New life

People who know me understand that I have a bit of a problem with Google. My problem is that I can't stop Googling people, such as ex-boyfriends, and often come across information I'm better off not knowing. Okay, it's actually just one ex-boyfriend, someone I dated at 26-27; after a short relationship, we broke up and never spoke again. So you can understand why I might take advantage of the internet to spy on what he and his new wife are up to. (Living in LA, working in entertainment, and most recently, having a baby, if you must know.)

I would never call him "the one that got away", but I do consider him someone who got away for the wrong reasons. Of course, that's probably because we never dated for the right ones. He lived in Pennsylvania while I lived in New York, and we were both looking for something more than each other - I, a reason to get out of the city; him, a connection to the city while he worked out a two year television contract in a mid-tier market. But on the surface, things were good, and for a while, I convinced myself he was The One. The One who would solve all my problems, the One that would get me out of Manhattan, the One who could give me the energy and the excitement and the life I could not muster up for myself anymore. Even I knew that was far too big a job to rest on anyone's shoulders.

When I first read that he had gotten married, fifteen months after we had broken up, I was upset. How could he have moved on so fast? How could his life have fallen into place while I was moving across the country to avoid a mental breakdown? Was I ever going to get a break in the relationship department? Bitterness and jealousy consumed me, and I longed for what I could not have. Not him, per se, but the security, reassurance that I might be loveable.

So I braced myself when I saw the baby announcement the other night. I read through the spaces between my fingers as I gripped my hands over my eyes. I calculated what I was doing the day the baby was born. I laughed at the ridiculous name. And then I breathed a sigh of relief.

While I had often, irrationally, thought bitterly of their marriage (it should have been me!); this time I thought the opposite: thank God this wasn't me! Much as I would like a boyfriend, I suppose, I can't imagine being married with a baby right now. Mentally, I am years away from wanting the baby part, possibly more years than my body is willing to give me. And for the first time I can honestly say that I'm GLAD it didn't work out. Not just okay with it, or over it, or moved on from it, but really, truly, happy that it didn't.

Although, had I been truthful with myself, I could have told you back then that it wouldn't.

I knew the night I almost had a panic attack in his apartment. It was a cold, rainy Saturday evening in early spring, and since there was nothing to do in suburban Pennsylvania, we had settled into what was becoming routine. He watched the game on TV in the living room, while I started making a salad in the kitchen. Suddenly, I became overwhelmed with a sense of dread, some sort of claustrophobia where I wasn't so much worried about the walls closing in as I was fearful of my life closing in. Was this all there was, I thought? Was this what my life was going to be? Staying in on a Saturday night watching the game? Suburban bliss was looking no better than the city hell I wanted to run away from. So now what?

I started hyperventilating and tearing up and slipped out of the room because I didn't want to explain how freaked out I had been. I don't remember if I even told my friends that story, because I was so busy trying to convince myself that it was going to work out. It HAD to work out.

But it didn't work out. And even if it was for the wrong reasons, it turned out just right.

Big Brother Bliss

I just called to scheduled an appointment at the (relatively) new Bliss Spa here in LA. After I gave the woman my name, she read aloud the phone number that must have popped up on the screen. It started with 212, and had a familiar ring to it (no pun intended). I asked her to repeat it, and recognized it instantly: it was my old home phone number in New York. From five years and two apartments ago.

Now, I have never been to a Bliss Spa, ever. EVER. I have never ordered from one of their catalogues, never even bought one of their products at Sephora. And I can't think of how on earth they got my phone number five years ago, or why I would have given it out to a retailer in the first place. I'm pretty conservative when it comes to sharing my number with guys, let alone potential marketers.

Not a big deal, but kind of creepy nonetheless.

Marketing malfunction

I was driving to work this morning when something on the side of the road caught my eye.

Right there, posted on an exit sign, was a cardboard cutout of Janet Jackson.

That was weird, I thought. I know she has a new album to promote, but freeway advertising doesn't seem quite appropriate. Not that there was any "advertisement" to speak of besides the lifesize cutout. Here's a closeup:

At least her nipples were covered.

Will someone please tell these people that the store will still be there tomorrow?

See post below for commentary.

Cheap fashion finds it way to LA; teenyboppers everywhere rejoice

For anyone living in Southern California, you're no doubt aware that H&M is opening up its first west coast store today. I started noticing coverage early last week, and since then, all of the popular radio stations, blogs, and newspapers have covered the story. So have the unpopular ones.

I was living in New York when the first H&M opened in the United States, and while I didn't go on opening day, many of my colleagues did, and they came into work the next morning talking about how they waited on line (in line? I never remember) for two hours before finally being allowed into the store to spend their hard-earned money on clothes that would fall apart two washes later.

(I've already written my feelings on H&M. I just don't get it.)

The new store opened today only a few blocks from my office in Pasadena. When friends came in at 9 AM this morning, they reported a line around the block already - three hours before the noon opening. At ten to noon, when I heard helicoptors overhead, I went out to see for myself, and sure enough, there were hundreds of young women - who all oddly looked similar, despite the variety of races and hairstyles being represented - in a line snaked around the block and through and alley and over the river and through the woods.

I'll post the pictures here when I get home tonight. Even though, for me, seeing still isn't believing.

Cause for celebration

For the first time in what seems like a really long time, gas finally dipped below $3.00/gallon.

Eighteen months ago today I moved to LA

Back in May, when I was having serious freak-outs over turning 30 and felt like the man without a country or at least the girl without a neighborhood bar, Bonnie shared with me the following:

The first time I moved to LA, I remember someone telling me it would take 18 months for me to feel like I could call LA home.

I left after 13 months, having never really felt like it was home (and the Northridge Earthquake didn't hurt either).

True enough, when I came back to LA "this time," I stuck it out those first 18 months and, amazingly, that's about when it really clicked for me.

I don't dare say that LA has miraculously clicked for me, at least any more than it did when it cast its seductive spell the first time I came here; but I will say that the past few months have been nothing short of fantastic. Granted, I was traveling during those months, and maybe what I like more than being in any one city is feeling so busy that I don't have time to mull over my age or the meaning of life, but I do feel like some things have changed.

For one, I have planted some roots. People I was only been peripherally close with in the spring have become good friends. I've made more personal connections that aren't anything I'd want to walk away from. A few months ago I often felt like I had to really work to keep my life going, to keep things interesting. Now I feel that my earth is easily spinning on its own axis, with nary a nudge from me.

Buying the bed last week was, mentally, a big deal. I have held off on a lot of big purchases since my move, not so much because of the money, but because I was really afraid to invest a lot in this apartment, in this life. What if I decide to leave it all tomorrow? I'm still a good ways away from investing in good bedroom furniture, from buying that second TV, from getting TiVo, but I am coming to terms with the idea that this is my home.

That's not to say that I see myself here forever or that I don't forsee another low period down the road, where I miss my family terribly and want nothing more than be back east enjoying storybook fall foliage. I most likely will go back east, in three years, five years, or whenever I get sick of LA. Because I know myself and trust me, I will get sick of it. But for the moment, I'm enjoying the "now", and am ready to stop worrying about the "what if's".

Sunny day in Santa Monica

When people ask me why I moved here, I give them one of two explanations. The short answer, given usually when I am out at a bar or suspect the other person is just making conversation, is, "For fun." The long answer explains how I started getting tired of New York, and then suddenly found myself going to LA a lot; how in 2002 I knew no one here but by 2004 I had too many personal and professional contacts to ignore the significance; how I just felt in my gut that something was telling me to move out here.

But sometimes, the answer is much simpler.

Pet Peeve

Why is it, that seemingly every time I'm folding four loads of freshly laundered, fabric-softened, dried-to-a-fluffy-finish clothes, someone takes that moment to step just outside the open laundromat door and smoke a cigarette?

Never mind that I've been at the laundromat for an hour and a half with three weeks worth of clothes, sheets, and towels spinning safely behind the locked doors of industrial machines; this person has to wait until practically my entire washing machine-safe wardrobe is out in the open to threaten my freshly laundered goods with the smell of their cigarette smoke. Please don't strain your blackening lungs by walking half a block down the road - away from the open door. Really, I want my clothes to smell like your disgusting habit. In fact, if Bounce made a dryer sheet that smelled like Burning Tar, I'd be all over that! But since they don't, just yet, please let me stick with Mountain Breeze.

In happier news, my bed arrived, only an hour and a half into the four hour window I was given. I don't know if it's because the mattress has a built-in pillow-top or if the actual mattress is just higher than my last one, but it has dwarfed my adjacent nightstands and practically the rest of my room to near Alice in Wonderland dimensions. I smell a redecorating project on the horizon!

Oh, wait, maybe that's just cigarette smoke.

Bed's dead, baby

When I moved to LA, I was lucky enough to move into a friend's apartment. I was even luckier that the friend moved out first and left me a number of big ticket furniture items, such as a bed.

Having a bed here on my first night in an otherwise near-empty apartment was a comfort, at least until I lay down on it and promptly rolled into the concave center. Not exactly comfortable, but tired, I ignored the laws of gravity only to wake up to sound of squeaky springs every time I moved during the night. Consequently, I flipped the mattress, bought a foam pad, and hoped for the best, and eventually I grew used to the constant noise and gravitational pull.

Until last week. Sometime around Tuesday I woke up with severe back pain. I started thinking maybe I needed new running shoes, or maybe I was stressed out from work. By Friday morning when I woke up near tears I realized that my bed was to blame. No longer could I ignore the quirky coils, it was time to suck it up and buy a big girl bed.

Saturday I did just that. And tomorrow it is being delivered, so I am staying home all day in anticipation of my first good night's sleep in a year and a half. Girl, I'll be a woman, soon.

(Did you spot the first Pulp Fiction reference or was I too obscure?)

My September 11th

Well, I was going to save the September 11th post until it was officially September 11th, but most people probably won't read this until tomorrow anyway. Besides, my story about that day actually starts the night before, so I guess it's just as relevant for me to post now.

The summer of 2001 had been an amazing, crazy summer. One of my best friends had moved to New York, interesting and interested boys had been in abundance, and I had reached a point at work where I felt not only comfortable, but confident. The week before Labor Day, two people from my company were scheduled to host a party in Las Vegas for one of our clients. At the last minute, one person got sick, I was asked to go, and in less than 48 hours I was hanging out in the Hard Rock Hotel with Gary Coleman and Wyclef Jean. (I made my friends cringe with embarrasment when I got back and told them I was more excited about meeting Gary.)

Two weeks later, it was Fashion Week in New York, and on the night of September 10th, I was going to some after-party, feeling very self-important. The party itself was nothing special, but that on top of my Vegas trip represented a sort of high for me, like I had arrived both in my job and in New York. I was only 25.

The morning of September 11th, I woke up still a little drunk. Getting dressed, I felt fabulously thin, and was excited to wear a "skinny-shirt" I found at the back of my closet. It was the most beautiful sunny day and I walked into work thinking that life really just did not get much better.

Shortly after 9:00 one of the girls had gotten a call from her husband who worked downtown who told her that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. The office buzzed about it, but we all kind of assumed it must be an accident and went back to work. Shortly thereafter (you know the drill), we heard about plane number two and knew it was terrorism.

At that point, though, it was only 9:30, and everyone was being told to stay in the building, not to go anywhere. Our office was located at 43th and Madison, and our only window view was of an airshaft, so a few people went down to the street and walked to Fifth Avenue, because at that intersection, you could see straight downtown. I stayed upstairs and kept checking CNN.com, but this was before streaming video or any of today's technology and the web kept crashing. I forget when we heard about DC, but I started emailing with a friend of mine down there, to make sure he was allright. He was, and he was doing the same as me - sitting around with all of his co-workers waiting to be told what to do.

When the girls came back up from street level, the towers had just fallen, and I just couldn't believe them when they said they were gone. What do you mean, they're gone? They fell? Where did they fall? This was before any of us had seen a TV, so all those images of the towers falling that are so ingrained in our minds now didn't exist at that point. I couldn't imagine how one minute something could be there and the next minute it wasn't, especially something like two buildings that defined the New York City skyline.

Once the towers fell, panic started setting in. A few people had familiy who worked in the trade center, so they were allowed to leave. My uncle worked down there, but I learned immediately that he was fine, and I only knew one other person to worry about. He ended up being fine as well (well, physically fine; mentally, not so much) but because of the breakdown in cell phone communication, I didn't learn that until much later that day.

At 11 AM we were allowed to leave - I think the whole building was evacuated. And that's when I started getting scared. It was one thing to know that planes had hit downtown, but to be evacuated, you start thinking it was for a reason - they're coming for us next. At 43rd and Madison, we were very close to Grand Central and the Chrysler building, and we just didn't know if the attack was over or just beginning. We had heard reports that Chicago had been hit - which obviously didn't happen but we didn't know that at the time - and that another plane had crashed or was missing somewhere.

At street level, those of us who lived uptown started walking together, heading northeast away from the midtown monuments that might serve as targets. We stopped at one point to pick up someone's friend at another building; while we waited, a man walked by with his head bandaged and his shirt bloodied from the neck down. This was around 53rd street, and it occured to me that he had walked all the way up from downtown. Clearly, he had been caught in the middle of it.

The streets were a pedestrian river - everyone just flowed north. I lived on 86th street with two roommates at the time, and our apartment was unusually large and so typically served as a gathering place for all of our friends. When I walked in around noon there were two other people there; by 8 PM that night we hosted about 20. I spent a good hour or few watching the TV - this was the first time I had seen the planes hit the buildings and the buildings fall. Amid the footage of the buildings was footage of the people - walking, running, crying, searching.

By 6:00, I just couldn't watch TV anymore. To call it depressing would be an understatement. My girlfriends and I went across the street to our favorite bar, where we treated ourselves to dinner and some margaritas. Only in New York, I think, do people go out drinking in times of crises. We certainly weren't the only ones - the place was packed. It wasn't a jolly old time, but none of us could bear to sit inside anymore, and we justified the outing by considering that we were celebrating, because collectively, miraculously, we hadn't known anyone who had gotten hurt.

After dinner we went back to the apartment, and by 10 PM the group had broken up. With a few margaritas in my system I was ready to be alone and just talk on the phone to my parents, but I will always remember that day because I had been surrounded by so many friends. I was lucky not to have been downtown or to know anyone personally who had been in the thick of it, but I feel luckier that I had so many shoulders to cry on, so many ears to listen.

I will also remember that day not just for the tragedy that it was, but for the context in which it took place. Walking to work that day, I had been deliriously happy over a Fashion Week party; in two hours that would seem so trivial. Getting dressed that morning I had been thrilled to wear a skinny shirt; that night, I looked in the mirror and thought of all the people who had lost limbs. Telling my September 11th story never seems right without including the party on September 10th, and usually, the Vegas trip. I just think it demonstrates how fleeting things can be.

Blogger identity crisis; please save me from my happy, boring self

Do you ever feel that some of the best blogs are written by people who are fairly miserable?

Before anyone takes offense to that (as in, you're happy which means I must not like your blog, or you know I love your blog and therefore that must make you miserable when really you're quite fine, thank you very much), let me clarify.

I've found that the majority of my favorite daily reads are composed by people who are grappling with an issue. The issue may be a struggle with parenthood, with depression, with dating (or not dating), or whatever, but in these cases the writing is usually so passionate and engaging that I can't help but get hooked. Or, maybe I just get off on other people's pain, who knows.

Personally, I think most of my best posts were written in times when I was in a downward spiral, like back before I moved, then back in the fall of last year when I started to get really homesick, and then again in the spring of this year when I was overcome with anxiety about turning 30. Now that I've spent the better part of three months, though, really pretty happy and stable, I'm boring the crap out of myself with these banal posts.

Since I'm in no way looking for a reason to become all Sylvia Plath again, I think I need some inspiration to get writing. But because I've been suffering from this sort of creative hangover for the better part of the summer, I'm looking to my readers (all 10 of you!) for suggestions.

Some bloggers hold regular Q and A sessions via the comments section. I would totally do that except I don't know if I have enough commenters to make that interesting on a regular basis. Want to prove me wrong? I could do a weekly rant, but like I said, I'm pretty happy these days, and don't know what I could find in my heart to complain about. I could start a dating column about all the imaginary boys I'm not meeting, but that would be fiction and this is the real deal, baby. I could write odes to ex-boyfriends sung to our favorite makeout songs of 1991, but my parents read this and even from 3000 miles away I'd rather not go there.

If you have an idea that could save Lori MacBlogger from total banality, please share. Lurkers, this is an open invitation to come out of hiding and tell me what you'd like to read about. Because I honestly think I can do better than horoscopes and computer problems.

If someone blogs in the forest....

If I had to make a list of the top five things in my life that have shaped the person I am today, number one or two would definitely be "sleepaway camp."

From the time I was 11 until I was 17, I spent eight weeks every summer at Pierce Camp Birchmont in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, a co-ed overnight camp that offered everything from sports to swimming to fast boys from Long Island and the closest girlfriends I ever had growing up, or at least until I went off to college.

Some of my best memories are from that camp and the friendships that grew out of it, and at least once a year, usually around May, I'll have a dream that I have suddenly decided to go back for one final summer as a camp counselor. Usually, in the dream, I'll be packing and suddenly realize, hey wait, I forgot to quit my job and they are expecting me there this summer! Or, what was I thinking wanting to sleep in a bunk bed when I have this great apartment back home! Can I at least get a sublet?

Last night, though, the dream took a different turn. I was packing with my friend Rachel, and I suddenly realized, wait, would I be able to BLOG from camp?! Because surely I couldn't go eight weeks without blogging! I was trying to ask Rachel if computer clusters had been installed at camp since the last time I was there (1993) and she was avoiding the question, telling me that she would bring her laptop with her in case I wanted to use it. But will we have wireless access all the way up in the woods, I asked?

She didn't know, and I suddenly began to dread my decision to return after all these years.

End of summer, start of ?

I've written before that I am, if not necessarily a believer, at least a loyal follower of astrology. So it has been bothering me for four days now that my September horoscope starts out like this:

The winds of change are again blowing, and you are about to experience a radical shift in your career. The first week of September will be fraught with tension as unexpected news about a professional matter comes your way.

Although I guess what's really bothering me is that the last week at work truly has been fraught with tension, and so much energy has been building up to the point that I know something soon has to give. The irony is that I haven't been part of the drama, only privy to it, but the whole thing exploded into a whirlwind last week and now I'm afraid it's going to suck all of us in.

If you go on to read the rest of the horoscope, it turns out the news is more positive - that I have the power to use the changes to my advantage rather than suffer from them. But other than the drama last week, things at work have been pretty good lately, and I'm not sure I want too many changes to take place. Fortunately (or not, who knows), I won't have to wait too long to find out:

Uranus will oppose the Sun on September 5. This is an extreme aspect, and one that can cause a permanent riff, even an emotional scar afterwards. You may have to count to ten to keep yourself from having a direct confrontation with an authority figure on September 5. This aspect caused Hurricane Katrina last year, as it fell at the end of August in 2005, but as you see it can have an emotional or physical manifestation.

The main event will be a lunar eclipse due on the full moon September 7 in your solar tenth house of professional status, plus or minus 4 - 7 days. It appears your boss or client, most likely a female, is about to announce a surprise departure, and you will be distressed to hear this, for it looks like she was a strong supporter. Certainly if it is not this, something else will come up. If you were born within five days of June 5 [June 2!], you will feel this eclipse most powerfully.

This horoscope combined with the truths behind it have weighed down an otherwise fabulous holiday weekend. Friday night I met some friends out, ended up running into some more old friends, and just had a great, old fashioned fun night on the town. Saturday night another friend had a get-together at her place and we spent the night lounging on her massive porch with views overlooking the canyons, drinking wine and catching up with more old friends. Sunday and today I went to the beach, trying to soak up every last ray the summer sun would offer.

It would have been the perfect Labor Day, if only my mind hadn't worked overtime.