Fall in Los Angeles

September 29th, 2006 · No Comments

Living in L.A. still feels a little like a long summer vacation because the weather hasn’t changed at all since we got here (only a slight exaggeration), and it’s nearly October. Alright, so it’s a little colder, but it still hasn’t rained a day in sixty, it was 76° today, and I’m wearing the same clothes I wore in July. These days, I’m preparing to head to Italy next week for the silent film festival, excited to run my first trail race tomorrow morning in the Santa Monica Mountains, and slowly getting a feel for the city. Some observations: good restaurants in strip malls seem to be the rule, rather than the exception. Our intersection is accident prone (one I drove past minutes after, another Aimee and I witnessed last week). And thousands of people drive around Los Angeles in cars without license plates; can anyone explain what rules encourage this? It’s really bizarre.

My routine is mostly the same these days; I get up and go for a run in the morning, then walk from our house down Fountain until the DASH bus turns onto Fountain, and for a quarter, I ride the rest of the way to work. The ride is only a few minutes, but it’s helping me work my way through all of the back issues of The New Yorker (I’m somewhere in July at the moment) that stacked up over the summer.

Number of classmates from freshman dorm whom we unwittingly moved two blocks away from: 1
Number of acquaintances of my dad who have contacted me looking for a film, not knowing who I am, in my first two months on the job: 2

Last weekend we enjoyed karaoke with a bunch of people at Chapman Music Studios (?) in Koreatown. Their advertised “beer and wine” selection meant “Coors and undentified red wine” in reality, but their selection of songs in English was better than expected, and we all had a great time. I’m not sure everyone agreed, but I felt it was time to resurrect Cutting Crew’s “I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight,” and Aimee blew us away with several impressively rendered songs by the likes of Natalie Imbruglia and Avril Lavigne.

We headed to the H.M.S. Bounty afterward, and I finally found an actual bar that you might want to go to more than once, a place that seemed to attract people who wanted to hang out and have a drink, rather than just look at and be looked at by others. It wasn’t a dimly lit dive; rather, a strangely bright dive with bathrooms only through the portholed door, into the apartment building lobby next door, and down the stairs past the laundry machines. Nice.

Tags: Los Angeles