"So. What do you do?" A standard, boilerplate question, tried and true, used to abate the awkwardness of social mingling. For most of my life this question presented no challenge. I met it with ease, replying in kind with a standard blurb about my life of academic slavery, eliciting bored but polite nods from my cocktail clutching interrogator. Lately, however, I find myself struggling with this question.
What is it that I do, exactly?
I graduated from law school over a year ago. Since, I've spent much of my time fondling diamonds and South Sea pearls in an office on the ostentatious Rodeo Drive. At one point I tried my hand at being an attorney, but soon realized court appearances were not my forte. After a few weeks as an attorney, I found myself spending my Friday nights bawling over gin and tonics in the arms of the bus boy at the Roosevelt. Soon I realized this was the manifestation of my misery, the 8 to 8 job that had consumed my very soul and left me waking up at night drenched in sweat. I lasted 6 weeks.
I'm normally not a quitter. No, really. But I do believe in loving, or at least liking what you do in life. So I quit like Jerry Maguire. It was rather terrifying but also exhilarating to for once in my life just walk away from something. Perhaps considering the current economy, my act might be considered foolish by some...or many. But I've been living in a state of bliss ever since."So. What do you do?" Do I proceed to answer this question by launching into the saga of my brief stint as bankruptcy litigator slash jeweler?
The economy tanked in perfect synchronization with my admission to the bar, at long last the seemingly untouchable profession, that of the lawyer, came crashing down and broke its crown. The future doesn't look bright, as every six months a new swarm of newly minted esquires jostle for rank amongst those already waiting for that entry level job to launch their careers.
Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.
I love working at the jewelry company. An office of one man and an ever evolving staff of women (11 at last count), every moment spent there is packed with popcorn-worthy entertainment with a fascinating cast of characters all of whom I've fallen in love with over the past 18 months. Plus did I mention the diamonds? If it paid enough to fight the monster of Sallie Mae, I’d stay forever.
On the legal front I sometimes Clark Kent as a temporary attorney. Document review, who knew? Document review attorneys are generally regarded as the untouchables within the legal community. But I love love love love love it. I pay the bills by reading salacious materials subpoenaed from the black heart of your hard drive. When things get dull I blog, do a crossword, participate in the occasional Disney sing-a-long. It's a unique culture, created when you herd a large group of bored attorneys into a confined area with a highly repetitive task to perform. Such a scenario tends to bring out the immaturity in everyone. Gossip is a welcome and fascinating respite. The stereotypical bad rat is not just a stereotype; he does exist and will circulate the rooms, attempting to sabotage his more trusting co-peons in a hapless bid to impress somebody. After a while, there is the inevitable drama resulting from the variable preferences in sunlight, volume, food and inappropriate subjects of discussion. Bondage, drugs, politics, religion, UFOs, animal nights, anything that might create a hostile work environment is fair game after only a few days of boredom. It is, in a word, amazing. Maybe I'm crazy, but I really do enjoy it. Stress free and characters welcome. It also gives me the luxury to figure out what I REALLY want to be when I grow up. Yes, my current status as temp attorney brands me as the black sheep of a rather pretentious profession. But that's surprisingly ok.
"So. What do you do?" I really have no better notion of how to answer this than does a fluffer presented with the same. I could lie just to get it over with. "Mortician" should do the trick. On only one occasion did my answer of “lawyer” result in a man abruptly darting away with his canapé. More often, “lawyer” breeds more questions with uncomfortable answers, and there is something about the truth that doesn’t quite mix with dirty martinis between strangers.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Headache
The sound my mother makes as she witnesses one of the dogs skip across her Persian carpet with mud dipped paws must mirror the anguished wails of the damned that echo within the passageways of Hades. Seriously. It is a sound I heard much of in my youth and it really bugs. Some shopping might help.
I apologize for my last post's abrupt ending. Apparently I cannot edit posts with this free app. Well, off I go to add to my collection of fringed scarves and nifty winter caps, none of which I wear 11 1/2 months of the anum. Salut!
I apologize for my last post's abrupt ending. Apparently I cannot edit posts with this free app. Well, off I go to add to my collection of fringed scarves and nifty winter caps, none of which I wear 11 1/2 months of the anum. Salut!
Saturday, December 26, 2009
T'Was The Day After Christmas
I trust everybody is beginning to recover from their alcohol slash food haze brought about by the copious amounts of bubbly and the questionable consumption of a slightly stale lopsided gingerbread house with Hershey's chocolate shutters. I regret to inform you that amongst my various Christmas duties, I was required to sit through the film, "Julie and Julia" from start to end, which provided enough cheese for one of the hefty French baguettes that ample Julia Child probably ate as a midnight snack. Amy Adams' character's obsession was neither remarkable nor endearing, it was creepy and aggravating. Julia Powell, thank you for wasting two hours of my life. And thank you for making me feel blissfully normal.
Friday, December 11, 2009
A Dr's Diagnosis of LA Dating and The Good Samaritan
Is Los Angeles the Toughest Town for Singles? by Dr. Benzer
Little known fact: I went to high school in Los Angeles, so I'm kind of from Los Angeles. So when I found myself back in LA after a long hiatus, it was a bit of a homecoming. I looked forward to perpetually sunny climes, rollerblading on the boardwalk, and the general openness of the people. The perceived abundance of friendly, fit women didn’t hurt either.
However, the quality of my love life was worse than it had been in any other city. For the first two years, I just assumed I had suddenly gotten ugly and stupid. Then I heard multitudes of other people voicing similar experiences.
Now after six years of being in this town, conducting dating seminars, answering thousands of readers’ letters and writing The Tao of Dating for Women and The Tao of Dating for Men, I’m pretty sure that Los Angeles is a particularly tough city to be single in – perhaps the toughest in the US. Here are one man’s observations on the challenges of socializing and dating in LA:
1. According to the Singles Map, the sex ratio in LA sucks.
Anthropologists have noticed a statistic that correlates nicely with the social and sexual permissiveness of a population. It’s called the sex ratio – the number of men for every 100 women. In places where the sex ratio is low (i.e. excess of women over men), social mores are relaxed, women go out a lot, and everyone has a ball. Where the sex ratio is high (i.e. excess of men), people go out less and attitudes are more conservative. No one knows exactly why this is, but it makes sense.
This correlation tracks in large populations (e.g. whole countries like Russia) and smaller ones (e.g. cities, towns and university campuses). According to the latest singles map from the 2006 US Census, New York has a 211,000 surplus of single women over single men, while LA has 89,000 more single men than women. Accordingly, dating in New York City is fun, while dating in Los Angeles sucks. This statistic alone may be the single biggest cause of the lackluster love lives of singles in LA.
2. Large distances in the world’s biggest city create a real barrier to intimacy.
Let’s say you meet someone you like -- cute, fun, smart, funny. You ask where this person lives --“Silver Lake.” You live 20 miles away in Santa Monica -- and that’s not just any 20 miles. It’s 20 miles through one of the most car-jammed concrete jungles on the planet, with no efficient public transport to speak of. And your helicopter’s in the shop. Again.
20 miles is a perfectly reasonable distance to travel in the 5,000+ square miles of Los Angeles to get somewhere. Yet, it is totally unreasonable by human terms. It’s almost twice the length of Manhattan (13 miles) and enough distance to cross a couple of national borders in Europe.
And so the activation energy of meeting someone not nearby goes up. Physics tells us that the higher the activation energy, the less frequent the event. So people become less likely to meet to get to know one another casually.
Contrast this with New York City. Even though the times required to get around in NYC are comparable, the perceived effort of taking the subway or hopping in a cab is much less than driving yourself through snarls of traffic. Hence people there are much more willing to go places and meet up.
Which brings us to…
3. Lack of pedestrian culture reduces opportunities for casual contact.
Whenever I visit Boston, New York or London, I bump into friends – on the sidewalk, on the subway, in the parks. This casual, unforced, unpremeditated contact is the cornerstone of building social relations. That’s why our closest friends tend to come from work and school.
That casual contact is missing in LA, because we spend a lot of time in our wheeled steel cages. As as in the song by Missing Persons, “Nobody walks in LA.” And if you want to meet someone again, you have to coordinate busy schedules, make a one-on-one date and travel (see #2) – a higher-stakes proposition than bumping into someone and grabbing an apropos drink. The higher energy required for making a date means that it happens less often.
4. Transportation challenges make even the best-intentioned people flaky.
Traffic in LA is unpredictable; as a result, even the best-intentioned people end up being late more often than they wish.
Here’s the psychology of what I think happens: once you’ve been late or missed an appointment for reasons beyond your control, your brain has to make a choice: “I’m flaky so I’m a bad person” vs. “Flakiness is okay.” To avoid cognitive dissonance, the unconscious choice that most people make is to validate the unintended bad behavior.
Showing up late, not showing up at all and breaking promises can then become the norm. When that happens enough times to enough people, you end up in a legendarily flaky city, and social and dating life encounter more obstacles.
5. The transience of the city’s entertainment culture adds an aura of impermanence and unreliability to social ties.
A lot of people come to LA to make it in the entertainment industry, which is a fleeting, fickle creature. Is it too farfetched to see that fickleness permeating all the way down to the participants in that industry and their social bonds?
A peculiar energy permeates a town when so many people are trying to advance an ego-based agenda – my role, my song, my script – which may not be the most conducive energy for building meaningful, lasting relationships. Bringing us to…
6. Dating people in the entertainment industry is fraught with unique challenges.
I’ve already written another article about dating actors, so I’ll make this brief: dating people with uncertain finances, erratic schedules and fragile egos is a challenge requiring saintlier patience than most people possess.
7. Nightlife shuts down at 1am and you have to drive your own butt home afterwards.
Last call being 2am in Los Angeles, most establishments start kicking you out at 1am. So just when things have started to get interesting, the party shuts down. In cities like Berlin, New York, London, Barcelona and Paris, people often start going out at 1am, and the social life is correspondingly more raucous.
Lack of public transport also means that people stay sober enough to drive back home. As a result, the social lubricant effects of alcohol don't operate in the same way as in a city with public transport.
Mathematically stated, less party time + less imbibing of adult beverages = less fun. This, plus the other six aforementioned factors, may very well make LA the toughest big city in the US to be single in.
I've found that the best way to overcome these challenges is to carve out a smaller, more local niche of friends based on shared interests and to cultivate that group with intimate events like book clubs, mixers, dinner parties and game nights. How have you managed to create a lively community of friends in spite of tough odds?
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-alex-benzer/is-los-angeles-the-toughe_b_379298.html
Thank youuuuuuuuu Dr. Benzer. My $0.02: first I would like to praise Dr. Benzer for his writing ability. There is nothing worse than a piece of writing where any interesting point to be made is obscured by repeated failed attempts to amuse me and a bland selection of words. Sometimes I wish I'd lived in the 1700s, when people used ink dipped quills to create delicious prose. For instance, the exploitation by the of the lower classes was described by one 18th century gentleman as "grinding the poor." Grrrrrrrrinding the poor. Yes. Yes. YES. Unf. I'd love to have grab a dirty 'tini and bitch with this Dr. Benzer someday.
How are you all doing today? Per request, I have now enabled anonymous commenting so if you feel the need to slam me, giddyup. I am rather upbeat today despite the weather outside. I hate cold weather, a fact that has landed me in a somewhat awkward position. I borrowed a valet's jacket a few nights back as I was exploring North Caheunga Boulevard at 3 am. Behold the radness:
There really isn't anything more magical than waking up in a tulle dress and an inside-out valet jacket. Sadly the owner of this jacket (or as he pronounces it in his heavy Spanish accent, "NNNNYACKET!") has demanded it's return in the form of harassing me via text and call multiple times a day regarding how cold he is. I suppose at this point he has learned that no good deed goes unpunished. And I must do the right thing and return this beauty to its rightful owner. Off I go, happy Friday!
Little known fact: I went to high school in Los Angeles, so I'm kind of from Los Angeles. So when I found myself back in LA after a long hiatus, it was a bit of a homecoming. I looked forward to perpetually sunny climes, rollerblading on the boardwalk, and the general openness of the people. The perceived abundance of friendly, fit women didn’t hurt either.
However, the quality of my love life was worse than it had been in any other city. For the first two years, I just assumed I had suddenly gotten ugly and stupid. Then I heard multitudes of other people voicing similar experiences.
Now after six years of being in this town, conducting dating seminars, answering thousands of readers’ letters and writing The Tao of Dating for Women and The Tao of Dating for Men, I’m pretty sure that Los Angeles is a particularly tough city to be single in – perhaps the toughest in the US. Here are one man’s observations on the challenges of socializing and dating in LA:
1. According to the Singles Map, the sex ratio in LA sucks.
Anthropologists have noticed a statistic that correlates nicely with the social and sexual permissiveness of a population. It’s called the sex ratio – the number of men for every 100 women. In places where the sex ratio is low (i.e. excess of women over men), social mores are relaxed, women go out a lot, and everyone has a ball. Where the sex ratio is high (i.e. excess of men), people go out less and attitudes are more conservative. No one knows exactly why this is, but it makes sense.
This correlation tracks in large populations (e.g. whole countries like Russia) and smaller ones (e.g. cities, towns and university campuses). According to the latest singles map from the 2006 US Census, New York has a 211,000 surplus of single women over single men, while LA has 89,000 more single men than women. Accordingly, dating in New York City is fun, while dating in Los Angeles sucks. This statistic alone may be the single biggest cause of the lackluster love lives of singles in LA.
2. Large distances in the world’s biggest city create a real barrier to intimacy.
Let’s say you meet someone you like -- cute, fun, smart, funny. You ask where this person lives --“Silver Lake.” You live 20 miles away in Santa Monica -- and that’s not just any 20 miles. It’s 20 miles through one of the most car-jammed concrete jungles on the planet, with no efficient public transport to speak of. And your helicopter’s in the shop. Again.
20 miles is a perfectly reasonable distance to travel in the 5,000+ square miles of Los Angeles to get somewhere. Yet, it is totally unreasonable by human terms. It’s almost twice the length of Manhattan (13 miles) and enough distance to cross a couple of national borders in Europe.
And so the activation energy of meeting someone not nearby goes up. Physics tells us that the higher the activation energy, the less frequent the event. So people become less likely to meet to get to know one another casually.
Contrast this with New York City. Even though the times required to get around in NYC are comparable, the perceived effort of taking the subway or hopping in a cab is much less than driving yourself through snarls of traffic. Hence people there are much more willing to go places and meet up.
Which brings us to…
3. Lack of pedestrian culture reduces opportunities for casual contact.
Whenever I visit Boston, New York or London, I bump into friends – on the sidewalk, on the subway, in the parks. This casual, unforced, unpremeditated contact is the cornerstone of building social relations. That’s why our closest friends tend to come from work and school.
That casual contact is missing in LA, because we spend a lot of time in our wheeled steel cages. As as in the song by Missing Persons, “Nobody walks in LA.” And if you want to meet someone again, you have to coordinate busy schedules, make a one-on-one date and travel (see #2) – a higher-stakes proposition than bumping into someone and grabbing an apropos drink. The higher energy required for making a date means that it happens less often.
4. Transportation challenges make even the best-intentioned people flaky.
Traffic in LA is unpredictable; as a result, even the best-intentioned people end up being late more often than they wish.
Here’s the psychology of what I think happens: once you’ve been late or missed an appointment for reasons beyond your control, your brain has to make a choice: “I’m flaky so I’m a bad person” vs. “Flakiness is okay.” To avoid cognitive dissonance, the unconscious choice that most people make is to validate the unintended bad behavior.
Showing up late, not showing up at all and breaking promises can then become the norm. When that happens enough times to enough people, you end up in a legendarily flaky city, and social and dating life encounter more obstacles.
5. The transience of the city’s entertainment culture adds an aura of impermanence and unreliability to social ties.
A lot of people come to LA to make it in the entertainment industry, which is a fleeting, fickle creature. Is it too farfetched to see that fickleness permeating all the way down to the participants in that industry and their social bonds?
A peculiar energy permeates a town when so many people are trying to advance an ego-based agenda – my role, my song, my script – which may not be the most conducive energy for building meaningful, lasting relationships. Bringing us to…
6. Dating people in the entertainment industry is fraught with unique challenges.
I’ve already written another article about dating actors, so I’ll make this brief: dating people with uncertain finances, erratic schedules and fragile egos is a challenge requiring saintlier patience than most people possess.
7. Nightlife shuts down at 1am and you have to drive your own butt home afterwards.
Last call being 2am in Los Angeles, most establishments start kicking you out at 1am. So just when things have started to get interesting, the party shuts down. In cities like Berlin, New York, London, Barcelona and Paris, people often start going out at 1am, and the social life is correspondingly more raucous.
Lack of public transport also means that people stay sober enough to drive back home. As a result, the social lubricant effects of alcohol don't operate in the same way as in a city with public transport.
Mathematically stated, less party time + less imbibing of adult beverages = less fun. This, plus the other six aforementioned factors, may very well make LA the toughest big city in the US to be single in.
I've found that the best way to overcome these challenges is to carve out a smaller, more local niche of friends based on shared interests and to cultivate that group with intimate events like book clubs, mixers, dinner parties and game nights. How have you managed to create a lively community of friends in spite of tough odds?
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-alex-benzer/is-los-angeles-the-toughe_b_379298.html
Thank youuuuuuuuu Dr. Benzer. My $0.02: first I would like to praise Dr. Benzer for his writing ability. There is nothing worse than a piece of writing where any interesting point to be made is obscured by repeated failed attempts to amuse me and a bland selection of words. Sometimes I wish I'd lived in the 1700s, when people used ink dipped quills to create delicious prose. For instance, the exploitation by the of the lower classes was described by one 18th century gentleman as "grinding the poor." Grrrrrrrrinding the poor. Yes. Yes. YES. Unf. I'd love to have grab a dirty 'tini and bitch with this Dr. Benzer someday.
How are you all doing today? Per request, I have now enabled anonymous commenting so if you feel the need to slam me, giddyup. I am rather upbeat today despite the weather outside. I hate cold weather, a fact that has landed me in a somewhat awkward position. I borrowed a valet's jacket a few nights back as I was exploring North Caheunga Boulevard at 3 am. Behold the radness:
There really isn't anything more magical than waking up in a tulle dress and an inside-out valet jacket. Sadly the owner of this jacket (or as he pronounces it in his heavy Spanish accent, "NNNNYACKET!") has demanded it's return in the form of harassing me via text and call multiple times a day regarding how cold he is. I suppose at this point he has learned that no good deed goes unpunished. And I must do the right thing and return this beauty to its rightful owner. Off I go, happy Friday!
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Road Rageaholics Anonymous
Sorry for the lack of updates. Ideally, I'd love to blather on about things on here every day but SHOCKINGLY I don't have the time. For those of you who know me well, me not having time for the Internet means now you can now enjoy ice skating in hell. It doesn't help that my Macbook's LCD screen is cracked out and my HP is inflicted with a corrupted .dll. But being electronically unequipped is kind of freeing and makes me more mysterious, right?
Today's post will be short(er) and bitter. Today is not "my day," whatever that expression really means. On my morning commute I saw Santa Claus on a bike which was really exciting, but the presence of several gargantuan super sized SUVs blocked the view of my cellphone lens. I had to sadly watch him shrink to oblivion in my rearview mirror as I drove on.
Can I just for a moment bitch about SUVs in general? Thank you. They are always driven by people who lack the competence to drive in Los Angeles to begin with, usually by overripe trophy wives with PDAs held to their left ears by diamond encrusted acrylic tipped claws. Anybody with a spark of intelligence should know to at least put whoever it is on speakerphone, it's much more stealth, but the German symbols fused to the hoods of their steel chariots make these drivers feel that heeding the law is an unnecessary inconvenience. They haven't yet figured out the whole turning signal feature, drive the wrong way down one-way alleys, always park in compact spaces, and block your view of everything from devastating six-car pileups to Santas gone green.
While I am on the subject of things that piss me off, can I express how sick I am of jay walkers? Like everything else in this world, there is an art to jay walking. The right way: traffic is stopped due to another unnecessary construction project in the middle of Santa Monica Boulevard at 2:00 pm. By all means, proceed, I get it. The wrong way: Clutching your L'Occitane (how do you pronounce that?) and Neimans bags, you trot across Beverly Boulevard at a treadmill speed of 0.3 in your Brian Atwoods and make me miss my left-hand turn as you grin in what you hope is a sheepish and charming manner with your collagen stuffed smackers. You make me sick. First of all I would appreciate those shoes so so much more than you do, and second, I am now wishing I lived in Toon Town where I could proceed to mow you over, reverse, repeat, reverse, repeat and then watch you peel yourself off the asphalt like a sticky fruit rollup while I laugh evilly in my Jetta. Then I'd steal your shoes. Does this mean I need therapy? Listening to Limp Bizkit makes me feel better. Remember them? I used to belong to the Limp Bizkit fan forums when I was obsssssssseessed with Fred Durst. A guy told me he'd give me Fred Durst's email if I sent him a pic of my ta-tas. I google image searched and found a suitable pair, which I traded for the email address, chocolatecoveredstarfish@aol.com (yeah really). Thank you Google and irresponsible girls with web cams and Internet access. I know it wasn't the Real Fred Durst. It was probably Brian Peppers. Google him. You're welcome :)
Today's post will be short(er) and bitter. Today is not "my day," whatever that expression really means. On my morning commute I saw Santa Claus on a bike which was really exciting, but the presence of several gargantuan super sized SUVs blocked the view of my cellphone lens. I had to sadly watch him shrink to oblivion in my rearview mirror as I drove on.
Can I just for a moment bitch about SUVs in general? Thank you. They are always driven by people who lack the competence to drive in Los Angeles to begin with, usually by overripe trophy wives with PDAs held to their left ears by diamond encrusted acrylic tipped claws. Anybody with a spark of intelligence should know to at least put whoever it is on speakerphone, it's much more stealth, but the German symbols fused to the hoods of their steel chariots make these drivers feel that heeding the law is an unnecessary inconvenience. They haven't yet figured out the whole turning signal feature, drive the wrong way down one-way alleys, always park in compact spaces, and block your view of everything from devastating six-car pileups to Santas gone green.
While I am on the subject of things that piss me off, can I express how sick I am of jay walkers? Like everything else in this world, there is an art to jay walking. The right way: traffic is stopped due to another unnecessary construction project in the middle of Santa Monica Boulevard at 2:00 pm. By all means, proceed, I get it. The wrong way: Clutching your L'Occitane (how do you pronounce that?) and Neimans bags, you trot across Beverly Boulevard at a treadmill speed of 0.3 in your Brian Atwoods and make me miss my left-hand turn as you grin in what you hope is a sheepish and charming manner with your collagen stuffed smackers. You make me sick. First of all I would appreciate those shoes so so much more than you do, and second, I am now wishing I lived in Toon Town where I could proceed to mow you over, reverse, repeat, reverse, repeat and then watch you peel yourself off the asphalt like a sticky fruit rollup while I laugh evilly in my Jetta. Then I'd steal your shoes. Does this mean I need therapy? Listening to Limp Bizkit makes me feel better. Remember them? I used to belong to the Limp Bizkit fan forums when I was obsssssssseessed with Fred Durst. A guy told me he'd give me Fred Durst's email if I sent him a pic of my ta-tas. I google image searched and found a suitable pair, which I traded for the email address, chocolatecoveredstarfish@aol.com (yeah really). Thank you Google and irresponsible girls with web cams and Internet access. I know it wasn't the Real Fred Durst. It was probably Brian Peppers. Google him. You're welcome :)
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