Public Trends
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“Los Angeles, Her Early Days: As Told by a Recently-Relocated Maladjusted Fucktard”
By Hillary Corbin
I hate it when my alarm clock goes off in the middle of deep sleep. I stand in the shower, alternating between scorching and freezing; a vain attempt to shock my system into an awakened state. I am blessed with a short commute, although “short” by Los Angeles standards is still half an hour. My brain is inundated with this new, numerical nomenclature of the zigzagging and sprawling highway system. The 101. The 110. The 118. The 5. The 10. The 134. The 90. The 105, 405, 605 and 805, respectively. If you were to drop me off randomly on a Los Angeles county highway, I would know exactly where I was. Each has its own characteristic. The 105 has a metro train running down the median. The 405 is more rural, despite it serving as the valley’s most direct route to LAX. I take driving very seriously, and practice it as though I were the captain of the varsity Commuting team. I am the single greatest reason there exists a fossil fuel crisis. As soon as I hit an emotional snafu, I am on the road. It’s all very contrived; it’s perhaps the last great contrived thing that was glorified and implemented while I was an impressionable youth. That, and smoking.
Driving seems risky. If I’ve had a glass of wine, it’s risky-expensive. If traffic is heavy, it’s risky-unsafe. If I’m in an unknown area, it’s risky-adventurous. It incites the same thrill, however subconscious, that I get when I wait until the very last minute to pay a credit card bill. Little inconsequentialities that probably have long-term ramifications, but I’ll worry about those later.
Three months ago, I moved to Los Angeles from Georgia to pursue a career in Sound Editorial Postproduction. I left my dreamy, moss-draped microenvironment filled with artists and thinkers to take a stab at adulthood. I now live in a squalorous apartment in the often-overlooked Downtown Los Angeles neighborhood of Pico-Union. Just me, in a studio, surrounded by a hundred thousand El Salvadorians and unruly USC students. I have completely rejected the joie de vivre of my area. Never has a taco been served to me from a truck. I drive ten miles to the most bourgeois grocer in the most bourgeois neighborhood. I ignore the street cats, despite how much I love cats. Whatever, I have an unprecedentingly deep bathtub and am therefore deserving of palpable envy.
I shuffle between jobs, some paid and some unpaid. But I am entirely prevented from realizing my career, which has taken two diplomas to establish, due to the restrictions on Union membership. I can’t get paid as a sound editor if I’m not in the Motion Picture Editor’s Guild, but I can’t get into said guild if I’m not getting paid. What an excellent Catch-22. In the meantime, I work irrelevant entertainment-industry jobs to keep myself satiated.
There are no winners in the workplace. The closest thing to a small accomplishment is how frequently you can touch up your manicure without suspicious glances from your boss. “Are you using your time efficiently?” he glares, his mouth remaining in a crooked “m” shape, lips tighter than the space behind your refrigerator where you’ve inevitably lost some essential kitchen gadget.
A bird in the hand is worth two tired anachronisms. Tired, I say, is the state that I exist within permanently. I am incredibly tired of feeling somewhere between worthless and awesome–the worthlessness stemming from a long withstanding addiction to self-loath, and the awesomeness stemming from the fact that I think that people should allow their lives to be touched by wisdom. A star that shone dimly, but a star nonetheless.
I wander aimlessly, driving down streets and spiraling up hills. And I have no clue why I experience any joy in something so minute. This might prove to be the most easily ascertained form of joy in my life. That is, not to suggest that joy is unascertainable, or even difficult to attain, but my California life is inundated with repeated letdown. Such an outlet’s mere existence is something really significant. Now wait, let me backpedal. A life ripe with letdown seems like a reach. I am surrounded by love. But my little microcosm is perpetuated singularly. As is the case with driving, stupid little shit gets me off. Wine. Diet coke, Bubble baths–all relatively standard protocol for young women. Growing up in the south, I took a proverbial dump on the idea that I should marry and squeeze out babies in lieu of a career. I feel like a callous, urban career bitch too concerned with the dogmas preached in liberal newspapers, which I probably read while commuting by subway. Having my really difficult-to-order, free trade, hot coffee beverage order fucked up at Starbucks is enough to catalyze a temper-tantrum, and that’s the extent of the infantile behavior my day can accommodate.
While hardly a conundrum, newly hatched young adults must feign interests in things noxious: The bouquet of fine (or, as it may be, not-so-fine) wine. Interior decoration. The cost-to-comfort ratio of toilet paper. Credit scores. Finding a mate. Visiting the parents. World events. Such interests are to be executed while maintaining steady employment and faking some effect, at least outwardly, of self-sufficiency. Doing all of this stuff, this careful balancing act of keeping morale elevated, finding money, maintaining mental stability, preventing loneliness, keeping up appearances, is only further complicated when newly placed in the steamy asshole of a gargantuan urban metropolis. This whole adulthood thing came at me like a battering ram, and I hope that I can navigate through. In the meantime, California, please do excuse me while I swill away at your gasoline and your Cabernet. She owes me that much.