Newcomer’s Orientation

This evening I shared a meal with a gentleman named Gabriel. We met in an on camera acting workshop taught by Bobby Weinapple, a man who exemplifies the best parts of bay area crunchy liberalism. In a hole-in-the-wall Thai noodle shack in San Francisco Gabe and I shared our visions of coming down to LA to live the dream. We kept in the lightest of touch through Facebook. As things would have it, I made my trek down to La La Land about 10 months before him. So it was me who got to play the role of wizened sage when we met up today at Thai Patio at the intersection of Thai Town and Little Armenia in Hollywood.

Our conversation wound through geography, up to work, finding comfort at craft, climbing to relationships, falling to raunch, and oscillating to a delightful hum in the realization that we shared similar ideas about how it was we wanted to find success in this town. We agreed that it was a bad idea to sell our souls, but that there might come a time when we would have to; just not yet. The key, we discovered, is that no matter what you do in this town or what this town does to you – you have to live your life. So it might as well be the life you want to live.

I will share with you, faithful reader, the one piece of advice from our dinner that I feel genuinely qualified to give. It will come to you by way of anecdote.

When I first moved to LA there were only two things that I truly could not stand about the town: traffic, and parking. Every night I'd drive home sighing my frustrations at the cars streaming before me in an endless parade of red brake lights. When I got to my apartment, my supposed sanctuary, I found no place where my Mitsubishi Galant could rest it's weary tires. I would circle, and circle, and circle in search of parking. 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 23 minutes and not one fucking space in this block?! Eventually I reached a point of such extreme frustration that I would park five or six blocks away because, well, spaces were available. As this became routine, I stopped searching for parking near my home. What used to be a 20 minute quest became a ten minute walk home and a ten minute walk out to my car. A curious thing happened because of this new strategy, a certain buoyancy entered my step, the stresses of the day rolled off my shoulders and by the time I joined apartment key with apartment lock I was happy, renewed, and refreshed. What once felt like a punishment, exacted upon me by the forgotten Gods of Olympus, was now an expected pleasant part of my day. My time commitment hadn't changed, searching for parking and walking both ways averaged to the same 20 minutes. But I had shifted my mindset.

A Joke:
A man walks down the street and sees another man lying in the street. The standing man asks the supine man "What on earth are you doing lying in the street? You're going to get yourself killed!" The horizontal man replied "I'm saving this parking space! I was so excited to find it I sent my wife out to buy a car."

Don't be the man in the road. Leave early, park where there are spaces, and enjoy the walk to your destination.