Home Sweet Home

I'm back!!! From the longest business trip ever! And I think I can say that it took this trip for me to finally consider LA my home.

It was such a whirlwind trip, I don't even know where to begin. You could say that Saturday was a low point. Or it was, until Sunday.

Sunday was the Gay Pride Parade in New York, and, thinking it would be filled with shirtless gay men of boundless disposable income, we were doing a booth at Pridefest to promote the Spa. My partner-in-crime on this trip (who I love dearly and is one of my very favorite people I have met in LA) is part of that demographic, and having been to Pride festivals in LA and San Francisco, thought this would be the perfect opportunity to hand out discount cards for waxing services and offer samples of shave creme and muscle-soothing gel. We were so off. Perhaps it was the intermittant rain showers that kept them away, or maybe it was because we were across from the Hepatitus Vaccine tent, but after 9 hours we left lugging home way more samples and leftover postcards than we had anticipated. Did I mention the rain?

It kept raining on Monday. So much so that I ended up cancelling the models I had booked for that night, since I didn't think a rainy outdoor movie event was the ideal sampling opportunity for high-income spa-goers. I handed out the samples myself, standing in the doorway of the still-under-construction spa. The rain had stopped by that time, but I didn't want anyone I know to see me.

Tuesday things got better. We opened. Wednesday we got press. Today we got more press, and now the wheels are in motion, momentum is picking up. I was almost sad to leave. Almost. But not quite.

A few months ago I mused that maybe once I was back in New York, among my friends and professional connections, that I might not miss my life out here and wonder what on earth I was doing so far from home. I have to say, it was SO good to see my friends. Emotionally, I feel rejuvenated. Connecting with people who have known me so well and for so long has made me feel whole in a way that I didn't know I was missing. I literally feel energized from the love they gave me, from the conversations we had, from the knowledge that after ten years we have more than just college memories, but have somehow grown up together and still really like the people we each have become.

But if socially, I was rejuvenated, everything else just sucked the life right out of me.

I'm not going to complain here. Everything I could complain about has already been said in prior posts, whether it's about roaches, dirty streets, noise, stress, space, prices, etc. We all know how I feel about the city itself; it's the relationships I had there that keep drawing me back, making me wonder if I really belong there. All week people kept asking me how I like LA, and I would find myself explaining why I liked it by comparing it to everything I didn't like about living in New York. And around the fifth time I tried to answer the question, I realized that it's not so much an issue of which city I like better, but that I like the person that I am in LA much better than the person I was in New York.

I hated the person I was two years ago. I was bitter, angry, impatient, fairly miserable. And having the very best of friends living within a two-mile radius didn't change that. I won't go into how my life has changed or why I am happier now, because, truthfully, I am still trying to figure that out. I just know that on a day-to-day basis, I am a happier, calmer, more rational person. I often have a smile on my face. That's not to say that my life is all roses, but I think I handle things better than I would have back then. Dare I say it? I'm just a little more Zen.

It only took a few days before I started slipping back into the old persona. I saw it in others, and it made me sad. I wanted to take some of these people, shake the frown lines right off of their face, and tell them that life doesn't always have to be so hard.

Then again, what do I know? I'm just one of those annoying, happy-go-lucky chicks in La La Land.

At least I'm not blond, yet.