Carpe Commentarius

Saturday, my morning pages took me to the end of a journal gifted to me by my friend Jessica. Jessica and I met through the St. Benedict Catholic Church, specifically its teen group, and after many years, we reconnected by chance two falls back. After hearing about all my grand plans for myself, Jessica gifted me the journal, thick with off-white pages, bound in a suede cover with the words “Carpe Diem” stamped into the front. 

After I began doing morning pages in Tahoe, I soon learned how quickly the exercise scarfed down journals. Luckily, I had a few lying in wait, mostly gifts like Jessica’s. The Carpe Diem journal is now the latest one to be set aside, bearing that slightly open swell of a journal well-used. 

Despite moving on to a gorgeous Shakespearean journal gifted to me by my M&B board mom, CJ Hauser, the Carpe Diem journal will always hold a special place going forward. The first entry in it was February 4th of this year…five days after I arrived in LA. When I flip through the book, the black ink flashes from page to page and seems far too much for the two and a half months it has been. But then the experience of that short time has also seemed inordinately stuffed, to the point that even my mother commented at Easter that it felt like six months had passed since I left the east coast. Unintentionally, at least by my recollection, I began writing this new chapter down in a book commanding me to stride forth confidently. This feels warm and right. 

It was a fitting day to end on, too, a Saturday after a week of significant change. Last Sunday, I joined the nearby LA Fitness and Monday night, I signed up for personal training. During that meeting, I sat across from a tall, stacked, goofy, enthusiastic training director named David who had called me Bro Montana on our first call and who posted up for a muscle-corded high five when I got his passing Doctor Who joke. In between his descriptions of my goals, we digressed into discussions of the Justice League and swapped stories of horrifying sea creatures. In short, I was surprised to find out that the titan before me was a big ol’ nerd. 

David takes it upon himself to be the first workout in the program and takes a special joy in making people hate him while keeping up the fun chatter. We did a number of exercises that pushed me significantly, most of which involved David telling me that if I didn’t relax my shoulders and neck, I was going to seriously hurt myself. At the end of the session, he told me what Erik had in Tahoe: I had a decent amount of existing muscle, but none of it worked together. 

David asked me to come in the next morning to meet with one of the trainers and get initial measurements to track my progress. I had already done the math on morning gym sessions and I didn’t see a way to get up, write, work out, and get to work without getting up at four AM. Nonetheless, I decided to make this first session for the measurements, keep my morning pages, and move my actual writing session to the evening. This still meant getting up at the unthinkable hour of 5:15. 

On Tuesday, something incredible happened. My brain woke me up five minutes before my alarm. I got out of bed in a room and world still dark, pulled the chain of my overhead light, sat down at my desk, and began my morning pages. I was done by 5:45. I dressed for the gym, crept through the house, and stepped outside, where the morning began to brighten. I took the opportunity of the walk to my car to call my mom, who was surprised to hear my voice so early. 

At the gym, a trainer named Matt took my measurements and put me through another workout. At the end, I felt worn out, but fantastic. I got back to the house at quarter to eight, showered, dressed for work, and began my walk to the metro. I hit the Water Court outside our office building at quarter to nine. Early for work.

I felt incredible throughout the day, downing water constantly. During a practice meeting, I noticed that, for the first time, I wasn’t fidgeting. I felt laser-focused on the person speaking, my body happy to be at rest, without any excess energy to work out. 

Then, after I got home, I ate a quick dinner and sat down to what felt like the moment of truth. Working out is a goal of mine, but not to the degree writing is. When David had asked me to gauge my commitment on a scale of one to ten, I told him eight just because writing would always come first. Still, I had let the gym dictate almost the entire day’s schedule, so I was curious how much energy I would have after the gym and a full workday. 

Thirty minutes later, I hit my word target for the day. Effortlessly. 

Still curious, I got in bed shortly after nine and kept the same alarm. I woke Wednesday, did my morning pages, and went to the gym, this time working out on my own. Home before eight, showered, out the door. Still on time. That night, another full stint of writing. 

Then again on Thursday, this time meeting with a trainer named Stephanie who put me through a workout that left me sitting in the gym lobby, chugging water and staring into middle distance until I believed I could make it back to my car. 

I wrote 100 words past my target that night and set myself a to-do item to raise my output weekly. 

Friday I worked out alone again and, throughout the workday, the degree of soreness through my body felt like a calendar of the week behind. I felt Monday in my arms, Tuesday in my chest, Thursday in my legs and back…especially Thursday. Steph doesn’t mess around.

I looked back on the week agog. I had never been so diligent about going to the gym, nor had it ever been so simple to get up so early. My best guess is that by keeping the first minutes of the day for morning pages, for my own thoughts, my own company, I make it clear to myself that I am a priority, something I’m sure friends and family would agree has been an issue in the past. 

And so we come to Saturday, the first day in six that I slept in. No alarm whatsoever, my first obligation of sorts at 3pm. I woke up at nine, tangled in my sheets, feeling the weight of our housecat between my feet. I looked around my sunny room with a smile.

As I got up and began my pages, noting the end of the journal, I realized how rare a morning it was. I have never enjoyed sleeping in on a Saturday or really sleeping in at all. I love the wee hours of the morning and even when I travel, if my travel partners want to rest, I creep outside and have a quick, quiet adventure before they’re up. I considered this Saturday's change, this sudden appreciation for the break, and realized that for so many years, Saturday was the only diem I ever carpe’d. I felt so little connection to the accomplishments of my weekday that Saturday bore the full brunt of my purpose in life, carrying seven days worth of expectation like a busboy with a too-high stack of plates. Unless a Friday night precluded it, I woke early on Saturdays to claim as much time to myself and with friends as possible, storing personal satisfaction in my hump for the desert of the workweek. 

Today, though, I woke with a week of satisfaction in the bank, having gone to the gym eagerly with genuine goals in mind, having written indulgently because I no longer need it to save me from my own life. With all that stored up, with a body sore from effort and a journal replete with output, I saw the value in sleeping until I woke naturally. 

Going forward, not only will that soft suede journal be the account of my initial time here in LA, but it will also end where I hope a routine begins. Part of me feels it dangerous to publish this after only a week. I have self-congratulated on writing progress before only to have the stream run dry. But even if I fall off dramatically, this last week will still have happened in a way that cannot be changed. It is, quite literally, in the books. 

Snow, Stone, and Sky

How long do you have to live in a place before it feels like home? LA is said to take a few years, so despite how at ease I feel in my early-established haunts, perhaps there are deeper roots to sink before it's home.

Regardless of how long LA might take, though, I have another data point to compare it to. Lake Tahoe became home in three short months.

I learned this at the end of the long Friday drive I began after dropping Chelsea off with her friend. US-395 was familiar territory after two southern jaunts last fall, but neither trip saw the Sierra Nevadas quite so majestic with snow. On the prior treks, the range had seemed far off, especially so every time I tried to take a picture. Furthermore, the previous drives had grown dark after about half the drive, depriving me of the most dramatic scenery along the way. No surprise, then, that as I drove up Friday afternoon, I pulled off the road time and time again to snap a quick picture (or 80, as my Instagram followers probably bemoaned) and take a minute or two for myself, breathing the crisp air and following the blanketed ridges off into the distance.

Perhaps it was that ride that distracted me from even asking the question of whether Tahoe would be a homecoming. I had been excited before the trip, having planned a return as soon as possible after my move, but it hadn't been the weightiest decision. Do you want to go to a cool place? Yes I do. Also, I felt an element of reassurance. Through the years, Erik and I have bonded over our distance from the place that formed our friend group, but I failed to make it out to Tahoe for years until that long stay last fall. Once I got to LA, I felt it important to get to Tahoe quickly to assure him and myself that the bond was cemented. After all, even among a pantheon of friends that humble me regularly, Erik's generosity and support last year stand out, especially because he would shrug that off and say "Meh, I liked having you here."

For that reason, I didn't think about the homecoming aspect until I crested a hill and saw the lake. As soon as possible, I pulled to the side of the road, leaned against my car, and stared at sunset over the water, letting tears fall. At that first sight, my heart leapt. I felt embraced by the setting and, in that embrace, I realized how much healing had happened in those three months. Every moment I find myself smiling at my life now, every time I poke my head into the former dark places within and find them reshaped in radiance, I can trace it to that place and the progress I made there.




Is it as simple as recognizing one's fortune? Realizing the sheer arrogance of claiming frustration with one's life when one can say one's friend would have them as a houseguest in Lake Tahoe? Um, yeah, probably. I have had both internal and external voices telling me recently that my life is nothing to sneeze at and I think I finally get that. Apologies to the voices that have been saying it for years.

I also feel, though, that Tahoe represents the marriage of two of the most important things that make a home for me (and really most people, of course), friends that make you grow and a place that charges you up. Tahoe’s ample beauty alone isn’t enough to bring me back as much as I can afford (though it’s pretty close), but tell me I can go to one of the most beautiful places I have ever been and have deep friendships there when I arrive? Well, damn, let me set up half a dozen low-fare alerts now (juuuust kidding, they’re already set up).

The weekend was short, but rich. After my emotional moment with the lakeside, I made my way north to Incline Village, the sign for which gave me another jolt of feeling. I parked outside the complex, trundled my spinner along the familiar walkway, and climbed the stairs to the apartment I so often came home to (from what, walks to the coffee shop?) for three months. To my delight, the dogs missed my footsteps on the stairs, but began barking when I swung the door open. I’ll admit, I had hoped there would be some recognition, especially after Erik said Lucy sniffed around my room for a while after I drove back east. Though welcoming leaps are normal for Lucy, she seemed particularly excited, while Bailey, ever the chill one, wagged enthusiastically and, as Kelly pointed out, smiled.

I hugged Erik and Kelly and shared with them how hard my arrival had hit me. Meanwhile, my eyes raced around the apartment, taking in the restorative surroundings with a new mindset. In what became a tone for the weekend, I got to appreciate the beauty of the apartment, the town, my friends, and the wider setting without concurrently feeling the deep channels of anxiety and doubt about my future.

The night took us to Alibi, where we got food truck pizza (out of an actual brick oven on the back of the truck), played some Exploding Kittens, and ultimately dove into a deep but friendly discussion of politics helped along by a particularly fine IPA. When we got home, Erik and I tried and struggled to watch some Deadwood, but the drive and the drinks caught up and I found my old bed.

Saturday, we took the dogs and their FAVORITE drone to the lake, where we spent the day enjoying gorgeous weather and stunning scenery. As with the drive, snow in the mountains altered and heightened the familiar views, as pictures can convey better than I can.
















After tossing around some Incline Village options for dinner, we called an audible and planned a night out in Reno. After some showering and changing, we piled into two cars and caravanned over Mount Rose. Apparently, during the ride, Lucy gazed out the back window of Erik’s car, keeping tabs on me in case I decided to leave again.

The night began with incredible sushi, ended with an Uber through a McDonald’s drive-thru, and made stops at the Simpsons Arcade Game, an asshole firefighter, and an ex-parrot friend along the way. Hearkening back to the Reno nights of last fall, we definitely got after it, necessitating the next morning’s tradition of a greasy breakfast and fetching of a car.

If it feels like I’m at the end of the weekend sooner than expected, then I’ve captured the feeling I had at around 2pm Sunday when it dawned on me that the eight hours back weren’t going to drive themselves. We said our goodbyes and, as we had all weekend, discussed me flying in the future to give us more time to hang out.

As if to reinforce that decision, the drive back proved a slog even mountain majesties couldn’t quite overcome, particularly once I got back into town and played the parking game.







During that drive, though, I did think about how this first trip back felt. Familiar and refreshing, tried and true, like visiting a part of myself.

It felt like home.

Of All the Comrades That E'er I Had

What a difference a year makes!

When my friend Chelsea reached out to say she'd be in LA the weekend of St. Patrick's Day for a bachelorette, I didn't think about it much at first beyond being excited to see her. I had already planned on spending Friday night through Sunday up in Tahoe, so we tucked away St. Patrick's Day itself for a night out in LA, making it the second year in a row we would celebrate St. Paddy's by going out together.

As the day itself approached, I began to feel not only the weight of the year between our shared festivities, but also the import of that prior night back in March of 2015.

Chelsea and I met up on the 14th, the preceding Saturday night, in a great Roswell, GA pub called Mac McGee's. Her husband David, also a close friend, was traveling with his business school program, so we connected earlier in the day about possibly meeting up after Chelsea got some studying in.

Looking back, it's amazing that Chelsea and I even made it out at all. It was the third wind of my St. Patrick's day celebration, following a coworker's house party and a meet-up with my high school friends. Then, thanks to some glitch, we'd missed some of each other's texts planning on a place to meet. Finally, after landing on the time and place, Chelsea had to double back for her wallet.

Finally, though, we made it to Mac MacGee's and knocked back Jameson's shots and a Guinness or two in the second floor bar while live Irish trad music drifted up from the floor below. After staying a while, we decided we wanted to talk without shouting over a fiddle and went back to my apartment, where I imagine I had more whiskey waiting ('twas the season). We sipped our drinks and talked more, the type of deep, thought-provoking conversations Chelsea and I really like to have (either with Dave or on our own).

The conversation that night turned to work, unsurprisingly. Chelsea and I had met when our two companies merged and our beyond-work friendship also allowed for frank discussions about our teams, our office, and the company-at-large. By that point, I had told Chelsea of my plan to leave Towers during the coming summer and, being the lucky winner of that confidence, she had to hear a lot of nervous outbursts every time I sat through a planning meeting with more information than the rest of the room.

That night, I repeated my reluctance to leave my workload to be split among my already-busy teams filled with people about whose stress and success I deeply cared. I then said that even people on other teams would be affected and that she, Chelsea, who didn't overlap with me at all on assignments, might even be left holding some of the bag.

Chelsea's response was, and I'm paraphrasing, "Yes, it will affect me, and all of the people on your teams. But you can't let that keep you from doing what you need to do for yourself at this point." Her support and selflessness moved me. More accurately, it set something in motion within me.

Within a week, I told Towers I was leaving. Chelsea did not back away from the inevitability of affecting my team members, but by encouraging me to go for it anyway, she made me realize that the best way to leave and do right by my teams was to break the news early, even if they had to show me the door that day. Luckily, since a soul-searching artistic journey was not the same as going to a competitor, they let me stay through early July. I got everything I wanted without having to skulk around for months with my secret. I feel I owe that to Chelsea.

And it seems impossible not to see that moment as a match set to the fuse of the year that followed. My departure from Atlanta, my travels to Boston and New York, my trek across the country, months of blissful retreat in Tahoe, and all of the peace I found that let me return to the job, all of that stems from someone nudging me in the direction of my own authenticity and values.

Our night out in LA this year was just as fun. We met at one of my favorite bars in my neighborhood, walked to my new home in all its serendipitous glory, laughed over dinner at a diner, and finally Ubered out into Hollywood. We hit similar beats to the year before, replacing the cozy upper floor of Mac McGee's with the dark interior parlor room at Sassafras, then once again moving along when the live music made it too hard to hear each other. Our search for a quieter scene took us to Stout, where we talked about finding the balance in life and how prior lives of high highs and low lows compare to a steady increase in one's baseline contentment.

Chelsea and I are either different people with similar approaches or similar people with different approaches. It's hard to tell which sometimes. The differences are somewhat cosmetic: hobbies, interests, approaches to work. On the other hand, our childhoods share similarities that shaped how we react to and roll with the world, but that sometimes make reacting to and rolling with ourselves difficult. We both analyze things to the bone and both want to go where other people are as much as possible. Perhaps it's these alignments that help me learn about my own journey whenever I hear Chelsea talk about hers.

Eventually, we Ubered back home and fell asleep, only to wake up early and begin solving the problems of the world again, first in our pajamas, then over brunch at Home. Ultimately, I dropped Chelsea off for lunch with the bride-to-be. We parted with a hug and I found myself saying, "Thank you, I needed this." I have been processing the success of this move a lot, but I think part of that processing needed to happen with someone else. It was a pleasant thought as I turned my car northward to further echoes of my past year.

I intended to make this post about Chelsea's visit AND Tahoe, but as usual, the topics choose their own length. I will get to my Tahoe return in the next day or so. For now, it is fit to share my enthusiasm and gratitude for Chelsea's friendship and for the geographic fortune that results in such an unlikely tradition. I owe each person in my unthinkably broad network of friends and family some form of debt for placing me into the swift and easy current that now carries me along, but, in a very real way, Chelsea started it.

Thank you so much, Chels. Who knew, when we met one-on-one to discuss a post-merger exam policy, that we'd be friends at all, much less St. Patrick's Day partners-in-crime. The world is wonderfully precise sometimes.

And That Don't Look So Bad to Me...

This entry comes from the Phoenix Public Market Café, after scheduling a particularly early flight for my Monday and Tuesday stint onsite with a client. This is my second week out to Phoenix and, now that I've found this spot, I'm regretting the alarming progress we made Week One. What was supposed to take us through the end of April is now subject to a rolling decision on booking another week, so I may have to revisit the Café later, on my own time. Quelle horreur!


I've had another blog on my list for a while, because I've been thinking a lot about my happiness. I seem to have been in LA long enough that friends are starting to check in, and given the nature of the move, the general tone has been, "Is it everything you thought? Are you happy?"


Overwhelmingly, yes.


Almost daily, I find myself stepping back from the flow of life and feeling a deep contentment. Whether it's the rosy sunsets as I walk up Hollywood from the Vermont/Sunset metro or the Saturday afternoon pint of Racer 5 and Chernow's Washington at the sidewalk table of a neighborhood pub, I am finding that my time to myself is simply blissful. Despite the deep love I hold for the friends I kept and keep from DC and Atlanta, I always struggled through the times in between happy hours and Friday nights. Being alone was hard, and if I felt a disconnect with my personal surroundings, I had no distractions from it. Now, there almost seems to be an inversion. I am comfortable on my own at last, smiling to myself as I walk around my neighborhood.


The other half of the conversion is that I am coming to grips with the additional effort LA takes socially. Without any current standing engagements (be it trivia or simply an assumption of weekend hangs), I'm finding that seeing people means getting on their calendar. I wouldn't call it a problem; in fact, I'm excited to make the time because almost every friend I have in LA is someone I have spent years wanting more time with. Whether high school friends with whom I didn't realize I shared interests or college friends I only saw through the lens of theatre, every connection has room to grow and that's deeply exciting.


The happiness has manifested in some weird ways, however. For instance, I've had more bad dreams in the last month than I did in the decade prior. I should clarify that the dreams aren't horrifying, but rather anxious. A good example is working at a sandwich shop with former roommate Wade Tandy and being massively behind on the orders. At first, I found this troubling; after all, bad dreams seem inherently...oh, what's the word? Given some thought, though, I developed a positive theory of explanation, one I think will let me accept them for the time being. Having spent so many years living with daily frustrations, feeling deeply dissatisfied in one way or another, I surely created some semi-permanent wiring for stress and concern. Now that each day is blissed out to the extreme, I imagine my anxieties feel like a department on the verge of elimination, struggling for relevance by taking on my subconscious. I like the theory, particularly because there's yet another inversion in play. In my first two years out of college, when I was darkly depressed, every night brought dreams of adventure and success while waking up to my reality put a pit in my stomach before I even opened my eyes. Now, no matter how high-strung my dreams make me, I awake and acknowledge my reality with relief, especially on the days when I have a cozy cat sleeping between my feet.


So, to those who have yet to ask, yes, I'm happy. So very, very happy.


One final thought...On my flight here today, I had an aisle seat beside a mother and her eight-year-old daughter (my terrible age-gauging skills ensure she's really 13 or something). Halfway through the flight, I noticed the young girl's voice speaking at length. Knowing her mother was asleep, I looked up from Chernow to find the girl talking into a handheld device, closer to a gaming device than a phone. I initially thought she had gotten on the wifi to talk with someone through something like FaceTime, but as I listened, I realized that she was simply recording her thoughts, splitting her time between speaking into the camera and pointing it at her surroundings while describing the experience. She even turned it down our row to me and, as I quickly resumed my studious reading pose, I heard her say, "So, you can watch a movie or you can just read."


It's easy to wax nostalgic about a time where kids weren't raised with an instinctive knowledge of technology, but I am nevertheless so charmed that this girl used that technology to keep a record. I'm not sure if it was her first time flying or if she just had someone in mind with whom she wanted to share the trip, but she was my hero in that moment and, as she went on, I cracked a nearly-overworked smile again. I hope she caught it on video.

Is This Real Life?

I feel like the only way to appropriately capture the flow of the last few days is to simply record the events.  

So here goes. 

Having already met up with Milton High School alums Ashleigh and Adam separately, I reached out to them this past week to get together as a group. I sent texts Thursday checking on availability and woke Friday morning to both of them confirming they were open. I put together a group text on my way to the Metro and descended into the signal wasteland. Upon emerging downtown, I received a flurry of messages, in which Adam and Ashleigh picked a place and time, setting up the plan all while I read on the train. 

Friday passed with a little work and a lot of prep for my first actual project, which will involve two days a week in Phoenix for a few months. I did not anticipate that my steps back into the fray would carry me to another exciting Southwestern city, but the explorer in me couldn't ask for a better opportunity. 

Leaving work, I caught an Uber and met Ashleigh and Adam at Golden Road Brewing, a rare brewery for its commitment to a family environment. Adam had mentioned liking the place because it eschewed the normal exclusivity of a bar, the thought process being that limiting things to 21 and over is what creates the Moe's Tavern-esque escape from family, while a place that serves food, offers games, and allows kids and dogs makes it so unwinding isn't at the expense of family connections. 

The three of us sat out on the patio, where heat lamps rebuffed the slight chill in the air. Unsurprisingly, we talked a lot about high school, but we also talked about work, from Adam's full-bore freelancing to Ashleigh's excitement for the world to see Disney's Zootopia after all the hard work she and the rest of Disney Animation put into it. It's so cool to hear about all of the great, creative work they both do and to have their help navigating this wild new place. 

After a fun happy hour, Ashleigh gave me a ride home and after checking in with Bing, I went up to bed to rest up for what I intended to be a busy Saturday. 

I woke up EARLY the next morning, 7AM in fact, which allowed me to get through morning pages, breakfast, and a shower at a leisurely pace while still getting out the door just after nine. My plan for the morning was to shop for some clothes in Beverly Hills, having collected suit-buying input from about a dozen male friends on the drive out, as well as purchasing a Groupon for tailored shirts this past week. Unfortunately, I struck out on my first stop to get the shirts, finding that the fitting room not only wasn't open yet, but in fact was only open on week days during normal business hours. 

I moved on to suit-shopping, which I did at the far-too-fancy Brooks Brothers on Rodeo Drive. I was greeted by a cashier who directed me up a staircase out of Titanic to the suit FLOOR of the store. I found a salesman who quickly got me into a few coats before landing on a suit that worked. A tailor took measurements and chalked up the suit and in the end, I wound up with an order in on a great charcoal grey suit, which will supplement the literally ONE suit I have that fits (which itself was tailored down from 40 lbs north of where I am now).

After that, I had a lazy day. Lunch and coffee in the midst of the shops, both while forging forward in the Chernow Washington. Then, I returned to Los Feliz, where I parked and found yet another sidewalk seat to continue reading. Bing and I watched the Clippers game at home in the early evening and then it was time for me to head out into the night.

My destination for the evening was the Serial Killers show by a theatre company called Sacred Fools. When I told Seamus I wanted to get into a theatre community once I came out, he recommended the group as one he liked working with, particularly on this Serial Killers series. Essentially, every Saturday, they have an 11pm show consisting of 5 ten-minute serial plays. The audience votes and three winners move on to the next week with two new challengers. Some shows go weeks and weeks, each week bringing a new chapter in the story. It's a fun idea and the late-night nature sounded a lot like the midnight shows we had in college.

My first experience with Sacred Fools was at their membership meeting last week. I sat in the audience as they conducted company business, with particular focus on their new, exciting home (ten minutes from my place) and their upcoming shows. I could tell from the personalities that it was a great community vibe filled with people who want the group to succeed and thrive. The producers of Serial Killers stood up and spoke and I made a point of talking to them at the meeting break to make some connections.

A week later, I was sitting in the audience, waiting for the show to begin, still alone, but soon chatting with a woman named Samantha who had also been a newbie at the meeting. As I watched the crowd file in and greet each other, I saw a girl in a blue dress who I thought I immediately recognized, only my brain had no context for why she would be in the setting. Then, looking through the program, I spotted her name listed as the writer of one of the pieces: Annette Fasone. Annette went to the same elementary school as me, but more importantly, because her dad and my mom worked at the same company, our parents occasionally arranged for us to hang out. One time, they even took me to Six Flags.

Being that our interactions hadn't really made it beyond elementary (we actually went to the same middle and high school, but both didn't realize it), I had no idea she was into theatre or that she was even in Los Angeles to begin with. I was so dumbfounded that it took me until after the show had finished and an afterparty began to go over and confirm this weird small world. As I started with saying I think we went to elementary school together, I could see confusion on her face, but then when I said my name, she immediately recognized me and joined me in flipping out. She proceeded to introduce me to some of the other members by sharing our bizarre story while we both kept processing the fact that we were in the same place.

I'm still reeling. It was a big, fun, loud party, so she and I exchanged numbers and plan to get together and figure out how we each got from the same point A to the same point B. It's unfathomable to me, but also great to hear she's involved with such a great group (to say nothing of her working as a voice talent agent in town)!

As for Sacred Fools on the whole, I loved it. Everyone was kind, welcoming, goofy, sharp, and jubilant about their company's new space. Everyone I spoke with told me to get involved however I could and advised that Serial Killers was a great start. As I'd hoped, the show itself was a rowdy, tipsy-crowd-participation romp just like midnights had been and I definitely want to be a part of it. I stayed at the after party until about 2:30, at which point I knew I had to go or I'd not get any sleep before meeting Adam and Ashleigh in the morning. I rode Uber home excited for the prospect of seeing their main stage show Past Time with Seamus on Friday.

My sleep was limited, but for a good reason. Ashleigh texted Adam and I on Saturday to invite us to a friends and family screening of Zootopia. I met up with them at the Walt Disney Animation studio in Burbank, where freshly popped popcorn and drinks  awaited us in the lobby of Ashleigh's offices. Inside the theater, we found some seats and settled in among the various families. The movie was fantastic with particularly beautiful visuals and touching performances. I plan to go see it again when it comes out (March 4th for the interested folks out there), just for all the little details I know I missed the first time.

As it ended and we saw Ashleigh's name in the credits, I felt really lucky to have reconnected with someone who contributes to work that I have loved for years now and grateful that Ashleigh shared the experience of seeing it.

And that's how my fourth weekend in LA went. I can't believe this place at times, but I love it. 

Learning the Ropes

Friday, after running out of legislative highlights from the last six months, I found myself still without work and with hours to kill before a work happy hour. Since rolling to a stop in LA, I'd been meaning to learn a little more about my local geography, tired of nodding knowingly through more than one work conversation straight out of SNL's The Californians. After starting with Wikipedia entries for each neighborhood I knew, I eventually clicked through to the LA Times Mapping L.A. project, which was exactly the resource I needed. Over the next few hours, I memorized all 114 neighborhoods in the city of Los Angeles, to the point that I could name them by sight on the Times map and list them from memory.

It was an admittedly obsessive exercise and I have already found its usefulness to be comparable to middle school academic bowl when I learned the lyrics to American Pie, but not the tune. My knowledge of the LA neighborhoods was exhaustive, but sterile. I still knew nothing about how each area felt or, perhaps more importantly, how I would feel IN it.

The exercise paid off eventually, though. Sunday, I met my friends Lauren and Sam at The Doughroom for brunch and afterwards had an urge to drive. I realized I STILL had yet to see the Pacific as resident, so I quickly hopped on the 10 and followed signs towards Malibu. The ocean appeared from beneath an overpass, glittering blue and insistent on my attention. Northward, the road narrowed, carrying me past huddled packs of beachfront houses.

A few miles up the PCH, I decided to program my GPS with my destination for the Super Bowl and keep driving until the ETA on the app was the time I intended to be there, at which point, I would start following the directions. It seemed like enough structured spontaneity to make an afternoon of and I would have held to it if I hadn't seen an alluring sign for Malibu Canyon Road.

In a matter of a few turns, the ocean was forgotten as I sped along, hugging the steep canyon walls. The road took me past Malibu Creek State Park and within sight of some astonishing rock formations before finally depositing me on the 101 near Calabasas. My jaunt was over. All that remained was to head east to my buddy Adam's for kickoff.

While I was blissed out on the PCH, it was on the next stretch of the drive that I noticed the benefits of my furious memorization. Instead of ignoring exit signs until the GPS told me to pay attention, I smiled at names I recognized, neighborhoods arranged north and south of the freeway just as they had been on the interactive map. I began predicting the next sign and found myself hitting more than I missed. I'd had the lyrics, now I had the tune, the physical sense of how one place knit into the next. I was on the freeway, to be fair, and surely missing some surface road broad strokes, but I still enjoyed the comfort of not being lost. I was no longer surrounded by the foreign language of unfamiliar places. My Los Angeles geography was passable, if rudimentary.

It's a nice feeling and it bred more confidence. I keep finding myself trying new routes and new extracurriculars just to put myself in a new place in the city. Yesterday, after work, I walked 20 minutes southeast of my office to the Arts District, where the Angel City Brewery holds a Monday game night. I was nervous, having been told not to stray too far while Downtown, but with plenty of daylight left and the sight of hundreds of normal folks living their lives very unthreateningly, I never felt unsafe (acknowledging that to be the luxury of the six-foot-tall, broad-shouldered, white male). Instead, I got to walk through some new neighborhoods, feeling the pulse of areas Mapping LA would have slapped "Downtown" on before calling it quits. A few hours later, after some good beer, delicious food, and a game of Pandemic, I called an Uber and made it home with such speed and ease that I could hardly believe it. The utility and price of Uber is going to make happy hours hard to pass on.

I'm liking it here and if I can't claim fluency yet, I at least feel my mind opening wide, seeking immersion.

Novelties

I prepared the deep thoughts that follow first, but then realized a more concrete update might be worthwhile.

Work has begun and is excellent so far. As with every Towers office (or Willis Towers Watson, whenever that sinks in), LA is filled with bright, clever, kind people whose gears are always turning. Yesterday began with my welcome breakfast, an event shared with another new hire and consisting of the two of us sitting in a conference room with a breakfast spread while the whole floor came through to get food. While the receiving line format felt a little odd, it provoked a lot of fun conversations, including an almost unanimous encouragement to take the LA Metro in to work. Given that vote of confidence and after my cube neighbor toured me down past the station by work, I tried it today and found it to be a pretty good means of getting in, certainly for a former DCer.

I also sent an introductory e-mail around full of my sense of humor and my interests, trying to improve once again on the long process it has been to bring my self, all of my self, to work. My desk sports a little Funko Tyrion and a bobblehead Darth Vader, while my coffee mug options are Doctor Who and Hamilton, both amazing gifts. It's good to be back in the swing of things and I took no small joy in choosing my benefits today, so that I can get a little knee work done and adventure out into the wilderness again.

On to the deep thoughts! At the office today, I found myself thinking about the relativity of time. Ever since I reached back out to Towers, I have remarked to friends how strange it seems that so momentous a time for me will seem like a much shorter time to my former company, especially when it comes to my service history. The retirement work cycle is, like so many jobs, annual, so missing six months doesn't feel like that much...except to my Atlanta office friends who have accused me of planning my six-months of self-discovery to conveniently miss a big special project AND disclosure hell month. Oops? The six months felt so very long to me, in the best of all possible ways. It feels like years since I left Georgia in August.

Then, today, I realized that I have only been here five days. This seemed impossible. How could I have been in Maryland a week and a day ago? That's not right, is it?

Which brings me to my two cents as far as the relativity of time...the key, at least for me, seems to be novelty. Doing new things slows time...or perhaps more accurately records memories on slower film. My six months off feel so long because such a high percentage of that time brought new experiences, new friends, new places, new growth. When I consider instead how the periods of sameness I have felt in the past...and how quick they seemed at the time and still seem. Whole years or handfuls of years I could describe in a sentence. Years spent living for the weekends, so that the weeks themselves were edited out of my life story each time I returned to it.

It's just a thesis (and I can almost guarantee it's more friendly to extroverts), but in this absurdly short time since my westward rocket landed in LA, nearly every moment of every day has been new and surprising, dynamic and challenging. Those moments have stretched, extended by the novelty of it all. It gives me confidence; if all I have to do to put down a life of great length is to keep aching for newness, then I have come to the right place.