Greetings and Salivations

Salud.

By chance or by fate, you-- YES you-- have somehow arrived at this corner of the internet, nestled ever so comfortably between Craigslist's missed connections and a series of Myspace profiles that haven't been updated in 8 years. Glad you found the place all right.

But what is this, exactly? What have you gotten yourself into? Is it worth your time and mental effort? Does your iPad have enough power to support all these ? Is there really such a thing as cat heaven? These questions and more will all be answered soon enough. So let's do the damn thing.

The skinny: This is my new blog.
This is my old blog: Scuttlebutt
This is my old travel blog: The Prog Blague
This is your brain on drugs:

Conceptually, this new blog is more or less a combination of the previous two, in that it is an autobiographical account of my adventures and misadventures in a new place. My story is relatively dull but the context is necessary; you can't just go around creating blogs willy-nilly and not let the people know where you're coming from. That's like going to a movie before watching all the Youtube trailers and reading the IMDB synopsis.

(It's actually not, but come on, don't act like you don't do that.)

So here's where I'm coming from. I am a recent college graduate who received a bachelor's in both English and Philosophy of Film from the fine institution of Whittier College.

Fear the Poet.

Soon following graduation my 4 flatmates and I had to move out of our crap-fest apartment located in the scenic suburbs of Whittier, California. Without a real place to go or a real reason to go anywhere else, I moved right across the street in a quasi sublet-type situation with my friend and a friend of hers who was doing the same thing for the summer. The friend who owns the place was virtually never there because she's from Newport Beach, and why the hell would you spend the summer in Whittier when you could be kicking it lagoon-side in Newps?

So that situation worked out nicely, but it was a very temporary one. I didn't want to settle in there too much because my ultimate goal was to move out to Los Angeles to pursue my writing career. I want to write for television; 0 points for originality BUT I am seriously racking up the number of passive-aggressive Facebook messages from family members who "just want to see how the job hunt is going."

Plus, there's nothing in Whittier. I apologize to all the people who live there and love it-- after 4 years of going to school there I know why-- but Whittier has nothing for me. It's a quaint, quirky and comfortable little town with a lot of unique features, but I appreciate virtually none of them. And in terms of my career, LA is where it's at: Girl wants to write for television. Girl moves to LA. Girl resorts to selling crack on the corner to pay the bills. Girl achieves fame and accolade for her writing after 15 years of slinging. Girl soon sinks back into oblivion, resumes selling crack. Girl dies on the 110 on-ramp from choking on a bottle cap. It's the classic Hollywood fairytale!

So as soon as I graduated, I knew I needed to get the hell out before Whittier slipped its rose-tinted glasses over my eyes and kept me there another year or twenty. Days went by and I savored my new found post-grad freedom. I was constantly surrounded by friends also staying in town for the summer, giving me every reason to enjoy my time in Whittier. But all the while, I was Craigslisting. I was Craigslisting so hard. Looking at rooms for rent became an addiction. While the rest of the world was playing Candy Crush Saga, I was on my own saga to find a reasonably priced place to live in LA. It seemed the only reasonably priced options were men's sober homes, dubious "live-in gf" arrangements and dorm-style houses that let 12 people fight over a single bathroom.

Only the strongest bladders will survive.

The search seemed utterly futile.

...That is, until I discovered a "cozy room for rent" in Chinatown.

The thought had never occurred to me. I didn't know anything about Chinatown. Is it safe? Is there anything fun or exciting? Do Chinese people actually live there? The answer to all three of these questions turned out to be a resounding yes. And so we're more or less caught up to real time now. I am sitting in my room... my OWN room for the first time in 4 years... perched on a little hill in pleasant Chinatown listening to some massive electronica festival happening about 50 yards away. Teenagers in spandex bathing suits have been crawling around the main street all day like a bunch of ball-tripping zombies. My people.

(Not my people.)

It's not Whittier, I'll say that much.

I'll leave you in suspense until tomorrow as to what I think about Chinatown, having lived here for 3 whole days so far. This blog will serve as a chronicling of my new life: as an Angelino, as a college graduate, and as an aspiring television writer doing the same God damn thing as everyone else out here. Cheers, or as they say in Chinese: [they don't say anything, they just stare at you and wait for you to walk past their bus stop]