found myself reading a leftist rag that made outrageous claims about America. It said that we are becoming a society in which the poor tend to stay poor, no matter how hard they work; in which sons are much more likely to inherit the socioeconomic status of their father than they were a generation ago. The name of the leftist rag? Business Week...

Conspiracy theory #7829: The White Stripes are sponsored by Target.

Yes, people really do think Saddam blew up the World Trade Center.

Reminds me of a classic blooper Rick and I caught on CNN. The newscaster referred to the continued hunt in Iraq for "Osa-...uh...Saddam Hussein."

Gosh, who can tell those murdering fundamentalists apart these days?

Have a Happy Merry Festive Chrischanukkahwanzaamas!

Rick decorated our living room last night. We don't have a tree, but we do have Xmas lights with ornaments hanging from them. It looks like a suburban front yard in here. It is sick and wrong, yet awesome.

There is a local mall that's been making it "snow" every night at 8pm. Silly Southern Californians.

The new World Trade Center will be called the Freedom Tower.

Because nothing says "freedom" like dying senselessly in your office on a Tuesday morning.

The only good thing about September 11, 2001 is that we had not yet politicized the tragedy.

I wonder when, if ever, I'll stop feeling sick about all this.

Some people "promoting traditional family values" are running a poll on gay marriage. Have fun. They're claiming the results will be presented to Congress.

Do heed the note at the bottom of the page about how to avoid getting email from them, or use a spam email account.

I'm considering staying on their mailing list because it might be amusing and informative to see what the super-Christian focus-on-the-family types are up to.

A less heartwarming tutoring story:

I was trying to make my 8th grade boy guess what the prefix "sub-" meant. (I don't do much with prefixes and suffixes as a rule; it's SAT stuff and not as practical for kids who are struggling just to read fluently, but it happened to come up.)

"Tell me some words that start with 'sub-,'" I said.

"Submarine...subway..."

"And what do a submarine and a subway have in common?"

"They both start with sub?"

"Okay, what's a submarine?"

"A boat that goes underwater."

"And what's a subway?"

"It's a place to eat."

Ooh, I was hatin' on LA at that moment.

Now one more kid in the land of the car knows that a subway is a train that goes underground. Go me. Or something.

Grr.

***

In other LA news, I forgot to mention that I've now been to Reseda. As in:

"You are going to Reseda to make love to a model from Ohio whose real name you don't know"

or, more relevantly,

"You live in Los Angeles, and you are going to Reseda. We are all, in one way or another, going to Reseda someday, to die."

Just another LA moment.

My 7th grade student who can say "nuclear" better than the president used "election" in this sentence today:

"I hope George Bush doesn't win the next election."

The following vocabulary review word was "exception:"

"When George Bush became the president, it was an exception."

She wasn't just working off my amusement at the first answer. I asked her to explain and she knew about Florida. Too bad she won't be voting for president until 2012.

I imagine, at her age, her political opinions are at least somewhat formed by the adults around her. But will those adults go the ballot box?

One of my holiday donations this year was to give the gift of a working Democracy to non-profit organizations who will register voters in Florida. If you have money and/or time, please consider giving some of it to Project Vote in (or before) 2004. I'd appreciate it, and, apparently, so would my students.

I've been invited to more 2003 holiday fun in Boston than in LA.

My first thought is not "I need more friends in town" but "I wish people would maintain their personal email lists better."

Between this post and the previous one, perhaps I must admit that I have some inner geekiness I should embrace.

I rue the day "print-friendly" pages started to contain ads and other graphics.

One of the kids I tutor is a 7th grade girl who, depending on which test you give her, reads on a 5th or 6th grade level. The book she chose to read from yesterday was one on African-American inventors (so far, we can thank the bruthas for ice cream trucks and Supersoakers.) She came upon the word "nuclear" and said it correctly.

At the end of the section, I brought her attention to the word, and, in all sincerity, congratulated her for being able to read a word our president can't.

***

LA driving moment of the day: the guy who made a right turn on red. From the center lane.

Moment of yesterday: not hitting the dog that ran into the street in front of my car.

Truth be told, the LA driving moment of every day is pulling into your parking spot alive.

Thanksgiving's over, but I'm feeling grateful, so:

1) I'm thankful I was not compelled to attend my high school reunion on Saturday, which surely would have been awkward, expensive, and insecurity-stoking. Likewise, I'm thankful I had a friend who went and sent me a nicely detailed report so I didn't have to leave my curiosity entirely unfulfilled.

2) I'm thankful to be spending this winter somewhere my snot won't freeze, I won't have to shovel a sidewalk, and I won't have to pay hundreds of dollars per month to (barely) heat my apartment. I'm also happy to not be spending this time of year in Hamburg where, today, the sun rose around 8am and set around 4pm.

3) Roof over my head, food, not on welfare, health (though no thanks for that one-day vomiting flu a few weeks ago), happy marriage, etc etc.

4) After drifting aimlessly for the past few years, I may be finding some direction. This is nice.

5) Six months in LA as of tomorrow, and I've not yet experienced a car accident or an earthquake.