Dispatches from the City of Angels
I'm a writer and humorist living in and writing about Los Angeles. You can catch my novel LOSING CLEMENTINE out March 6 from William Morrow. In the meantime, feel free to poke around. Over at my website you can find even more blog entries than I could fit here, as well as a few other ramblings. Enjoy and come back often.
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"Taint what a horse looks like, it’s what a horse be." - A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett
"Trying to take it easy after you've finished a manuscript is like trying to take it easy when you have a grease fire on a kitchen stove." - Jan Burke
"Put on your big girl panties, and deal with it." - Mom
"How you do anything is how you do everything."
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Why does nobody f-ing tell me anything?
My husband loves to watch this reality show on the Food Network that follows this crazy guy around his custom cake-making shop. He's bald and has tattoos and uses power tools on pastry, which is mostly why I think Austin likes it. In one episode, crazy guy delivers one of two cakes to a bat mitzvah, the other cake being provided by another pastry chef. They engage in some chefy-chefy talk, which ends with the woman explaining to him that fondant comes in colors other than white.
Apparently, crazy guy had been dying his own fondant for, presumably, decades without ever knowing he could just buy the damn stuff in any color he wanted. This would be the pastry equivalent of only buying white house paint and trying to use Rit dye to make it match the drapes.
"Why does nobody tell me anything?!" he exclaims to the camera.
Pee-shaw! I thought. What a DUNDERHEAD. I mean, COME ON. You make cakes for a LIVING. How could you not know this? Are you raising your own chickens for the eggs, too? And then I laughed a superior and knowing laugh. Hardy-har-har.
You know what's coming.
Today, I was innocently, INNOCENTLY, reading the L.A. Times coverage of the on-going Writers Guild strike. The current story is the impact the strike is having on coffee shops and other writer-gathering places. (It would appear that I am the only writer in L.A. that works from home.) The article opened by explaining that the once harder-to-get-into-than-a-nun's-pants workplace called theOffice is now practically vacant.
TheOffice, you say? What is theOffice? I have never heard of theOffice?
TheOffice, it turns out, is a full-service author oasis mere miles from my very own home. Free parking! Noise-blocking headphones! T1 internet! ALL THE COFFEE YOU CAN DRINK!
I can't...there aren't...no words. No words to describe this wondrous place, this heaven on earth. Frankly, I'm getting a little hot just thinking about it.
Can you even imagine the joy, the mirth, the near-orgasmic pleasure I could have had at such a place while my apartment complex was ripping out the entire outer wall of my apartment WHILE I WAS IN IT?!? Oh yes, people. I continued to write at my little desk while men in hard hats tore out walls ten feet from my head. Little foamy earplugs don't cover that, just in case you were wondering.
(Why didn't I just go to the library, you ask? Because the university library I usually frequent won't let non-students use the internet I needed for research, and the public libraries near me are populated by scary homeless guys that stare at my boobs.)
And to think, I could have luxuriated in this caffeinated, noise-reduced, T1 bliss all this time!
Why does nobody tell me anything?!?
Apparently, crazy guy had been dying his own fondant for, presumably, decades without ever knowing he could just buy the damn stuff in any color he wanted. This would be the pastry equivalent of only buying white house paint and trying to use Rit dye to make it match the drapes.
"Why does nobody tell me anything?!" he exclaims to the camera.
Pee-shaw! I thought. What a DUNDERHEAD. I mean, COME ON. You make cakes for a LIVING. How could you not know this? Are you raising your own chickens for the eggs, too? And then I laughed a superior and knowing laugh. Hardy-har-har.
You know what's coming.
Today, I was innocently, INNOCENTLY, reading the L.A. Times coverage of the on-going Writers Guild strike. The current story is the impact the strike is having on coffee shops and other writer-gathering places. (It would appear that I am the only writer in L.A. that works from home.) The article opened by explaining that the once harder-to-get-into-than-a-nun's-pants workplace called theOffice is now practically vacant.
TheOffice, you say? What is theOffice? I have never heard of theOffice?
TheOffice, it turns out, is a full-service author oasis mere miles from my very own home. Free parking! Noise-blocking headphones! T1 internet! ALL THE COFFEE YOU CAN DRINK!
I can't...there aren't...no words. No words to describe this wondrous place, this heaven on earth. Frankly, I'm getting a little hot just thinking about it.
Can you even imagine the joy, the mirth, the near-orgasmic pleasure I could have had at such a place while my apartment complex was ripping out the entire outer wall of my apartment WHILE I WAS IN IT?!? Oh yes, people. I continued to write at my little desk while men in hard hats tore out walls ten feet from my head. Little foamy earplugs don't cover that, just in case you were wondering.
(Why didn't I just go to the library, you ask? Because the university library I usually frequent won't let non-students use the internet I needed for research, and the public libraries near me are populated by scary homeless guys that stare at my boobs.)
And to think, I could have luxuriated in this caffeinated, noise-reduced, T1 bliss all this time!
Why does nobody tell me anything?!?
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