e*star LA

I hate that at The Highlands night club (at … guess what?  Hollywood and Highland in Hollywood), inside one of the dance rooms, there is an illuminated picture of the Manhattan Skyline covering the entire back wall. 

What is that atrocity?

Here you are, and you’re in Hollywood.  You’re in Los Angeles and you wanna go out.  You wanna go to the hottest spot in town–so naturally you go to the nearest shopping mall in a tourist area.  And you’re getting your groove on in the club, right?  You find out that the club owner wants you to … imagine as if you were in New York.  Because New York is the place to be, and you just wasted your plane ticket. 

Call it a hunch, okay?  How about some city pride, already?  Actually, thanks for the city knowledge–and the reminder that the HH Center’s purpose is a cheap, back-up parking spot at the bottom of The Bowl.  Oh, and for housing The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency.

(Yeah, guilty as charged.  How else was I supposed to gather good reasons to hate the place if not to visit the club in person?)

But you can’t really dispute that it’s a trendy thing, sometimes, to hate L.A.  If you don’t live in L.A., we already know for a fact that you hate us.  (Hell, I did.  But it was the furthest thing from home.  Kidding.)  Anyway, I’m talking about people who live here.

The traffic, blahblahblah.  The lack of a bustling downtown, blahblahblah.  The actor who wouldn’t shut up in front of you in line at The Coffee Bean, blahblahblah.  [whine]  The city’s too spread out, blahblahblah.  [/whine]  Everyone cops so much fake attitude everywhere, blahblahblah.

“Why are you still here?”

Ah, life’s a journey.  And sometimes, you just run out of things to talk about.

Since I have no roots here, if I didn’t like it, I would’ve had no excuse to not pack up and head somewhere else, right?  But here I am–five years since graduation.  Granted, adjusting was rough in the beginning (especially that attitude part for this Midwestern girl), but if there’s a vision you just need some patience and a few additional skills to practice and develop to forge your own way so you don’t let the negative overcome you.  You know what?  You learn if it’s worth it, and then you learn to suck it up.  Everything else is just, distractions.  

And then, you find out what absolutely amazing talent is everywhere in the city.  It comes with the territory that yes, there’s a crapload of crap too.  But if you’re too lazy to sort through all of it, it’s only your loss.  The wealth of opportunities is here.  There’s so much opportunity to do good things, to make a great return.  California is the fifth largest economy in the world.  It’s the haven for small businesses and heaven for adult AD/HD.  Crazy people are interesting, and only crazy people elect a bodybuilder for governor.

What’s not to love as long as you’re south of The Valley and north of Orange County?  Kidding.  Sometimes, I think how nice it would be to not have to drive too far to be able to eat grubby Taiwanese and Chinese food, but I don’t end up thinking about it too long.   I certainly didn’t move 2000 miles to forget the lessons of my minority youth to just … be comfortable seeking refuge on the other side of the train tracks.  I want to be driving the train.  Laying new track in, to and from both sides.

Thanks for joining me, you guys.  This is all very exciting!  I’d appreciate any feedback you may have about the site.

Love,
*e

P.S. — I would really like to recommend to you guys the German film, ”The Lives Of Others,” which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.  Absolutely well done.  Spellbinding.  Go see it.

P.P.S. — We’re not doing anything about that MotherFlickr tab, so you might as well go ahead and chuckle to yourselves each visit, quietly.