BeachHead

She said: One of my least favorite things in the world.... and it happens a lot more in LA than anywhere else I've lived: When walking on the street, crossing paths with a man (or men) who offer their thoughts on your physique or their availability just at that moment when you're passing them -- so you have no time to respond. 

Yesterday?  Two such men, crossing 3rd St. in downtown LA. Man one: "Bounce." Man two: "hey baby, I'm up for adoption." 

Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.

She said: Right now Max is pulling books out of the bookshelf.  *Sigh.*  Bengals.  He's hungry.  I should feed them.

Anyway....When I travel and am away from Long Beach, Geir says he's going to live bachelor-style while I'm gone.  Parties and strippers, right?  Not exactly.  Instead, he hangs out with friends,  and if I'm gone more than a couple of days, he putters around the house in his boxers, lets the dishes pile up, and doesn't eat well.  I chide him for being kind of lame.

Time for some crow. This weekend, Geir's in Boston.  I got up today at 11:15, ate some cereal, did a little cleaning, and took a shower.  Then I fell asleep again.  Woke up again at 4, went emergency food shopping and surfed the web.  Went upstairs, played some Wii with Ali.  Came back down, ate some leftovers.   Watched some TV.  For the last few hours I've been surfing YouTube.  From my own lameness and ooh-that-looks-neat mind, here are some links for your enjoyment.

Do Ninjas need love?  Find out here.  Apparently there are a whole bunch of Numa Numa-inspired videos on YouTube.  This one, for example.  And this one will make you pee yourself.  Cameron even makes a guest appearance. 

Life is so exciting in the L-B-C.

She said: I've explored the cafes of Long Beach, looking for one that could truly measure up to my Somerville favorite.  I've thought about this for some time, and have hesitated to make the call.  But I can't continue to hold out. 

Diesel Cafe, meet your sister city: Long Beach's Hot Java has reliable free wireless, tables, couches, great coffees & teas, nibbles, ice cream, and specialty drinks, is gay-friendly and well-nestled in the community.  On top of that, there's year-round outdoor seating, regular movie nights, a fireplace, live music in the evenings and lots of dogs!  In fairness, though, I must mention that what Hot Java does lack, Diesel has in spades: compelling and provocative art by local artists, the intellectual intensity of the Cambridge-Somerville crowd, and a front wall that in warm weather opens to the bustling streets of Davis Square.

When it comes to home-out-of-the-house, having a favorite brunch place is as important as the right coffeeshop.  And in the interest of comparisons and full disclosure, I must also share what Geir said this morning while we were eating breakfast at the Potholder Cafe: "If this place were in Someville, I'd have a hard time."

"What do you mean?"

"Choosing between this place and Kelly's."

Shall I bring his head on a pike, Walden brunch loyalists?

She said: I've always thought of myself as someone who could maintain relationships.  Sometimes image of self doesn't match up to the reality.  But I try.  Holiday travel for us is a study in that try.  I returned Monday night from ten days of frenetic travel and driving all over the Northeast: from Albany to Troy to Bourne to Lewiston to Oakland to Portland to Oakland to Bangor to Oakland to Dixmont to Belfast to Boston.  Four states - whew!  Then I was on the plane back to LA, Geir remaining in Boston for a week of work.  I know I wore myself out, but it was worth it: one thing the move to LA has made clear to me is how much I love the people in my life, what a stellar group of people you all are, and how much I especially value that you're the sort that I can pick up with right where we left off, months (or even years) prior.  Too earnest?  Too bad.  I love you anyway.

The New Year gets me thinking along these lines, but also a serendipitous meeting I had this evening with an old friend.  We hadn't seen each other for 9 years.  He's still him and I'm still me.  We only knew each other for a summer and one visit that involved jumping up and down on a Pittsburgh bridge on New Year's Eve, and haven't been in touch since.  Google ninja that I am, I tracked him down recently when I discovered he'd moved to LA too.  We broke bread together today and it was comfortable and good.  Humans are truly amazing creatures, that we have the ability to forge connections across time, space, age, and circumstance. 

Meanwhile, the cats are ripping me out of my reverie. They're being such pests right now.  Milo's walking back and forth across my lap and working on throwing (yes, that's right, throwing) a pillow off the couch.  Max is trying to knock down a lamp by batting it in slow motion with his paw.  Now he's moved on to standing atop Geir's studio cart while considering a leap to the armoire, all while going on with his characteristic "chirp mreaoowwww chirp chirp mreoooooooooowwwwwwwww chirp meaaaah!!!"  And Milo, the little bastard, watches Max to learn new tricks.

Time to capitulate: food for them, bed for me.  But before I go, my serendipitous friend pointed me to a blog two friends of his maintain, chronicling their travels on the Blue Line between Long Beach and downtown LA.  It's called Tales from the Blue Line.  And don't get scared by the story about a fight one night.  (Sleep tight, Mom!)

He said: When riding a bike in Boston, people yell at you to get off the sidewalk.  In Long Beach, people yell at you to get out of the road and onto the sidewalk. 

 

I believe in public transportation.  I really do.  So it really pisses me off when it just, plain -- doesn't work.

Coming from a city with a strong bus and train network -- Boston -- means I have high expectations.  I admit this freely.  And even though LA is famous for its car culture, it IS a world-class city, right?  And, my ideal-addled mind tells me 'world class cities have good public transit...'

I ride the Metro Blue Line every workday from Long Beach to downtown Los Angeles.  That's about 25 miles each way. The trip's usually about an hour, give or take a couple of minutes, and it usually gets me to work on time.  But every few weeks something goes haywire.

In February, it was a dramatic accident where a vehicle flew off the freeway and landed on the tracks, cutting the train's electrical cables.  Two weeks of two hour commutes. A few weeks later, the train ran over a car.  Down to single track and a 2.5 hour trip home. Other times the delays are unexplained.  There's rarely advance warning, and usually it doesn't seem like the Metro employees who drive the trains know either.  The common cause, though, is usually a fender-bender on the tracks somewhere between Grand and Washington stations.  Again, and again and again.

This is the problem with above-ground signalized tracks and a train that must contend with the ebb and flow of rush hour traffic, bad driving, and general urban liabilities.

It's a rare LA household that doesn't have two cars.  But that I can take the train to work allows my S.O. and I to live in an apartment we love, and only have one car.    

If I were to decide to bail on the transit system, how much would that cost?

I figure I'd get a used car, not too old.  I have a soft spot for older-model BMWs, with the bumper that looks like a fat lower lip.  Associated costs?  Loan payments, gas, insurance, parking, maintenance.

• $150/month loan payments.
• $200/month gas.
• $200/month insurance.
• $80/month parking
• $500/year maintenance.

Broad strokes here, but that's $8060/year.

Meanwhile, my Metro pass costs $31.20/month, after my work subsidizes 40%.  That's $374.40/year.

So how inconvenient or impractical would the train ride have to be to justify a more than TWO THOUSAND percent increase in cost?

 

She said: Apologies for the gap.  Over the July 4th weekend we made our way to Vegas with friends Andrea, Michael, and their 6-week old son.  Vegas is a weird place.  But before I get to that.... en route through the Mojave Desert, traffic on the 15 came to a halt.  Temperature on the blacktop was 122 degrees (yup you read that right), and after 5 minutes of total stoppage, people started turning their engines off and getting out of their cars to chat and crane their necks.  We had binoculars in the car, so I stood on top of the guardrail hoping I could peer ahead, but to no avail.  Muscley guys in pickups were amused by the girl in the dress with the binoculars in the median.  People ambled away from their cars up a nearby hill to piss in the bushes and stretch their legs.  After a little while, an old Dodge minivan a couple of cars behind us lit on fire.  Yup you read that right, too.  Its engine just straight-up ignited while the driver was trying to get the thing to start again.  Apparently the only thing keeping that engine from overheating had been the movement of air under the hood. 

While hot and stark, the desert was beautiful.  Terrain I've never seen before -- terrain I hadn't even imagined.

Just across the Nevada border, tall & brightly-colored hotels and casinos with ridiculous names sprouted up.   Only 40 or so miles after the border, Vegas started to fill in.

OK, so why is Vegas a weird place?  Because it -- especially some of the neighborhood areas -- feels like my mind's eye image of a Martian colony.  We stayed at our friends' mom's house in a 55+ neighborhood in Henderson, the city just south of Las Vegas.  Every house is the same color stucco, with barely differentiated architecture and landscaping.  In three days, not once did I see a human being out of doors outside of a commercial area.  Walking outside at midnight, though, I did see one bunny, two beetles, and a flitting bird.....real estate signs and one US flag twitching in the hot breeze.

He can give you his impressions of other things Vegasian.

She said: Weather on the east coast...which is why I'm sitting in the Long Beach airport, enjoying the free wireless.  I'm heading to DC to go to a conference for work....to do some story recon.  Prior to working at the Sustainability Desk I didn't tend to consider how many flights I take in terms of their environmental impact.    In the last year it's been a lot, what with the move to Cali.  Every time I take a flight the plane spews emissions into the atmosphere and nudges the atmosphere just that little bit.  So I'm more conscious now than I used to be, and am disinclined to fly twice if I can fly once....but still I fly.  And most of us do.  It's a rare traveller who cuts back flights to keep their carbon footprint bragging rights.  For the rest of us, we can just gamble on what the weather's gonna do.

She said: This post comes two weeks late.  But it's important to do because it marks two auspicious occasions: 1) my mother got on a plane, and 2) my mom, my cousin Tracy and I got to hang.  Tracy lives near LA, and it's a family cluster that's never happened before. I hope we'll have many encores.  Mom flew out on a Friday and stayed through Tuesday, the weekend before Mother's Day.  We all ate as one should when family visits...a lot.  I took Mom for a (her first!) pedicure, Geir surprised her with a yoga mat present,Tracy came for a day, we walked around 2nd Street and the beach, had brunch with some friends in West LA, went for a hike, and Mom spent an entire day (!!) in the Long Beach Aquarium.  As they say in Minnesota, "good times!"

Picture is Mom and Tracy before dinner....jet lag hadn't yet set in.  More pix to be posted soon in the photo gallery.

She said: So it's Easter Sunday and that's a wrap for the major Judeo-Christian springtime holidays.  We didn't attend a Seder, we didn't eat matzoh, we waved no palm fronds, we went to work, we didn't go to church, we baked no ham.  Geir's not even a Chreaster, I'm barely anything more than an atheist, and our combined Jewish-Protestant-Lutheran-Catholic backgrounds add only a thin veneer of guilt.  What we know we're missing is family  (and for me, hollow chocolate bunnies).  I'm not sure, though, that we should rely on others to make the holidays; at some point the burden falls to us to decide if holidays matter enough to make them our own.  But what's the point of a special meal without the bosom of family?  If we make a Sunday dinner, how is it not just another meal? 

How is this night different from all other nights?