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.
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