And it's only Wednesday!

Listen, People, it's one of THOSE weeks. This ain't gonna be pretty.

It all started out on Monday morning. After an amazing and relaxing weekend wine tasting up North, I get into my Acura, place the key in the ignition and turn. Nothing but a few weak flashing lights and the "Goodbye" electronic message lighting up in front of my steering wheel. Not really what I want to see at about 9:30 a.m. when I had decided to snooze versus rolling into work on time. I promptly run through my roledex of Men in Brentwood who I can ring at times such as these and call up Infatuation (I'm still struggling with the "boyfriend" terminology"). Within 10 minutes, he's in my parking garage and he's jump-started my car. Problem solved.

After a full 10 hours of pretending to work, I decide to head to the grocery store. I'm hungry and I've been out of town the last three weekends and a girl needs to eat. Now, anyone knows it's absolute silliness to grocery shop when you're hungry, but I have to go. What I didn't think about is that I am also PMSing. So after I fill up my cart with bright, fresh produce--apples and zucchini and leafy greens--I find myself stopped dead in my tracks in the dairy aisle like a moose in heat. I reach over and throw cookie dough into my cart. I am like the freakin' terminator! I Need. Cookie. Dough. All the while it's a nasty game of Good Angel-Bad Angel occurring in my head. Jo, Don't do it. And: C'mon girl, it ain't so bad! I agree with the "ain't so bad" comment and move on to the wine section. Enough said.

I'm home and I promptly eat three cookie dough squares. I text Infatuation.
Me: Can you make bruschetta on Wednesday? It sounds good.
Him: Sure I can. Is that dinner or were you thinking we should do something else, too?
Me: No, dinner is going to be halibut in a white wine caper sauce. Do you like asparagus.
Him: Yes, I do like it. But do you really think we need a heavy appetizer, too?

I pause. Try to put myself in check.

Me: Are you saying that we should hold on bruschetta for the weekend? That is fine.
Him: I'm just trying to not be a fatso! :-)

I grab another cookie dough square.

Me: Okay, yup. Me too. Sounds good.

Tuesday. I wake up and I feel like a fatso. I head to work armed with cottage cheese and strawberries. Since my car battery died the day before, my audio system in my car needs to be reprogrammed and thus, I have no radio. Instead, I repeat a simple mantra in my head: Today is going to be a good day. Today is going to be a good day.

I pretend to work for several hours. Just after lunch, I swing into a conference room to interview someone for a senior management position. Wait. Let's be clear here: the senior management position my coworker and I both got passed up for. I lick my cottage-cheesy chops and can't wait to rip this interviewee a new one.

However, I find it hard to rip him a new one when I find out he has less marketing experience than myself and a masters in hotel management. I think he's a goner. But I find out one hour later that they are making him an offer.

It's at this time I get a phone call from my landlord. The one who fancies herself an artist and wears army boots and blue eye liner on her cheeks.

I'm replacing the microwave this afternoon, I just wanted to let you know. I'll be letting myself into your apartment to supervise the work.

I'm thinking: Sweet! My current ghetto-fab microwave, circa 1982, will be gone and in its place will be something shiny and new. It won't match the 20+ year old appliances in the least, but at least it won't blow up and smoke in my face.

That night, I meet a friend in WeHo for some down-home BBQ. You know the drill: creamed spinach, sweet potato mash, cole slaw and mac'n'cheese. It's PMS diet 101 and it's incredible. I return to the apartment that evening happy but feeling like a fatso. I unlock my deadbolt and then push. The door doesn't budge. I try again. Nope. Nothing. The bottom part of the door is locked and it's at this point that I remember that the locks were changed about a month ago and new keys issued. New keys that my roomie and I don't use.

"What the f..."

It's 10-something at night. I calmly buzz my landlord's apartment. Then I calmly buzz her again about 10 more times. Calmly. Nothing. I call her. Nothing.

My crazy-tired mind turns to the 6-foot high wooden fence surrounding my back patio. Could I jump it? I envision myself to be my own hero! Jumping my fence and breaking in through the kitchen window to safety and warmth. But then I recall a scene from my childhood. I'm in sixth grade and my dear old kitty cat decided to hop the wall surrounding my parents' backyard in Arizona. My heroic father jumped the wall after the cat. After passing the cat back over the wall and into my loving arms, my father could not get back over the wall himself. We passed him a stool but it was no use; my brother had to drive around to get him. Recalling that legendary tale, I shake my head. There's no way this fatso is gonna make it over a 6-foot fence in Brentwood.

I then barter with a 24-hour locksmith on the phone. He sounds like he just crossed the border and I debate whether to give him my real address, for fear of break-in or swine flu. He wants to charge me nearly $200 to let me back into my apartment and then I figure, hey, the Acura ain't so bad. But luckily it didn't come down to that. I drive one street over and I end up at my Favorite Couple's Place and figure I'll crash on the couch and deal with Jose again in the morning if I need to.

They have American Idol on and my stomach is rumbling from all of that damn BBQ and I think I'm never going to get a moment alone! Just when I am starting to silently curse creamed spinach, my phone rings and it's my Nazi-like landlord. She's home and will let me into my apartment. I suspect she's stoned.

I'm smiling to myself when I buzz her apartment just five minutes later. I'm thinking I'm so happy I could hug her. She stumbles down the stairs and those damn army boots are clinkin' and clangin'. I am still smiling until she comes close and then I nearly gasp. Without her smeared blue eye liner and overdone hairsprayed hair, she is a dark haggard angel. I back away.

Once inside my Brentwood Chateau, I'm thinking: I'll just put these two fatso days behind me. I'm thinking I'll check out my new micro and then hit the sheets. I turn into my galley kitchen and I do a double take. There is NO new microwave. It's the same old piece of shit from 1982.

Tomorrow, no more cookie dough. More cottage cheese. And I have to figure out where that new microwave went.

Goodnight.

It's here

Hardly any time at all to pour out a blog post, yet I have an urge to write.

Tonight it was deja vu. I sat in the upscale Italian restaurant near my office and sipped wine with friends in the dim yellow-orange light of the jazz bar, and it was just like all the times before and all the times that haven't happened yet. We are like a record that turns and changes and morphs, yet, at the end of the night, it's still the same song title, just a fusion-esque version.

And last night there I was, sitting next to a bright yellow wall of a divey sushi joint on Santa Monica and Barrington, munching and chatting with a favorite friend. I wore my flip flops and ripped jeans and Jesus!--when did LA happen to me? The check took too long and we sipped plum wine (far too sweet) and I felt as though I had just seen her and have hardly seen her at all.

Everything that has happened is happening again and it's better the second time around. In a nostalgic way, in a way that oozes reflections and thoughts. Think: leftovers. Ratatouille, so much better after the juices have sat a while.

And tonight, it's again, it's happening. The Maryland Kids have rung and right now they are on Wilshire, driving east, back to Brentwood. In just 10 minutes I'll be at their place and I'll have a glass of cheap wine with Aubrey and perhaps Matt will want to play a card game. We'll open the windows like we did last summer, like we did last spring, like we did last fall. I'll wear pajamas because I don't know how to arrive at their doorstep any other way.

And on Saturday morning, I'll be hitting that soiled and toiled wine trail of California's shining Central Coast once again. Is this the fifth time? Sixth? I can't keep count. I will wake up and there will be the gentlest of fogs hovering outside my bedroom window. My neighbors will be snoozing, most of them, and Infatuation and I will grab the best coffee in Brentwood, to go, and hit the road. We'll start on the 405, dip into the Valley and the weave in and out of green mountains and hills, vines as far as I can see.

Here we are again. It's spring time in Los Angeles.

Trapped

After two weeks in a row of travel and four-day work weeks, you would think I’d come back to the office refreshed and ready to tackle the marketing world. You would think I’d have a good attitude. I believe in those. After all, they can make or break you.

But instead, I feel stripped and raw. It’s sunny and 90 degrees outside in Los Angeles, too hot and too soon. The sun and bright sky give me hope but the heat is almost crushing and here I am sitting inside my drab gray cube and I’m feeling a bit trapped.

But I am not complaining—that is, to anyone but you. Our little secret, yes? *smile.* I do believe that I am in control and that if I am not happy, I shall seek happiness elsewhere, but that is difficult to do in this job market. It’s difficult to pick yourself up every day. To sift through the daily doldrum of a job that makes you, often, want to scream. To scrape your sanity off the floor and thank yourself when others do not do it for you.

A part of me, a small part, wishes she could hit a fast forward button and push to Q4, or even 2010, when there might be a tiny shred of a chance that I can make an escape.

And that’s it. That’s all.

Momentum

I am expending energy; my mouse wheel is forever turning. I sleep to dream and at night I awake with imaginary bubble poofs of ideas floating above my sleepy head and tousled pillow-creased hair. I am working harder than ever and thinking more than ever and perhaps it’s really true: what you put in, you get out.

I say this because this past week I’ve discovered clarity.I visualize the past two years of life and I see floating puzzle pieces and just recently they’ve all begun to find each other. They are the stars orbiting in the fog-ridden Los Angeles night sky. They are intermingling at a social for the divine and right and true.

At some point, some gray area between now and then, want and reality, dreams and possibility, I have transitioned in the last six months or so. I’m not sure when it happened but I am haunted by it. Did it happen in New York this past October, in the early morning dawn before I caught the train into Manhattan? Or that night at the Crown Bar in WeHo when my best friend and I slung back shots and fizzy champagne and danced the night away? But what about the sweet late summer mornings in Brentwood when my alarm clock was the sun coming through my open window, the rustling of paper sacks being carried by my neighbors on their way home from the farmers market?

It doesn’t matter.

What makes you happy?

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.
~Melody Beattie

How's this for your daily dose of perspective?

What makes you happy? What are the things you find rewarding in this recession? What are the simple pleasures in your life that you've become reacquainted with?

For me it's my 1.5 mile drive to work. That when I spilled cover all over my pants, shirt, ass (yes, really. I'm still not sure how it got back there...), crotch, etc. that I was able to run home and change in 10-minutes' time.

It’s my Pandora radio list at work; my ability to tune out my team members when I need to.

It’s my non-fat hazelnut lattes in the morning once or twice a week. Sure, $3.45 a pop, but the taste and smell make it a real treat.

Many meals in on weeknights. Quiet nights spent trying a new bottle of wine and a new recipe. Creating something tasty and tangible in the tiny galley Brentwood kitchen.

Free museums.

Walks around the Brentwood Country Club.

I’ve rediscovered the library. Have we forgotten the library? It’s that big building that houses a bizzillion FREE books!

Healthy lunches ate in, pounds lost.

$15 tickets to the Troubadour for Saturday night’s show—a steal!

Clean sheets and the rare occasion I get to sleep in.

I've fallen in love

I am told that when I was a little girl I used to eat oranges. And I have no clue if this blur of a memory is something my eccentric mind has simply conjured, yet I somehow recall sitting on the steps in my parents’ home in Maryland when I was a wee one and munching on a bowl full of orange slices. True? Not sure.

I also know—for a fact—that I had a bit of an obsession with frozen pizza. Cheese only, usually. Sometimes pepperoni. I liked the clean look of a frozen pizza, the dependable crunch with every bite; the perfection the circular shape offered. I would duck away from bites of fresh pizza and wonder why we weren’t eating “the good kind.”

Fast forward many moons and I’m sitting on a couch in Brentwood and my friend invites me to have an orange slice. I start to shake my head and then think, “Why not?” No need to wonder if I enjoyed that slice of Orange Heaven: fast forward a day later and I come home from the market with a bag full of oranges, prepared to indulge in my latest food love. One of such simplicity, such amateur nature.

I have no such defining moment with pizza but now pizza is something that I prepare homemade every few weeks.

Los Angeles, in some ways, is oranges and fresh pizza.

Let me explain. Flash back to about four or five years ago, I’m losing count, to when my ex-boyfriend invited me to come visit him in Los Angeles. This was, of course, before he was my ex-boyfriend and before he was my boyfriend. I had no idea, no image, no dream, of what Los Angeles might mean. I had no visual aid in my head to imagine. City? Yes, a city. But not like New York. Beach? Yes, but when I thought of beach, I envisioned Maryland and its charming boardwalks and diners and wild horses.

My mind was a blank slate when it came to Los Angeles.

The first year I came out here, doing long distance with my boyfriend, I kept an open mind but I didn’t fall in love instantly. Los Angeles had to romance me first. I was confused by the curving of the roads, the vastness of the city, the many choices of neighborhoods. I kept trying to place Los Angeles in a category of sorts. Charming? Formal? Laid back? Beach town or city? Dirty or clean? Superficial? Los Angeles refused to be categorized.

Eventually, I knew I would be happy here and so I moved. I figured it was a good three-to-five year plan for me. I figured it was good for my career. An urban experience but still a cheap one-hour flight back to Arizona suburbia and home sweet home.

But something has happened to me since moving to Brentwood about a year and half ago. I’ve fallen in love with Los Angeles. I never thought I’d be a California girl but now I can’t imagine it any other way. I feel as though I’ve opened up a box and discovered the sweetest of surprises. My walks around the Brentwood country club, the hiking in the canyons. The foodie nature of Angelinos with all of the restaurants and wine tastings and farmers markets. Jogging alongside the ocean. Peet’s Coffee & Tea (the best!). The boutiques you can’t find anywhere else. The birch trees that line Sunset Boulevard as you drive west. Sitting in meetings at work and seeing the ocean on a clear day. The appreciation for the arts.

Now this has me wondering what else I will fall in love with in five years. I was sitting at my kitchen table last night talking to my Mom…

“Just got my latest Netfix movie. It’s so much fun to just open up your mailbox and find a MOVIE!” I said.

“Joanna, I never thought the day would come when you got so excited over a movie rental,” she commented.

Movie rentals. Oranges. Pizza. Los Angeles.

I guess you never know.