Apparently if you google I feel pathetic and ill and want to have sex and martinis, my site comes up first on the list.

I'm so surprised by the amount of people who google entire sentences about their lives and the way they feel. What on earth are they expecting to find?
12:08:28 PM     comment []

I've hardly been able to keep up with my life, much less this weblog, recently.

I came home late the other night, after hanging out with friends in Santa Monica, and I reread almost all of my posts since I began writing here. Already, I feel so removed from who I was ten days ago, from the things I wrote about.

My new life came about so quickly. I put a deposit down an apartment in Venice Beach yesterday. I wouldn't have even begun looking for apartments yet had it not been for my friend Holly. She got really excited about the idea of helping me find a place and all week long she left voicemails on my cell phone with numbers and names and listings. Eventually, I began calling some of them.

The apartment that I found is on the canals and it is expensive but perfect. I had actually never even been to the canals until Thursday. I had no idea what they would look like. I imagined that they would either be really rundown and grimy or touristy and disneylandish. In the first place, I didn't realize that they are completely residential. Little white bridges, ducks and honeysuckle bushes, palm trees and morning glories. Walking along the paths that Thursday, I thought to myself, If I could live anywhere right now, it would be here.

On Friday with Holly, amidst numerous appointments to view depressing studios and the like, we were crossing a street and saw a sign on a telephone pole advertising a one bedroom apt on the canals. I had to look, even though it was out of my price range. Upon seeing it for the first time, price range aside, I knew that it was everything I want for myself in the next year. Clean white walls, hardwood floors, windows facing every direction, a deck for my plants and for the cat, a view of the canals and mere blocks from the ocean...

Yesterday I drove up to give the landlord a check. While I was waiting for him to arrive I met my new downstairs neighbor, a fortyish woman who works in film production. She reminded me vaguely of Krista in that bossy, LA industry kind of way but as long as she's just my neighbor and not my boss I can handle it. She had a lot of questions about me, of course. And I could give simple answers for none of them. So, where do you work? Did you grow up out here? Do you have family out here?

There was really no point or even any way to avoid the truth so, out it came. I'm 25. I haven't really worked all year because my father was sick and he died ten days ago. I was living in Hollywood with my boyfriend of six years but we broke up three weeks ago. I'm not really sure what I'm going to do with myself now but I sure like this apartment.

And of course this just spurs on more questions. What about your mother? Do you have brothers and sisters? Really no way to avoid those either and while you're imagining this whole conversation, also take into consideration that I had an identical one with the landlord ten minutes later. My mother died six years ago when I was eighteen. I do have three half siblings but they are all in their mid-fifties and on the East Coast.

An orphan at 25! she exclaimed (as did the landlord). It's true, I suppose, and something that has already occurred to me in the last weeks. But I don't really feel like an orphan. I still have parents. Sure, they're both dead but I had them and knew them and was raised by them. The word orphan, to me, gives the impression of never even having had parents, or having lost them at a really young age.

After I left Venice, I drove to Hollywood to water Abby's plants (which were almost dead and may not be salvageable). I got off at my old exit and drove past my old grocery store. For the first time since my Dad died, I felt like crying. I didn't though. I didn't mean for this new life to start so quickly, didn't mean to leave the old one behind so abruptly, never imagined that the week after my father's death would be such a happy one, full of new people and places, a future, not just shimmering, but clear and warm and tangible.

I'm afraid that later this week things will feel differently. On Friday most of my extended family is coming to town. I'm not sure what they're expecting from me but I imagine that it involves grief and panic and immaturity. Maybe it will. Maybe seeing all of them, going to the service, moving out of this condo will bring it all on. It's been delightful and distracting to fall into this new life but I know that I have not even begun to let go of the old one.

For the person who googled my father is dying and he won't see me, please do whatever you can to see him anyway.
10:10:16 AM     comment []