waving hello from the void
I am sitting in my boss’s office overlooking the LA skyline, trying to remind myself how I got here. The smog is overtaking the Hollywood sign and Griffith observatory and all around me I hear the clatter of agents and assistants making calls and heading to meetings and making deals and high-fiving but right now I am looking at the biggest cloud I’ve seen in a while, white and puffy merging into the smog that is the skyline of Los Angeles and I wonder how exactly I came to call this place home. I know exactly how of course, I packed up my worldly possessions and my Dad and I drove my used Subaru out of the hot Texas heat into the equally dry LA air. In August it will be four years since I made the journey and in May it will be six months of applying to new jobs, a process that has shown me both how far I have come since moving here and how little really things have changed.
Over drinks with Taylor we always vent to each other. If only we could get our career or love life in check, maybe then we’d be happier, more successful, more content, and thriving. At work with my other assistant friends who have also been job hunting for months with no luck, we lovingly joke about jumping off the roof we eat lunch on. On days we feel particularly bad, we shift that up to the penthouse of our building. We laugh with each other and complain about the hours, the personal tasks, the desire to do more, but we still show up every day at 9am, ready for a 10 hour work day.
It’s almost been four years in this city which means its time for me to become antsy and seek out somewhere else to live. I’ve sought escapes before when times got rough, to New York everytime I visit Erik and Nick and stay out until 4am every morning and exclaim that “I’m living like a 35 year old in LA when I’m actually just 26” to which all of his friends nod approvingly and then pour me another drink. At times I’ve dreamt of London, or Chicago, Portland after my solo trip that was mostly just me walking around and listening to music while I tried every ice cream shop in walking distance of my hostel. I laid in my non-airconditioned room during an unexpected heat wave and thought about living out my twenties in a city that felt eerily like Austin but wasn’t. But really I just wanted to get home because I was seeing someone new and cursing my past self for scheduling a solo trip during my July 4th holiday.
But recently, I’ve been doing something I never thought I’d do. I’ve been fantasizing about Texas. It usually comes after a rough therapy session where I explain my burnout with job hunting for the thousandth time, or when I click off a zoom interview wondering if they asked me any questions or if we just chatted for twenty minutes, or when I’m driving twenty minutes to meet my friends for a drink after work and remember walking to Spiderhouse for a beer on a sunny afternoon or doing karaoke at Hole in The Wall after my weekly Friday improv shows.
Mostly I picture the heat, always in the late afternoons and into dusk, the heat that enveloped you late into the evening, that made wearing shorts and a tank top to a house party feel normal in October. The heat feels like a warm blanket in a blustery LA where a puffer jacket in my backseat feels required during any month of the year. The ocean is just now getting warm enough to dip in and I think of Barton Springs frozen and delicious, I think of our house on Fruth street, the cicadas buzzing outside as the sun sets. I think of a shitty rom-com on the screen and my friends lazing about and sweaty on our used Ikea couch and I wonder how I ever thought that life would not be enough for me.
It’s a way of escaping I guess, from days of endless monotony of answering emails and scheduling meetings for people working on interesting projects that might never get made. It’s my way out, to remember a way of life that used to feel so provincial and small but now seems purposeful and beautiful. I remember a group of us sitting in Pease Park the summer after I graduated and contemplating a life of post-grad in Austin. We all scoffed, exclaiming that staying in Austin would be giving up. Now I think back and I wonder what we all thought we would really be giving up, a sense of community, of living at most twenty minutes from your closest friends, of Tuesdays out late and Wednesdays at coffee shops and Sundays hungover eating breakfast tacos or oversized pancakes.
It’s not that time in my life I miss, but the naivete, of thinking that my life would change drastically when I left behind my Texas roots. It’s almost been four years in LA and I am shocked when I look around to see the life I’ve built here, the friends I’ve met here, the community I’ve created in between drinks and traffic and awkward bad dates and heartbreak and clarity post-heartbreak and interviews that make me feel worthless and friends who make me feel like those interviews were all shams to begin with.
I guess I am graduating in a sense, from the feeling of uncertainty and chaos and confusion to a world of understanding and knowing what I want in my life, at least right now. I’m graduating from those early twenties hopes and crushed dreams to becoming a bit jaded in my mid-twenties and being okay with it because this is what Girls was talking about.
A friend from college this week visited, one who still lives in Texas but is thinking about heading west and I sat at a table with friends who were there with me in Austin. Who were drunk at improv shows and smoking weed in Pease Park and I marveled at the fact of our closeness still.
I think about the ways our dreams have morphed but are still there, glowing slightly outside of the periphery. I think of my neighborhood walks listening to Kacey Musgraves and crying. I think of heartbreak, which I’ve only experienced inside the city limits of LA and mostly I look around and am profoundly grateful that we all chose to leave, just so we could find each other again in this new city. At night I drive home listening to Classical by Vampire Weekend, off their new album. My head hurts from the frustration of thinking too critically of myself after another job rejection, but the music makes me happy. It makes me think of being 15 in Houston, standing in a mud pit to see my favorite band. I see the Century City skyline and the soft serve shop lit up in neon lights and know that in just a few minutes drive down Olympic I’ll be home.
Thank you for reading! Babby is back after a few years and I hope you’ll stick around to read ramblings from my brain every so often.
Babby recommends:
Grief Is For People by Sloane Crosley - I've mostly known Crosley’s writing from her books of essays but her latest book, a memoir about a burglary in her home coinciding with the death of her closest friend has been reminding me of the powers of nonfiction and the beauty in understanding grief. A short but powerful read.
Breathe In by Frou Frou - I love discovering a band that feels perfectly suited to my sensibilities. Frou Frou was the early 2000s project of Imogen Heap and Guy Sigsworth and listening to this song on a sunny LA day feels perfect in ways that are simply indescribable!
Love on Netflix - This is one of my favorite shows that I feel like most people haven’t seen?? Judd Apatow’s follow-up to Girls about two thirty-somethings falling in and out of love in LA. I love to rewatch this now and spot all the places I’ve been to in the city.