DIARY

SNAPSHOTS

(Not So) Lost Boys

Years and years ago, I was hanging out in a bar in the Valley with a friend who was visiting from Santa Fe, and decided to play the jukebox. I punched in the numbers for one of my all-time favorite songs, The Doors' People Are Strange, and about ten seconds after it started playing Keifer Sutherland walked through the door. He ended up buying my friend and I shots of Jack and playing darts with us for hours, and was extremely drunk and extremely nice, and that night remains one of my favorite L.A. memories to this day.

Now, I tried to tell this story to a couple of friends the other day, and they were totally lost as to what that Doors song might to do with Keifer Sutherland, and when I tried to clear it up with "you know, the opening montage from The Lost Boys?"...that didn't help. And then it turned out that they didn't know Lost Boys, and didn't know who the two Coreys were, and hadn't seen License to Drive, either, so…I don't know. Maybe my friends need a primer in 1980s cinema, or maybe I'm showing my age. In either case, I have to concede that this particular film may not be quite the earth-shattering cultural reference for everyone that it is for me.

SNAPSHOTS

Like The Old Days

This is one of my favorite photos ever; it's just so exactly what Sunday morning looked like.

So remember our friends Stephen and Dave - Kendrick's college buddies, who lived directly below us on the UES? Us living in adjacent apartments wasn't so much of a coincidence as it was us visiting them at their apartment, falling in love with it, and then finding out that the place upstairs from them was available and snatching it up immediately…but this? 

Coincidence. Kind of a crazy one. We got together for breakfast a few weeks ago and told them our big news - that we were headed to San Francisco for the summer - and then they gave us their big news: they were, too. The same weekend as us (except not just for the summer; for good).

Best

What’s Ours

The most surprising thing about our temporary apartment is how familiar it feels to me. It feels familiar for obvious physical reasons - it's a straightforward, pretty generic place, the type that you find in little complexes all over California, with stucco walls and beige carpets and low ceilings and a tiny patio and sliding closet doors, and I recognize it from the Los Angeles apartments that my friends and I lived in in our early twenties. But more than that, it's something about the spareness. The absence of "things," and the space that absence creates.

When I first moved out to California all by myself, not really knowing anyone at all, in my bedroom was a dresser and a bed, and in my postage-stamp living room was a couch, a desk, a coffee table and a TV table. Every piece was from Ikea and either white or that particular shade of Ikea birch wood. And I loved that apartment so much: it was simple and clean in a way that made a hard period in my life feel easier. It felt like "me" in a way that I don't know any space I've lived in has ever felt since not because it was "stylish" or "unique" or "filled with personality"…but rather because the things in it were so pared-down, carefully curated because that was the only option available to me. Each and every thing I owned was there not because it was part of a collection or even just because I liked it; it was there because it mattered.

At twenty-two years old, I couldn't afford and didn't especially want things like fancy vases and art books and tchotchkes; I bought one candle at a time to set on my coffee table, and always spent a long time choosing a scent I really, really liked, burning it only sparingly. I didn't have the money for the fancy pillows and quilt I saw at Macy's, so I threw a hot-pink, fringed blanket that I'd found at a market in Santa Fe over the sheets I used in college, and all of a sudden my white box of a bedroom felt transformed.

SNAPSHOTS

Airplane Etiquette: Ssh Him, Or Ssh Me?

I have flown cross-country with a toddler several times now. I know how difficult it can be, and how very, very loud it can be, even if the parents are doing absolutely everything in their power to be as respectful as possible of the other passengers. Which is to say: I am not an especially intolerant person when it comes to in-flight disturbances.

But OH MY GOD did the flight on Saturday ever make me insane. So I have a question for you, because I suspect that pounds and pounds of pregnancy hormones combined with the fact that I had just dragged unreal-heavy bags through an unreal-large airport makes the validity of my emotional response system a little…untrustworthy.

(more…)


powered by chloédigital