Our heroine finds herself alone, eats sammich

I've settled it--this is my spot. It is just a blip of a walk, a microsecond away from my apartment, but its nearness has not tricked me into thinking a better spot could be found elsewhere. I sit on this bench, Italian sub half consumed, relishing the Keanu Reeves flair of my solitary, introspective meal.

Rutgers is a sometimes an unappealing mishmash of architecture, the most unfortunate buildings, I think, from the sixties (Loree and Hickman Hall on Douglass being the most offensive to look at or be in). But the oldest buildings, clustered behind me, which hold the offices of the university's most important people and who knows what else (Van Nest? Winants? What is in there?), are undoubtedly the most beautiful, though not related to the average Rutgers student's experience in the least. Indoctrination to the Rutgers classroom experience is more like having a class in the freezing basement of one of the river dorms--I had roughly a billion of those. The very fact that these old beautiful buildings of Rutgers' past have nothing to do with us meager students may be part of the reason this lovely grassy area nearby goes ignored and all these benches lining the path remain empty.

Across the path I can watch that huge building next to my apartment being constructed (that stupid effing building--I look out the bedroom window and see nothing but its parking deck head-on), the church undergoing some construction, and the platform of the train station. I feel like 500 Days of Summer's Tom sitting on his bench at Angel's Knoll, thinking this is my little under-appreciated piece of the city.

I look over at the trains and think how easy it would be to get on and be home in twenty minutes, or get on and be in New York in an hour. How simple, accessible. I could even hop on and find myself at the Newark airport, and I could fly to Berlin, or anywhere else I wanted to. Who says it's so hard to pack your bags and leave home for other corners of the globe? The way out is right there... I'm not trapped... but for now, I'm still trapped.

An old woman jogs across the street, a city bus screeches annoyingly until it halts at the train station stop, a tall, slender man in a brown corduroy blazer and exaggerated clothes hanger shoulders moseys along the bench lined path with his briefcase. The sun is setting, it's cold, everything is a 5:30 pm blue.

I'm not sure why I came here to begin with, but now I guess it's time to go home.

LA stuff, part deux

In the mornings there is usually a big loud struggle to get my brother up and moving. Four out of five times my brother does not actually make it to school (is that an exaggeration, you ask? I assure you it isn't). So that's the reason I'm awake in the seven o'clock hour, which is a vile, vile hour. I am the opposite of jazzed about it. In other words I am zzajed.

It was annoying me that I had a "part I" for my LA pictures, so here are the rest. I realized it's not much in fact, just some shots of Venice Beach and Angels Knoll, featured in the movie 500 Days of Summer. It's where they play the Penis(!) game and where that iconic bench overlooking downtown LA is.

It was a beautiful day, a beautiful beach, and of course I laughed unapologetically thinking of the tremendous snowfall back home.

Hmm. There is something almost ...annoyingly too perfect about pictures of the beach, you know? It's like you can never really take a bad shot. Or maybe that's just LA. To wit, this statue in Glendale:

Ew, I say.

So Angels Knoll--

Why these people wanted a picture of the front of the bench is beyond me.

Right, but as you can see it's all just as it appears in the film. So I thought this was pretty cool shiyat.

Zoomin' in on the hotel Tom Hansen talks about.

I had my camera with me when I went on a double decker bus tour of Hollywood, Beverly Hills and such but, L oh L, it was the morning and I was utterly exhausted (slash hung over--aren't 23-year-old cousins the best influence?) and did not have it in me to play tourist. I was all oh sweet Jesus, what am I doing on this bus?

But you know what, I don't think it matters that I haven't any pictures for posterity. Because I think Hollywood is a sad place. Sure, there are your success stories. One "noteworthy" location on the bus tour was the Pollo Loco where a not-yet-discovered Brad Pitt was working, dressed as a chicken. But then you'd hear other fun facts like "this is the hotel where so-and-so overdosed and died." Hollywood reeks of desperation and failure... the foolish quest to be "make it", to be an icon, to be immortal. And it just made me laugh, driving through the rich, hoity-toity shopping parts of LA, to hear that "celebrities are often seen here! They love to come here!" because it's not like I did see any celebrities. Hearing them talk about it like that, I might as well have been on a tour of a ghost town. You can talk my ear off about the rich and famous, but when I look out that window all I see is a wandering homeless person.

The one time I saw an actor was in 2007, in some hip store in Little Tokyo. (aside: my cousin's friend, who brought us to Little Tokyo/downtown LA, called it hipster central and went on about the gentrification of the place, and I loved him for it. Isn't it fascinating though, you start out with some rundown undesirable area, then the poor students and artsy young people come--it becomes bohemian paradise--and that is the beginning of the end. Then it's the nice middle-class families...) Anyway, I saw a pre-Sulu John Cho, aka Harold of Harold and Kumar. In the store I just kept pacing around suspiciously, sneaking glances at him, since I was such a fan of the stupid/awesome film. And this was even before the sequel came out.

Well, to conclude, what I learned from this trip was that LA is most certainly not for me. It is just a totally different world over there.