my life should have training wheels

I get three types of mail. Hey what kind of conditioner do you use because I’m going to the store right now and I’d like to get the same kind to use on my pubes, Hey I like your site and Hey do you get paid to write because you should.

The last type always surprises me the most. Probably because it’s not followed by, “Pics for trade?” But also because these kinds of emails usually come from people who are not only employed, but work in fields directly or indirectly relating to professional writing.

Which is why I was in Los Angeles the first week of May. The trip was 95% networking and 5% thinking about whether the smog or billboards plastered with Paris Hilton and her English bulldog would kill me. Turned out to be neither and was instead two Irish coffees that almost sent me into oncoming traffic on Sunset Blvd. This is why I don’t drink.

I stayed in Hollywood and had the difficult task of choosing a hotel that wasn’t either a methadone clinic or the place where Janis Joplin died of a drug overdose. The only reason I had the patience for such a challenge is that I needed to be within walking distance of my meetings since I was adamant about not renting a car. Mostly because I’ve busted three side mirrors on my Jeep and don’t trust a car that isn’t built like a Transformer, but also because I didn’t want to deal with traffic or Mel Gibson’s drunk driving. This meant that I ended up being sandwiched in between Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and what looked to be a drag version of Marilyn Monroe. Actually, it wasn’t until I began my whiskey -fueled trip back to my hotel that I noticed I was walking over the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It finally hit me why, for the past two days, crowds kept hovering over the ground to take photos of this seemingly unremarkable marble sidewalk that served mostly as a break dancing platform for a guy dressed in a cheap Elmo costume. I also realized that growing up around Disney World and their penchant to recreate miniature landmarks of everything under the sun so you never have to experience anything for yourself ever has warped me into thinking that authenticity is just another fictional character from Fantasia.

Luckily, I wouldn’t care if Tom Cruise and his star were sent to a refinement plant and never heard from again. At the time, all I was concerned about was getting my Baja Fresh quesadilla back safely to my room so I could sober up and think about how the last few days were holding a mirror to my shameful inexperience and hapless lack of direction.

Hollywood, despite its impastoed landscape of self expression, left me feeling intensely self conscious. It’s not something I experience often, only because I am usually too oblivious to be insecure. But subtlety does not exist in Hollywood. It wasn’t an environment I could easily slip into and, because I knew nothing about writing a spec or working up from donut coordinator to staff writer , I couldn’t help but feel that I was sweating ignorance. I concede that most, if not all, of my problem most likely had to do with the false assumption that there was even something to know or get. As if having some sort of carnal knowledge of this place meant that I was entitled to a story arc involving an instant rise to success and years later, a spot on some sort of celebrity rehab or weight loss reality show. But that’s irrelevant anyway, since being a writer only really gets you noticed if you’re dead or cook up something about vampires.

My meetings largely resembled the course of a blind date. They even involved the obligatory, “So tell me about yourself.” The script was almost always the same – I’d talk about moving around a lot, majoring in Art History and having to nearly be forced into writing. Then I’d respond that, no, it’s not really that weird to me that I don’t have a hometown,  joke about my useless major so they didn’t have to feel bad about secretly coming to that conclusion on their own and try to make, ‘My boyfriend encouraged me and nearly demanded that I start writing’ sound a little less Ike Turner-esque. That was easy enough. But when it came to what I actually wanted to do, I began questioning why I even came to LA in the first place. No matter how many times I was asked, my first thought was always, “I want to write. I want to make people laugh.” And since writing for TV requires a bit more than child-like optimism, my answer never seemed to be well received. Even when the person I was delivering it to had been drinking. And while I wasn’t necessarily thrilled with it either, it was marginally better than sitting there and attempting to motorboat myself.

My pity party didn’t last long, though. In between picking through a congealed bowl of queso and flipping through the channels to find the most ridiculous direct response product (Cami Secret won), I stumbled upon Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 on HBO. I hadn’t seen it, but I was familiar with the legend of these pants. Not only were they vintage, but they also fit four lifelong friends perfectly, despite their different measurements. The pants also bring good luck in the form of cute boys and really, is there any other good luck to be had?

So, while I’m working toward a future that isn’t quite clear to me yet, I have the think that if there’s room for story about a pair of pants that can form to any ass and still manage to assist in unveiling what really matters in life, then I figure there’s room for me, too.