An Unfinished Draft

Guest writer from NYC: hmm...

after a year and a half of being away, i returned to la la land for thanksgiving. the flight was awful because on top of being a direct flight the person behind me couldn't grasp the concept of touch screen and was pounding his tv set the whole time, not caring that on the other side of the tv was my head. while i walked by him, on my way to the bathroom..because i thought i was going to vomit, i was shocked back into the reality that i came to loathe...that he probably wouldn't have understood me anyway.

we landed around 1, an hour late, for reasons too stupid to write about and i was shocked back into my personal reality and one of the reasons i don't live here anymore. i can't stand arguing. even though it was minor i felt like getting back on the plane and going home because after, not even, 5 minutes my parents were arguing over why they couldn't see each other at the airport. lovely. i was greeted by me ooooh maia! and we stayed up for a couple of hours talking. my body was a little messed up, time wise, and being up til 3 in la la land meant that it was 6 in the big apple and that i had been up for 24 hours.

when i woke up thursday morning, i wondered what time it was because it was so sunny. then i remembered where i was, the sun is different here. the sun likes to shine here, even on it's brightest day, the sun isn't as nice there as it is here. i saw jessica yvette a couple of hours later..she rolled in at about 430a, it must be nice to be so young. we milled around, my mom cooked (which she never did) breakfast, we ate and talked and started cooking around noon. it was a group effort, as it always is.

my sister has a boyfriend now. a real one, not an on the sly-no point to meet the family-only around for one reason one. it's weird to see my sisters as grown people. i have a head full of childhood memories but have been gone for their entire adult development and it's odd to see the kiddy faces get taller and older. they make me feel older and remind me that if they are adults that means that i must also be one, they put things back into perspective.

i ventured out of the house on friday with an old friend and her husband. she's a different kind of reality check because at 24, she is married and on baby number two and i seem to be no closer. i don't understand why la la land is so into making themselves metropolitan. people don't come here to see what they see in other cities but everytime i come back here, the efforts seem to be increased towards connecting the pockets of people who thrive on being separate. i don't come here to ride the metro with other people and be fakely new york social, i come here to get into a car and drive around staring at all the 'beautiful' people. la la land is cars not subways. i found myself constantly comparing the two and i really liked having the two places completely separate in my head, and they are now converging. la la land is a place to have a car or bum rides from your friends and be screwed by the bus if you're in a pinch. my sister is having problems with the whole getting a job thing because she doesn't have a license. while walking down the stairs at union station i thought, 'what is she talking about, all she has to do is take the bus to the metro and she'd be set.' that's a new york thought, not an LA thought. she should be screwed as a non-member of the social heirarchy that car ownership is here. staring at the housing developments that are being built around the metro stations, i was left unsettled about what la la land will look like in another year..and even in 20. i fear it will become just another city.

i got to bathe in normalcy with novak. we got into her tacoma and drove to our destination, like nature intended. our drive through silver lake let me see that hully gully is gone, but i delight in the fact that was able to remember the name that used to be on it's walls. novak always settles my equilibrium, i wish we could be around each other more. she is la la land, who you hope to see when you come home. the person who always knows where to go and who always knows someone. she's connected in a way that is not play dates and babies or the perpetual euro whinings of complacency, the type of person who cares that her home is morphing into something different and not necessarily better.

i took a trip into the familiar [ ]...
the face of la la land is constantly changing and my anger about that keeps me from wanting to come back here. i love seeing areas becoming more alive and filled with creativity, since that's why people think they want to come to calipornia. i become bitter when i think of what people may begin thinking of the city of my rearing. it then becomes the place that i had to move out of in order to be able to breathe and speak and be.