Oh So Summer

It's summer. God, it's fuckin summer.

The sunlight came like a thunderclap a couple of days ago, jolting me out of bed. Most years I wait eagerly for the summer sun to come so I'm anticipating it each week, each day, but this year I was completely blindsided, enveloped in rosy gold before I even started to yearn for it. The sweat that's now perpetually on my brow is equally annoying and rejuvenating, like plum juice on my chin while I'm lying on my stomach, feet swaying up in the air, reading you a passage from the book I'm reading.

It's funny that I'm so pumped about it this year, since I now live in a place that has very little difference between spring and summer (and fall, for that matter). But I am; I couldn't be more excited about the semi-arbitrary freedom that a summer mindset lends, warm night bike rides, summer fruit, more tomfoolery than debauchery, and sun. I don't always like the warmth, but god, do I drink up the sun. I'm too pale to tan but I love to burn. I can't wait for the freckles, the farmer's tan, the tops of my feet red and stinging in the shower. I'm going to bike to Santa Monica every week until I see dolphins. I'm going to have a picnic in Griffith Park. I'm going to visit the Aquarium in Long Beach. I'm going to as many outdoor concerts as I possibly can. I'm going to drink white wine even though I usually prefer red. I'm going to go rollerskating and chew gum and drink rootbeer floats. I'm going to have flowers at the apartment, the only living things as fueled by the sun as I will be in the next three months. I will find a way to make it far enough away from the city to look at stars. I will stay up too late. I will ride too far by myself. I will actually go out of my apartment. I will meet people. I will ignore those people and lie on grass by myself anyway. I will ride my bike with no hands, no helmet, and no health insurance. This one is entirely my own.

General Update; Low on introspection.

As I was getting ready to leave my apartment for yet another derby event, I realized that there was no way in hell I'd fit everything I needed in my shoulder bag. I needed a laptop for some last-minute editing of backup audio material, the audio interface for that, some microphone cables from my personal stash, an extra microphone, blah blah blah, the brownies I baked for the skaters, and my whiskey flask. So I put the fixed-gear away and lowered my blue touring bike down from the hoist on the ceiling. I loaded all my bags onto the rack and put all of my necessary effects in there and rolled out. Since I hadn't ridden that bike in several months, it was immediately striking how differently it handled than my other bike, especially with a fair amount of gear attached. It's such a heavier ride and the center of mass is so much further back that the turns and even straightaways when standing up feel more... substantial. It's a slower ride, for sure, than my yellow bike, but also somewhat smoother. At any rate, I started thinking about bike tours and I think I'm going to try to go back to France this summer for a couple of weeks, or maybe to Spain. I think my Spanish is at a point where I could use a little immersion to help it along. Sometimes when I'm on the metro and I have forgotten my book, I play a little Scrabble mini-game on my phone (it's not really Scrabble, unfortunately; it's more like Boggle) and I regularly see words in French and Spanish that I of course can't use. It's a small reminder that I need to put my language skills to use more often than I do.

As the readership knows, I do a lot of media work for LADD I am most proud of the latest highlight video. I get more and more comments from skaters and fans that these really help get everyone pumped and ready for the game. Last night a skater even told me that sometimes when watching the videos she starts to tear up! This one is a collaboration between Vince (the media clip montage) and myself (the music portion):


There were some skaters from the local flat-track league, Angel City Derby Girls who saw our media presentation and were impressed, so they asked about the possibility of us cutting together a promo reel to get some press attention. I'm going to talk to them this week about it.

After much unnecessary nervousness and anticipation, I did a test edit for American Gladiators and showed it to the mixer and he liked it. It's a higher profile show and the mixer is very particular about the edit. So I had to sort of prove myself to him, and now I'm editing dialog for that show this season, and I might still be doing the same graphic sound effects placement that I did last season as well. I started the dialog today and I'll be working on that first episode for the next couple of days. It's going to be as busy as ever.

Pros and Cons

The LA Metro system is a part of my life. Actually, it might be one of the biggest parts of my life right now, since I ride the subway every day. I go to work most days, and I ride my bike most days, and I sleep most days, but taking the metro is probably the only thing I do every single day.

To give out-of-towners an idea what it's like here, I have am compiling a list of things I do and do not like about the metro. My idea is to try to avoid making this list comparative. I'd rather define the absolutes about the things I do or don't like than reference other forms of transportation. Hopefully this will be at least mildly entertaining, too.

I like that I can be only passively involved in my own transportation. This way, I am guaranteed about 30-45 minutes per day of reading time, or sometimes audio spanish lessons. If it weren't for the metro, I am sure that I would make less time for each of these things.

I don't like that eating and drinking aren't permitted in the subway. It would be possible to save even more time by eating on the way to work if it were allowed.

I like that the seats next to the Elderly Priority Seating have a little ledge where you can put up your knee, so when I take the first morning train back home at 4:38am after a long night at work, I can put my knee and elbow up and rest my head. Unless I have my bike with me, which is usually, because then I have to stand.

I don't like that the trains stop running between 12:58am and 4:38am, because this means that if I finish editing a show at 1am, I have to wait for over three hours to get home.

I like seeing all kinds of different people with all kinds of different objects and companions. I hear different accents and I wonder where they come from and I look at what they are carrying and speculate what is the backstory with that crazy hat. I enjoy it when there is a young couple and one of them sits on the other's lap, not because I particularly like or don't like public displays of affection, but because it usually makes a middle-aged woman across the aisle smile knowingly and then stare off nostalgically. That I do love to see. Also, the metro is pretty much the only place where I see little kids these days.

I don't usually like it when people in the metro talk to me. Most often, a person will see that I am reading a book, comment on the book or the author, or perhaps books in general, and then try to twist that into some general interest we have in common in an effort to talk about something else, like a moneymaking scheme or his highschool football career. This should be against the law, because it certainly defies logic. If you liked a book that you see someone reading, let that person read the book in peace.

Occasionally a good, honest, working person will want to talk to me about my bike. I refuse to talk to bike-people about bikes, but if a normal person without one of those silly bike hats wants to talk about my Super Flashy home-stenciled paint job or my Tough Cookies sticker or my special whiskey flask holder in place of a water bottle, I'll do that. A couple of times, this has taken tangents to talk about the state of transportation in LA, jobs, getting to work, colleges, tech schools, starting over, and that kind of thing. This is really pretty rare. And usually the practical matters of the situation make it kind of awkward, because there isn't a concrete etiquette laid out for whether you're supposed to continue talking once the train comes and you'll almost definitely be split up since there are rarely two free seats next to each other, and even if there were, are we really ready to commit like that?

I don't like that the ticket machines are slow to respond. When I press the buttons to buy a ticket, sometimes it takes 4 or 5 seconds for it to wake up and display the menus for all of the button presses I entered, and then another 4 seconds to print out the ticket. Who has that kind of time? During off-peak hours, there are twenty minutes between trains, and those 8 seconds waiting for my little card could easily mean the difference between just catching a train and just missing it.

I like that the tickets are fairly cheap at $1.25 per one-way and $5.00 per day pass. If I weren't such a stingy bastard, I might even spring for the monthly pass at $60-something, but it's hard to fork over that much money at one time. If I were smarter, I would realize that having a monthly pass would save me all those 8-second waits, and that might be worth the money.

I DO NOT like this certain look I sometimes get from other white folks in the subway stations. It's sort of an acknowledgment, a recognition that we're kind of rare in public transportation in LA at certain times of the day. Class issues and race issues abound. Great. Don't nod at me.

I like the stairs. I have a rule that I only take the stairs, in part because I would be crazy to turn down free exercise and in part because the thought of standing and waiting in the middle of a long pack of people on the escalator makes me really anxious. Even when I have my bike on my shoulder I would still rather bound up the stairs two at a time than be stuck in a herd like that.

I like the constant hum-and-whoosh sound in the subway trains. It serves as a good foundation for starting random thoughts from scratch, especially when you're really tired. Last night's was pretty good: the next time someone breaks up with me and starts dating my roommate, I'm going to print a life-size picture of myself and wheat-paste it on the inside of their door. Not in a malicious way, sort of in a just-sayin' way.

There are probably more things that belong on this list, though I'm sure they are very small and hard to describe. If I think of it, I'll add them as they come up. Overall it's clear that the cons don't even come close to the pros on all of this, and seeing it laid out like this now, I just decided to pony up and buy the monthly pass. Go Metro!

Slimy

It's raining in Los Angeles. It's not quite up to late-fall-in-the-midwest standards, with all their gloppy, loud, kinda painful glory. But it's a lot more that the usual drizzle. Pretty rare.
It's rare enough that it's kinda dangerous.

The rain mixes with the grime and filth on the roads and it makes them very slippery. In most normal cities, it rains often enough that the grime is regularly washed away, so we don't notice it much. In LA, it builds up for months, so the first few hours of a rain mix all that mostly-dry film on the roads into a nice sheen of slippery, gooey good times. It's something of which I became frighteningly aware the first time I lived in LA, when I rode a motorcycle. Note: Sliding around on a motorcycle is a lot less fun than in a car.

So I didn't even attempt to ride my bike. Especially since I just finished work and I'm tired enough from being up all night (note time of post) that my equilibrium is shot. I just took the metro and walked my bike from hollywood and highland.

I was working on a new show that we got recently. I'm not sure which network is going to air it, but it's about a highschool marching band and somehow, it's actually pretty good. I liked working on it, in part because it's not one of the frustrating pseudoscience ghost shows we do.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention, though, that the really good thing about the rain is that even a really light sprinkle pulls the smog out of the air and the views around town are WAY more clear. downtown, mountains, everything. Ok, maybe all those pollutants being pulled down into the water table isn't a really good thing, but, you know.

Anyway the view from the roof of my (14-story) apartment building is going to be amazing!

Ok, enough. I'm going to bed.