Disorientated

There are some things that just don't come naturally to me. Which is something I was thinking about as I was hanging my suit pants up this evening, because although I know which way I want my pants on their hangers to face, I always hang them up differently, every time. I have no built-in sense of how to attach the pants to the hangers so that they face the way I think they should look. Which is a little strange, because I hang my pants up a lot.

I guess the kind of triviality this embodies is hardly worth mentioning, but I feel like there's a lot of that floating around in my life, things that I do often that I don't have a system for, or that I have a system for that fails often.

Example: I lock myself out more than the average person. Once I locked myself out four times in a month. That was exceptional, and probably a cry for help. But still. Since I moved to Bakersfield I have left my keys in my office twice.

If you make these kinds of mistakes you get good at retrieving them; I have excellent mistake-fixing skills. But there's still something upsetting about that since of friction in the way you move through life; it makes everything seem a little off.

I Do Not Live At The Center Of The World

A fact which I guess is even more true now that I live in Bakersfield rather than L.A.

Let us contemplate, for a moment, the fact that when one looks up basketball schedules on the L.A. Times website (that would be the Los Angeles paper, if you're curious), they give you the game times in Eastern Time.

This is probably actually because the L.A. Times just puts in some schedule-generated somewhere else, and Eastern Time is the national default for tv schedules, and so that's the way it is. Still, there's something eerie about watching a Los Angeles based paper print the times of its own home team according to the time of some other locale entirely.

It reminds me of the sense I had, growing up, that Los Angeles was not really a part of the national consciousness. Which may seem ridiculous, given the entertainment industry and all, but that wasn't the L.A. I lived. A lot of the people I went to high school with, I guess, had parents who made their livings off such mysterious things as residuals but up until that point I didn't really know anybody in L.A. who was involved in all that.

The more I think about it, the more ridiculous it seems that I would try to make that claim, that L.A. wasn't part of the national consciousness. We had the Lakers and City of Quartz and the riots and Joan Didion brooding about fires and flooding and water rights. We had L.A. Gear and, for a while, both the Raiders and the Rams, and the big one was coming one of these days.

So maybe my sense of the dominance of the East Coast was more a matter of the knee-jerk sense that a place you love is, however much consideration it actually gets, under-appreciated, the impulse that drives people to write passionate letters in defense of Kobe Bryant.

But I will tell you this. When I lived in Los Angeles, not so very long ago, half the people I knew had grown up there, gone away, returned. And yet, talking to strangers who weren't from there, when I said I was they would say, "Oh, that's so unusual," suffering from the widespread rumor that Los Angeles is a city of dreamers, of kids from Nebraska looking to make it big.

Whereas, I guess what I'm saying is that in some ways Los Angeles is just a city, a big city, a city that deserves to have its hometown paper print the tv schedules in accordance with the time zone in which it actually exists.

Oversaturation

Once a long long time ago when my only contact with blogs was my friends' blogs, I would sit there at work and be like, why don't they post more often? What the hell else are they doing that's so exciting and important that they can't post? And if they're doing something so exciting and important why don't they write about it? And here it is, and I haven't posted anything for like months, which is really the beauty of the co-written blog, because Noko Marie is putting up interesting things in the meantime. So I don't feel that bad, but I do feel a little bit bad.

Here's the deal, which you all already know, but still. I'm moving some place new. This hasn't kept me from posting because so much work is involved, although this weekend is the dreaded weekend of packing and it will suck. Still, moving, as I always forget in the meantime, although it leaves you with a series of small and annoying tasks to complete, is not all that physically complicated, especially for me right now where I am staying in a Best Western.

There is a huge psychological unease component and, separate but related, there is the overwhelming adjustment to a new place. For me this takes the form of everything being at least momentarily, gripping and important. When you've lived some place for a while, certain things are foreground, and others are background. There are the places you go and the places you don't really go, and every now and then you're like, "Oh, I should check out x." X can be a neighborhood or a museum or a cute little store or something entirely different. But you check X out and you fit X into a pre-existing framework in your mind, and that is that. Right now, though, in Bakersfield, which is the place to which I am moving, there is no foreground and no background. Every convenience store, every bar, all requires some kind of absorption. A place has to be made for it in my head.

Anyway, that's where all my mental energy is going. That, and motel room cable, which has been a very rewarding experience.

Also the other day a train roared through town, carrying tanks on it. Tank after tank after tank. Not tanks of gas, but Army tanks. That was a little scary.

Walking In A Winter Wonderland

I just got in from a walk outside and my cheeks are all flushed and rosy. (My nose is all runny as well, but let's ignore that.) I feel like a cliche, or, if not a cliche, at least slightly unreal. Which I also felt, when, earlier on this East Coast adventure, I helped build a snowman.

I think the thing is, these are all things that arose in the various children's books that I consumed as a child. People played in the snow; people went for walks in the cold; whatever. But they were never a part of my day to day reality.

So when I was at my mother's a few summers ago and I realized that little frogs were really just hopping around her yard and that if I were a kid I could have tried to catch them, or when I learned that lightning bugs were a real-life phenomenon, all of that was a little unsettling. It might have left me a little awe-struck in a meeting-a-celebrity kind of way.

It's not as if children's books haven't been written about California. Sweet Valley High, for example, was all California all the time. But when you grow up in a place, it feels normal.

Normal is actually totally the wrong word, because one of the things I love about Los Angeles, actually, is that it always feels exotic and mysterious, the opposite of normal. But it doesn't feel surprising that the various elements are there; it's just that you never know what's behind door number three.

Snow, on the other hand, always kind of surprises me.